Welcome, stranger!
I am Malt Schlitzmann, history's finest. I am the only funny person that has ever lived, and I also invented writing words on the internet. If you're reading this, you should pay me to be funny on your behalf.
At summer camp, I was the only 13 year old who managed to chug a quart of chocolate milk without puking and I'm proud to say I take this same approach to every endeavor I set out on. At any instant I can perform the original opening theme from Space Jam with 80% accuracy OR BETTER. If you ran a forum between the years 2003-2012 you banned me multiple times.
Thank you to Jim Robertus, the programmer who developed this extremely retro throwback HTML template. Thank you also to my editors, without whom I would be completely unhinged. Thank you also to my readers and everyone kind enough to reach out and tell me my work has impacted them.
If you'd like me to write for you, or if you just want to say hi, my email provider is gmail.com and my @ is "maltpoet". No quotation marks, but you know that. I look forward to hearing from YOU!
A Curated Selection Of My Best Works
Here's a quick list of some of my best work over the past few years. If you like what you read, I am available for commission.
"My Life as a Baseball Clown" is probably my most critically-acclaimed work, it earned me an entry in the Notable category for Best American Sportswriting 2020. It was also published hours before the staff of Deadspin unilaterally foreclosed on the site, to spite their corrupt managers. So, it didn't quite get the promotional push it might have otherwise received, and despite the fact that it had been in the pipeline for months before the strike, plenty of readers accused me of being a scab as well. That stung! But, it was an honor to work with my editors and I remain grateful for the opportunity to be featured on a legendary site.
It also remains one of the last normal things I did, before COVID.
The Deadspin piece was the second article that I collaborated on with word-style hero David Roth. Years earlier he helped me bring a piece on an Indonesian horse-sport-ritual to Vice Sports, who ended up closing before they ever paid me. Pasola, an equine blood sport, I learned about for a Cracked article on historical animal-murder-sports I never quite managed to make enjoyable. Either way, I like how the fiery passion about the dissolution of sports is contrasted by the quiet introspection of the Deadspin piece.
Hey, speaking of the final days of once-legendary websites, I should probably talk about my stint on Something Awful. My nostalgia blinded me to the true nature of what was transpiring until it was too late. People got hurt and I responded the best I could with the information I was given. As a result, several thousand words of Pokemon erotica were posted to the front page and left up for over a year, as of this writing.
I also liked writing Open Letter To The Class Of All Hell Has Broken Loose.
Also got to interview the author of STREET SWORD, the grandmaster flashlight Phil Elmore himself.
On 10/2020 Pif Magazine published my flash fiction Exactly 599 Words About Warblers.
2018, I ranked 3rd in the Frank O'Hara Poetry Contest for This Rage Dies With Me.
I have a number of scripts available for purchase through New Play Exchange, ideal for festivals, warmup skits, and high-school productions. Many are even written for Zoom! For example, here's a reading of "The Nostromo Rule," part of a longer sci-fi spoof series ideal for podcasters.
Videos & Audio
Is it fitting that my first attempt at standup was Star Trek Themed?
In case you missed it just above, you really have to listen to The Nostromo Rule, a satirical take on the Aliens franchise.
Fashion Libel was an attempt to revive a specific kind of conversational satire popular on early-oughts comedy sites. I wrote most of this script, along with handling recording and production. If you like this, we're still looking for a venue to host this and future videos.
This is a dramatic reading of a poem that eventually became an enjoyable Something Awful thread. Somewhere I worked out that it would take a modern construction company slightly less than a year to completely physically deconstruct the Tomb of Horrors, but that research has gone missing.
I occasionally write scripts for the fascinating YouTube channel Biographics. Please enjoy the videos I did for Dali, Warhol, and Monet. I also got to write on Pratchett, one of my favorite writers.
I'm especially proud of my research on the Monet video. I had found a number of claims online that he was "investigated by police," but it took a favor from a librarian in the Dutch national archives to unearth the original notes from the investigation. He was investigated because, as a Frenchman fleeing the collapse of the Paris Commune, it was suspected that he could be a socialist radical!
The police they sent to tail him complained that all he did was paint and eat dinner with other artists, which is probably what most socialist radicals would rather be doing with their time anyway. Easy to assume why the police thought a hungry French artist might be harboring socialist tendencies.
In The News
I got to open for Sharon Stone at a Bernie Sanders GOTV rally, and Vice was nice enough to mispell my name in the writeup. On the other hand, "Pure, Unpasteurized Irreverence" is probably the best tagline I could ever hope for.
Enjoy this video of me persuading city hall to declare June 10th International Pun Day, a celebration that will run in perpetuity until the heat death of the universe.
And, finally, because it would have come up no matter what, I'd like to share this Insider interview as my final word on the time a twice-impeached former WWE hall of famer called me fat.