Ben Brock Johnson

I just had to do them.

The one job I've always wanted to do is comedy.

It just started with another stand-up comedian friend of mine.

Ben's friend proposes that they submit lawsuits to court TV shows.

You can just go to the TV show's websites and fill out a form with your case.

You don't even always have to file with a real court first.

And I'm like, all right, let's do it.

And we already had some show flyers, so it wasn't really hard to, you know, come up with that or, you know, lie about that.

I did as many times as I could before eventually they go, hey, you've been on these shows before.

We can't have you on.

How did Ben Palmer go from goofing around on court TV to creating, as one commenter put it, one of the most creative, nonviolent and effective acts of resistance they'd ever seen?

I'm Mother Ben Brock Johnson.

I'm Anne-Marie Sievertson.

And you're listening to Endless Threat.

Ben first tried his hand at stand-up back in 2008 when he was living in Ohio.

Yeah, I just had a bunch of weird ideas that I prepared for a long time and went up and did it, and it didn't go as great as I thought it was going to go.

You don't say.

It probably was a bomb, but in my head, I heard maybe one or two laughs, and they probably were awkward laughs, but that was enough for me to keep trying.

No, not at all.

It's very weird, absurd.