Poorly Crafted Jokes for the Unlikely Roast of Todd Van Poppel

The occasion for the poorly crafted jokes below is not a definitely scheduled, certain-to-happen roast of former top Oakland prospect and actual major-league right-hander Todd Van Poppel. Rather, it’s how the author inexplicably woke up in the middle of the night, found it difficult to fall back asleep, and subsequently challenged the internet to amuse him until such a time as he became drowsy again — which he did, eventually, but not before also learning from WebMD that insomnia is a major symptom for no fewer than dozens of fatal conditions.

Were such an event to occur, however — that is, a roast of retired pitcher Todd Van Poppel — the author would at least have seven jokes already written for it.

These jokes, in particular:

1. Your career was so short, if it were a literary form, it’d probably be the epigram.

2. Your career was so short, doctors suspect it was born with achondroplasia, a common cause of dwarfism in humans.

3. Actually, upon further inspection, your career really wasn’t that short. That’s as a surprising as if a group of friends and family were to all gather for the birthday of an otherwise unsuspecting individual.

4. Your career was so disappointing, a comic has probably used it as a metaphor for his failed sexual experiences with women.

5. Your career was so disappointing, a really success-oriented parent mistook it for her son who was wait-listed at Tufts, and she’s like, “You can’t even get yourself into Tufts?”

6. Your surname is so Dutch, it probably got seized by English forces in 1665 and renamed after the Duke of York.

7. Your command was so bad, it gets confused a lot with William George Keith Elphinston, the incompetent British major-general responsible for devesating losses outside Kabul in January 1842.