Manny Wants Billion to Write Sitcom Episode

LOS ANGELES – Slugger and newest member of the LA Dodgers, Manny Ramirez, has announced that he will write an episode for the show How I Met Your Mother for no less than $1,000,000,000. He is slated to make twenty million this year at his day job as a man who swings a piece of wood at a traveling projectile and also as a man who, in left field, talks on his cell phone and takes a leak on the legs of groundskeepers while they rake the dirt. His proudest accomplishment in baseball is how his calculated spaced out behavior has helped scientists prove the theorem “yeah, man, that dude is, like, out there in left field.”

Most sitcom writers make, on average, just enough money to share a bungalow with a quirky roommate who the writer will use as a template for future character development in a situation comedy about a low level TV drone living with a person who shaves at the dinner table and has a stock phrase that keeps the live studio audience waiting at the edge of their seat, for instance: “Hey, it’s just Manny being Manny!” Activate sound track.

Ramirez has done no research on the professions of the five main characters on How I Met Your Mother. He knows nothing of Ted’s career as an architect, though, to Manny, it may have something to do with pizza topping; nor of Robin’s position as a TV reporter, however much her counterparts in sports continue to lambaste the Red Sox for committing a huge mistake in letting go a player who was inches away from being thrown to the bottom of the Big Dig by his teammates who considered him a major league asshole; nor of Marshall’s goal to be an environmental lawyer, since Manny equates the environment with the aura that surrounds his baseball uniform and protects him from the reality of global warming and a punch in the face; nor of Lily’s job as a kindergarten teacher, being that his intellectual and emotional peers are the students, the five-year-olds, and not that ogre of an authority figure, the petite, vivacious woman who shows them how to draw and play games and then goes home to get plowed by husband Marshall; and nor of Barney’s gig as a corporate type who gets paid to do nothing, though Manny understands this profession the best of the five. But Manny says that his ignorance is being worked on during an extra hour each day in the batting cage.

Manny says that he is worth the one billion dollars for a single script because, like everyone in America from the mother of four kids to the sales rep in a Best Buy, he believes that his life is a sitcom and that it would be even funnier with clever writers to bestow the verbal wit of Rodney Dangerfield upon illiterate baseball players, little tykes in car seats and high school drop-outs outfitted in blue polo shirts. He says that, true, he was not the one to create the now famous line “Manny being Manny,” but his selfish and often retarded antics did serve as inspiration – and so how hard can it be for such a “character” like himself to come up with a finished script once the producers of How I Met Your Mother deposit the money into his account? Plus Manny is entitled to the entire world’s capital because he is Manny, not Harry.

Manny will force the studio to meet his demands the same way he did when forcing the Red Sox to trade him to LA in exchange for a beer vendor and a palates instructor by not running to first base on slow ground balls and faking a knee injury so that he could miss two crucial games against archrival Yankees. As such, he will refuse to do any more writing on his laptop on which is downloaded the script software called Final Draft – that is, if he had a laptop and knew the existence of such a computer program.

“Manny is a shrewd negotiator,” said his agent Scott Boras. “He must have been anticipating this impasse for years, as he has not written a single piece of creative writing since his third-grade opus See Spot Lay Down on Team. That means that he has been holding the TV comedy industry hostage for eighteen years. Right now they will do anything to bring Manny aboard their writing team, though he will not be beholden to any team constraints. He wants his own separate writing room, his own research department and someone to write the actual script.”

Boras went on to say that he is asking the Red Sox to help the producers of How I Met Your Mother defray the costs of the $1,000,000,000 paycheck, just as they are paying the Dodgers seven million dollars for Manny to play not in Boston.

Manny’s biggest apologist in the media is ESPN’s Jim Rome, who said: “Man-Ram lives in a fantasy world that pays in real money, so what better marriage than my man, Man-Ram, and Hollywood? This guy is a joke,” which in Rome-ese indicates greatness. “Rock on Man-Ram! And make sure you bring together a romantic union between Barney and Robin on How I Met Your Mother, just like you brought together the people in Boston in their mutual hatred of a guy who refused to run ninety feet for twenty mil in jack.”