[Adapted from the works of Charles Dickens. If you’re part of his estate please don’t sue me. Creative commons or whatever]. 

From the foldings of its robe, the Spirit of Standup brought two open mic’ers; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

“Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!” exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a man-boy and a fucc-boi. Yellow, meagre, ragged, bitter, passive-aggressive; but prostrate, too, in their hack-ness. Where artistic ambition should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of the belief that the rules did not apply to them, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where jokes might have sat enthroned, pointless stories lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of actually punching up, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

The Local Comic started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine open mic’ers, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

“Standup, are they yours?” Local Comic could say no more.

“They are Comedy’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This man-boy is Entitlement. This fuccboi is Victimhood. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this man-boy, for on his brow I see that written which is making excuses and eventually quitting to NOBODY’S OBJECTION, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the spirit of Standup, stretching out its hand towards the venue (that wouldn’t even put a sandwich board out on the sidewalk advertising the show, nor turn off the televisions). “Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end.”

“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.

“Are there no free gigs they drove 2 hours to for exposure???” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no drink minimums???”

The bell struck twelve.