“I wasn’t even gonna get a PhD, they just heard me and were like, ‘whoa, here you go.’”
A local man has earned himself a doctorate in US history after he performed the entirety of Billy Joel’s classic, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”.
The song whose lyrics take us through a journey of geopolitical strife and victory, include mentions of Richard Nixon, Joe Di Maggio and Richard Nixon again. It has long been considered an impossible task to memorize.
“Yeah, I was just having some fun with my friends,” said the very humble gentleman. “I usually spend my commute to my job at Earl’s Carwash & Donut’s Emporium learning the song line by line. Just as a party trick. It wasn’t one I made a lot of use of. Usually my friends don’t even let me get to the chorus because they get bored or they don’t like my singing voice, but this time I waited till they were six Jaeger Bombs deep.”
He then claims he was not even planning on pursuing an advanced education. “Yeah, some university I’d never heard of, they contacted me and said ‘Hey, we saw that video of you on YouTube and we think you deserve a doctorate’. I thought it was a prank, so I asked them some questions that only historians would know, like; ‘Who did start the fire?’”
He has also expressed curiosity regarding the other applications of his talent. “Well, I didn’t think it would get me a PhD. Who knows what else this song can get me. There’s this bathroom in a library I pay to use a lot. If I work there, it’d be free.”
The Ipe Collection 