Uuiu is what makes time travel possible.

It might still be too early too tell, but so far it seems that riffing on Marvin Berry calling his cousin in Back to the Future is a joke premise with a lot of juice in it. It was used recently in the Onion for a brief story, and that article comes very shortly after this episode of The Simpsons aired:


Both of those references were beat to the punch by Family Guy, though, when that show rick-rolled its audience last May, with an impressed Marvin Astley alerting his cousin that he had found that "mediocre, generic sound you've been looking for." Unfortunately, Hulu has not made that clip available, but that should not stop you from loading the original, grabbing a rotary, and reenacting the scene for your own amusement at home.

Even better than that, though, would be to somehow go back in time and create the first joke using the premise established in Back to the Future. But that could create a rip in the fabric of the space-time continuum, or some kind of butterfly effect...I don't know. What do you think, Ultimate Reed Richards?


Great Scott, he's right! And nothing would bring me more satisfaction than filming myself in the role of Marvin Cobain Astley Berry Beethoven, reacting to the symphonic stylings of a time-traveling concert pianist with a call to my cousin: "Hey Ludwig, you know that new inter-movement unity with regard to interlocking thematic devices in music you've been looking for? Well LISTEN TO THIS!"

To which, of course, he would say, "What? What? I can't hear you, I went deaf years ago, and the telephone won't even be invented for another century!"

The only thing left to do then is to post the completed farce here at MatM with the timestamp set to November 11, 1955, making my version of the joke premise the first to appear even in abstract fictional terms. No, make that ESPECIALLY in abstract fictional terms.