A Very Unintentional Homage to Mel Brooks

Last week I wrote about the man traveling with a full-size guillotine before many of the details of the story were available. Since then, more information has come out — including some details that make the whole thing even stranger. So, naturally, I had to revisit it.

Mel Brooks takes extremely negative, frightening, even detestable things and surrounds them with so much absolute absurdity that they become funny. You see it in The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, History of the World, Part I— the pattern appears again and again.

Now picture a warm, sunny day.

A man drives up in a pickup with a full-size guillotine in the back and parks across from a government building.

Then he gets out of the cab with...

a pizza.

Where did he get the pizza?

Did the guillotine sit in the truck while he went inside the restaurant, ordered, and waited?

We just don’t know.

But somehow he has the pizza.

He climbs into the back of the pickup, sits on the tail gate, and starts eating.

Apparently, lunch finished, he and the guillotine moved on.

Capitol Hill next.

Because of course.

He parks and enjoys some leisure time on the wooden platform of his guillotine.

Police, having noticed, make their way over for what I imagine began as a fairly informal conversation.

How’s it going?

Fine.

Anything on your mind?

Not especially. Just enjoying an afternoon rest after lunch.

Is that a functional guillotine?

Oh, yes. It works.

Come on.

That screams Mel Brooks.

The only thing that could have made it more classically Mel Brooks would have been if a man sat down next to him to read a newspaper, and perhaps a woman was selling bird seed.

Unaware that they had wandered into some offbeat slapstick wormhole, the police continued to perform their lawful duty and brought to his attention that a guillotine is a deadly weapon. And, incidentally, he was parked in a no-parking zone.

And we can’t have that.

One would think an "Off with you, buster" or "It's time for you to move on" or "Perhaps there's someone we could call for you" would suffice in this instance.

Nope. There were serious objections to this device in this locale at this time.

Apparently you can’t just set up a French Revolution-themed park bench in a no-parking area and expect everyone to leave you alone.

The man was detained.

The guillotine was confiscated.

Even the truck was impounded.

And somehow, none of that makes it any less Mel Brooks.