Stock Market

One of our troupe members’ first play he was in as a boy was a play called “Stone Soup.” This sketch is based on the Swedish version of the tale called “Nail Soup.” “Nail Soup goes something like this:
A tramp was wandering the countryside and hadn’t had anything to eat. He came to a small cottage and knocked on the door. A greedy, penny pinching widow, who answered the door, refused to give the stranger something to eat. The wily tramp responded by saying that he wasn’t begging for food; on the contrary, he wanted to share his “food” with the woman. He showed her a bent nail in his pocket, claiming all he needed was a pot and some boiling water and he would produce the best meal she ever tasted. Upon boiling the water, he said that the soup was a little thin, and persuaded her to add some of her salt (leftover from Christmas), vegetables (from her cellar) and dried meat. The woman was so impressed with the tasty and sweet smelling soup that she agreed with the tramp that the soup was fit for a king, and allowed him to stay at her house for the evening. The next morning the clever tramp left the woman’s house without his nail, because the woman wouldn’t let him go until he agreed to sell the nail.
The tramp in this skit, Mr. Neil Soup, essentially tricks the network executive, Ms. Penelope Pinscher, into buying into an ordinary, everyday item of little value (an interview with canned questions and canned answers) by persuading her to dress it up: adding dancing girls, a house band, expanding it to 60 minutes, moving it to a midnight time slot, and adding a shiny suit host (who is usually a celebrity or standup comedian, not a journalist, and therefore a horrible interviewer), insipid skits and an enthusiastic but obsequious audience, landing himself a sweet cushy job as Executive Figurehead in the process.
This skit essentially is a jab at late night talk shows. These talk shows, at their heart, are nothing more than just rock-stupid scripted questions and stone-cold, scripted answers. And the networks keep buying the “nails” from the “tramps” over and over again and passing the “soup” onto the viewers. No matter how much you dress up that nail, folks, it’s still just a nail.