"Running refrigerators? That's energy, right?" (Photo: Alex Wong / Getty Images)

Proving our suspicions that the citizens of Russia are over there just laughing their asses off at us idiot Americans and our dipshit government, The Guardian reports that wholly unqualified Secretary of Energy Rick Perry was tricked into sitting for 22 minutes on a prank call about pig manure by a comedy duo the paper describes as “The Jerky Boys of Russia.” Calling TV hosts Vladimir “Vovan” Kuznetsov and Alexei “Lexus” Stolyarov “The Ali G of Russia” might be more accurate, though, as the duo specializes in making fools out of celebrities and high-ranking officials. (These are the same guys who fooled Elton John into thinking he was on a call with Vladimir Putin back in 2015.)


This time around, the duo pretended to be Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman and an interpreter, hoping to talk to Perry about energy policy. Perry’s office scheduled a followup, no questions asked, as Perry presumably sat up straight, smoothed back his hair, and gave his staff a thumbs up in anticipation of his big-boy business call. The ostensible purpose of the call was to discuss the Republican catnip that is American coal exports, but Perry also discussed a potential oil pipeline and natural-gas exploration in Ukraine and America’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, according to The Washington Post.

That’s embarrassing enough, but that wasn’t the real reason Kuznetsov and Stolyarov called: They wanted to tell Perry that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had developed a revolutionary new biofuel composed of home-brewed alcohol and porcine manure, a.k.a. moonshine and pig shit, as translated by Pravda Report. Perry’s response? That he’d like to know more about this “interesting” “scientific development,” and that he had never had Prince Albert in a can, but he looked forward to trying this Ukrainian delicacy on his next official visit. We made up that last part, but you can listen to Perry say the first part on the real prank call, which was posted in full on the Russian news site Vesti, below.