Thieves pulled off a brazen daytime robbery of the
famous Edvard Munch painting “The Scream” on Sunday.
Three armed, masked men stormed into the Munch Museum
in Oslo, Norway, around noon and made off with the
painting before a large crowd of stunned art patrons.
Police lost precious minutes of pursuit time due to
the failure of witnesses to immediately alert
authorities. “The all just stood there like a bunch
of bug-eyed goons, with their pie holes hanging open
and their hands clamped to their cheeks,” said Oslo
Police spokesman Kjell “Yogi” Yorgessen. “I realize
that the power of the work inheres in its depiction of
primal anguish through the eternal silent scream of
the wraithlike solitary figure on the bridge, but
come on people, this is real life! You wanna be
heard, you gotta bust a lung!”
The theft prompted the U.S. National Angst Level to be
raised from “Gnawing Dread” to “Acute Sense of
Impending Doom.” “It seems like nothing is safe these
days, not even a treasured international icon
reflecting our modern sense of existential
foreboding,” National Angst Coordinator Ed Reulbach
told reporters when questioned about the
level-raising. The Angst Level has been no lower than
“Mild Feeling of Unfinished Business” ever since its
inception three years ago, largely due to the ongoing
inability of the National Office of Angst to decide on
a color scheme for the scale.
In his press conference, Reulbach acknowledged that
raising the Angst Level could itself generate
additional angst that could result in further raisings
of the Angst Level, a vicious cycle that could only
end in the implosion of the collective national
psyche, “but, hey, have you got a better system?”
The thieves also made off with another Munch painting, “Madonna,” which depicts an eroticized nude virgin with a blood-red halo in a dark, swirling aura.
However, museum officials were much less concerned
about recovering it, saying “The concept’s been done
to death lately.”
