Contest #87 shortlist ⭐️

28 comments

Funny Contemporary Fiction

To All Our Loyal Sizzle Me This Customers,

Sizzle Me This would like to apologize for any confusion we may have caused yesterday as we made what we thought was a light-hearted joke about a “new burger” we’d be trying out that would be made up of orphan meat.

Sizzle Me This would never use orphans to make meat. We would never--nor have we ever--used any kind of human meat in any of our burgers, not even the Humanity Burger that was made using only cows that died a natural death, although we admit that one was poorly named.

We tweeted out the joke about the burger because it was, as you know, April 1st, and, as is the custom, we wanted to partake in a little prank on all of you. We assumed you would see the tweet, panic a bit, perhaps take a deep breath or a glass of water, check the calendar, and then have a good chuckle.

What we did not expect was to have some of you immediately call in death threats to one of our over eight thousand Sizzle Me This locations.

Fun Fact:  Most of our franchise owners have no idea what our main social media account is tweeting. You can imagine the pandemonium that ensued when Sizzle Me This restaurants all across the country began receiving angry phone calls demanding that the orphan meat be recalled. Our managers were certainly not pleased with us! And they are the real heroes of our team. The heart and soul of our Sizzle Me This empire. That’s why today we’re also apologizing to them and their families, and sending them complimentary Sizzle Me This bobbleheads featuring our mascot Pickles The Burger Bunny.

Attached to this apology is the full text of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. We hope you’ll read it, since satire is the backbone of American humor, and it’s clear that some of you are spineless.

See? We made a little joke there.

We hope you found it funny.

If you didn’t find it funny, and instead, took offense, we would love to send you a survey where you can tell us, on a scale of 1 - 5, how offended you were and whether or not a free Sizzle Me This apron would appease you. One size fits all and it looks great when you wear it at a summer barbecue while you’re grilling up some of our take-home frozen patties made of beef, pork, and absolutely anything but children.

We understand that those of you out there who identify as orphans may have been particularly upset by our little attempt at levity, and that’s why we are thrilled to offer the new “Orphan Discount” at all participating Sizzle Me This locations in the lower 48 states.

Just by showing proof that both your parents died before you were a legal adult, you are entitled to a free Sizzled Up milkshake and/or an enlarged All Fried Out order of Sizzler’s famous loaded fries at twenty percent off the normal price. At this time, we will accept obituaries, news articles, and or death certificates, if you have them.

We hope this will help ease the suffering we might have caused by insinuating, as a joke, that we would like to chop up some motherless and fatherless children and turn them into one of our delicious, award-winning burgers. While Sizzle Me This is proud to be the Best Burger in America as voted on by The Government Is Listening Magazine four years running, there are limits to the kinds of things we’ll cook up on one of our trademark grills.

Yes, over the years, we have continued to think outside of the box when it comes to our cuisine. Yes, we’ve served you ostrich burgers and coyote fillets and there was that two-week span in the late eighties when the Bald Eagle Burger was our best seller, but that lawsuit with the EPA was settled very quickly, and we’d like to think we learned a lot from that legal entanglement.

And yes, it’s true that our CEO is named Dan Sweeney, but he is not a singer, nor does he enjoy cooking people into pies or burgers, and actually if you know anything about that musical, it wasn’t Sweeney who did the cooking, it was his partner Mrs. Lovett, but we assure you that our Head of Marketing Steve Lovett also has no interest in murdering anyone, let alone children. Plus, all the people who got killed in that musical sort of deserved it, except for the--

Well, we don’t want to give anything away, but the point is, there is no conspiracy here, as many of you have suggested, because a conspiracy is when you do something covertly, not when you tweet about it in broad daylight--not that we did the thing we tweeted about, which was a joke, we’re just saying that none of you were using the proper terminology anyway, and if you’re going to accuse somebody of something, you should probably get the wording right.

In totally unrelated news, it’s with a heavy heart that we announce we will no longer be partnering with Universal Pictures to help promote their new reboot of Annie. We had been looking forward to all the little Annie dolls we were going to include in every Lil Sizzler meal, but we hope to partner again with Universal later this year when they release their remake of Oliver! We’d also like to encourage all movie studios to consider creating less orphan content as there’s so much other ground to cover, but, you know, that’s up to them.

Looking ahead, we will no longer be posting anything on April 1st or ever attempt to be humorous or irreverent again, partly because we want to avoid future conflict and partially because we might have to shut down all our accounts before you, our loyal customers, cyberbully our social media manager into (another) nervous breakdown.

Thank you and We Look Forward to Seeing You at Our Sizzlin’ Summer Event Beginning on Memorial Day (See Attached Coupon)!

March 27, 2021 16:45

You must sign up or log in to submit a comment.

28 comments

Francis Daisy
18:19 May 22, 2021

Also, your name is perfect for this story!

Reply

Show 0 replies
Robert Consiglio
12:39 Apr 13, 2021

I wish to apologize for my earlier comments concerning this story. I'm afraid my first impression was quite similar to the people who complained in your fictional story! In any case, this obviously is not my kind of humor. However, many people seem to have enjoyed it, People definitely have different tastes and opinions concerning what entails humor. Upon a second reading of your piece, I noted that you seemed to be satirizing Grimm's fairy tales and this was mildly amusing. In any case, I should respect other people's sense of humor an...

Reply

Show 0 replies
Reedsy | Default — Editors with Marker | 2024-05

Bring your publishing dreams to life

The world's best editors, designers, and marketers are on Reedsy. Come meet them.