Hamlet
HAMLET IN 400 WORDS
So the play is basically about these two guys, Bernardo and Francisco, and man, they’re a regular Bill-and-Ted, Jay-and-Silent-Bob, Vladimir-and-Estragon, Bud-and-Lou, Groucho-and-Chico, Groucho-and-Harpo, Chico-and-Harpo, Zeppo-and-Gummo pair. Oh, these are a couple crazy characters, who somehow have found themselves placed in charge of the third-shift watch over the gates of this castle in Denmark. Man! You never know with Bernardo and Francisco, am I right? And then a ghost shows up and scares them — classic! It’s just like the time Bernardo and Francisco are zookeepers guarding the very valuable Solid Gold Dancing Fish, and the burglar dresses up like a mummy to scare them, and Bernardo lets loose his classic line “it’s gettin’ awfully scaredy in here!”
Anyway, now there’s a ghost, and Bernardo is of course scared shitless, and Francisco is all science and reason and rationality, and brings in this scholar Horatio to reassure Bernardo that ghosts aren’t real. But he miscalculates, see, because unbeknownst to Francisco, Horatio is a scholar of the occult! He’s big into dreams and philosophy and shit like that. Francisco thinks he’s getting an engineer, science type, maybe an electrician? Like in the one where Bernardo and Francisco are the assistants to the curator of the Museum of Doubtful History, and they’re polishing the dinosaur bones, and meanwhile the curator hires the electrician to rewire the Magnetism Then and Now exhibit, and Bernardo thinks that the electrician is an alien come to take Earth’s valuable fossils, because of the radio show he heard, and he and Francisco set a trap for the electrician, and they catch him, and then they find out it’s only an electrician, and then the real aliens come and try to steal the copper wires because Mars Needs Copper (which would, by the way, be a great band name) and it’s up to Francisco, Bernardo, and the electrician to stop them? That was a great movie. Anyway, the point is that the electrician was all there’s-no-such-thing-as-aliens right up until the aliens turned him into an octopus. He was a materialist. Like Hegel.
And Horatio — woo! anything but. So he believes in the ghost, and Bernardo is all I-told-you-so, and Francisco is pissed, and Horatio calls in his friend Hamlet, who apparently knows a lot about this particular kind of ghost, and then nothing interesting happens for a long time, and then there’s a swordfight, and then it’s over.