Night at the Holocaust Museum

6,000,0001.

This is the number of people who died in the Holocaust, the most recent occurring today when an octogenarian white supremacist fatally shot a security guard at the Holocaust museum. Before I start making all sorts of off-color jokes, allow me to earnestly state that the guard, Stephen Tyrone Johns, is definitely a hero for protecting the visitors and sacrificing his life. At least he'll meet Anne Frank in heaven. She's probably a MILF by now. (Yeah, so obviously the earnestness didn't last more than a sentence, but it's still sincere.)

Taking after Eric by hastily devising a movie pitch in the face of tragedy, the first thing I thought when I heard the news was, ohhh, Night at the Holocaust Museum! I googled my idea to see if anyone else was making the joke, and found that someone had made a fake trailer for it two years ago. Aw, shucks.

It's not even worth watching, truthfully. You get the idea without even having to see it.

My pitch would be better. Night at the Holocaust Museum would be more of a suspense film and have less physical comedy. Mel Gibson would be the antagonist, of course. Denzel Washington would be the FBI agent (he's always best as those) on the outside trying to secure the museum by communicating with his agent, Ben Stiller (A JEW!), stuck on the inside. Better yet, Stiller's fired, and we go back to the series' physical comedy roots and just put Paul Blart Mall Cop in for more whacky hijinks. Surely, if he can accidentally foil armed robbers he can prevent another genocide, too. You can do anything on a Segway, I'm pretty sure. Despite my immense dislike for him, I suppose I'd let Robin Williams still be in this sequel too, seeing as he needs the occasional big budget film to support his meth habit, but his character would definitely have to be one of the casualties.

Movie aside, a year ago I moaned about how unnecessarily intense the security at the Museum of Tolerance (the Holocaust Museum for the west coast) is, which given today's events suddenly seems legitimate. Holocaust deniers are real, as preposterous as it sounds. As a teenager, I devised a plan to be totally normal and rational in all aspects of my life (as if I could pull that off!), but then randomly claim the Holocaust was a hoax. At someone's suggestion, I researched the issue and realized how many people actually believed this and quickly eliminated this idea for being thoroughly unfunny. That said, nine years later this Onion article is still one of my favorites, and I often mentally quote the headline, "Did Six Million Really Visit the Holocaust Museum?"

Oh, and if any of this post offended you, I promise none of it is as offensive as my student's essay about the Holocaust.