Ready your puns, references, and wordplay: Wild boars are ransacking Rome

Wild boars recently descended upon Rome, Italy, and are terrorizing locals as the animals rummage through the city’s garbage, providing ample free advertising to those critical of the mayor’s refuse collection problem while the town gears up for local elections this weekend.

Not only that, but… well, actually, that’s pretty much the entire story, to be quite honest with you. Definitely one of those “totally sucks if you happen to be there” situations that is otherwise cute, funny, absurd, and/or enjoyable-at-a-remove for everyone else who haven’t had the misfortune of encountering a ravenous, potentially violent, 220-pound forest pig while walking their children to school.

Of course, there is only way to combat this issue: a unified front of Internet gags, puns, references, wordplay, and assorted frivolity. Okay, so apparently another option is working with locals to reform Rome’s broken sanitation infrastructure while also adapting hunting regulations to better cull the area’s boar population, but that all falls far beyond our purview.

So, without further ado, here are a few prompts to get us all on our way here:

• Anything related to “XXX to L feral hogs”
• Variations of Pig Latin-related humor
• Any and all references to The Young Pope (The Young Pork, perhaps?)
• Anti-papist pork puns
• Similarly, anything involving “Porx Romana”
• History-referencing goofs, i.e.
• Something related to kosher laws that we can’t quite verbalize or envision just yet, but know is definitely there to mine for potential comedy gold
• Isn’t there that story about Jesus casting a bunch of demons into a herd of swine? Good jumping off point there.
• Any excuse to remind everyone Babe: Pig in the City is worth a rewatch
• …Hmm

Honestly, this truly shouldn’t be as hard as it is proving to be. A bunch of cute, fat hog-babies are running around Rome, spooking elderly Italian ladies carrying shopping bags. It needs to be writing itself right now. Perhaps this has something to do with knowing that our own, stateside woes eclipse Rome’s boar battalions, and that we’re simply, callously searching for distractions from American existential threats? The author of this piece lives in New Orleans, and only just had their trash picked up after six weeks’ of delays, including a disastrous hurricane. Who are we to judge?

…This isn’t what we had in mind after hearing about the Vatican sequence recuts to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Hogfather: Part III.

Ahhh. There it is.

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