x. Why would they want to rename monkeypox? The first thing we have to acknowledge, and I think you'd all agree, there has never been a better name for a serious disease than monkeypox. I don't care who you are, you hear monkeypox and you think, "Monkeypox." Am I right?

But you hear you're going to get a bad case of COVID-19 that might have come out of some kind of weapons laboratory — we don't know, but we worry that it might have. Now that's scary stuff. Although as bad as saying you have COVID-19 sounds, ironically saying you have long COVID sounds a little bit self-complimentary, if you know what I mean. I don't like to brag, but I got a pretty big case of long COVID. My COVID is so long.

So monkeypox. Tragically it looks like they're going to change the name, so we won't have the fun of calling it monkeypox anymore with all the jokes that you can make about that. And of course the reason is obvious. It's obviously racist.

Now here's a question I ask provocatively. If you and I heard monkeypox and thought of monkeys and thought it was funny and it was a good name and that's all we thought, because we're good people, but if some other people — maybe the people in the World Health Organization and a bunch of people who wrote to ask for this, there was some kind of a signup where people signed the letter and said you got to change that name from monkeypox because it sounded racist to them — to which I say to myself, huh, who is the racist in this story? If I put the variables together, the people who just think monkeys are cute, or is it the people who made some other association with cute little monkeys? To which I say I think we found