Watch "My Buddy Bill"

Last year while I was visiting Chicago, Mo Ryan told me she had tickets to see watch Rick Cleveland, a scribe for “Six Feet Under” and “The West Wing” (he shared the show's only writing Emmy with this guy), workshopping a monologue called “My Buddy Bill.” I had no idea what to expect, but the performance was a complete hoot.

The story starts out in the White House in the final months of the Bill Clinton administration -- he's the Bill in the title -- passes through Malibu and rural Arkansas (where Billy Bob Thornton somehow gets involved) and ends up with Cleveland trying to score illicit drugs in an Amsterdam coffee shop while hanging with Clinton and Christopher Walken. Much of the charm derives from Cleveland walking you right through the membrane that separates plausibility from absurdity, and you hardly notice a thing. He taped a polished performance in New York a few months later; it airs at 11 p.m. CT on Thursday on Comedy Central.