You'd Be Surprised

A lone coroner's lantern trembles across a cavernous morgue where vaudeville ghosts rehearse their final encore; through this chiaroscuro limbo wanders Billy West, a dead-pan jester who discovers that every punch-line he ever delivered has calcified into a pearl now lodged in his throat. In a city whose streetlamps flicker like faulty footlights, he negotiates with a tap-dancing undertaker, a ventriloquist judge whose dummy pronounces sentences, and a soprano whose high C can shatter the minute-hand off every clocktower. Each encounter peels another onion-skin from his identity until he stands before a mirror that reflects not his face but the audience itself—at which point the celluloid appears to inhale, swallowing viewers whole into a looping vaudeville reel that never resolves, only re-invents the very concept of the final curtain.