A father and two sons run Adelphia. It’s a cable company. And they took from that company a billion dollars. A billion. Three people - three people took a billion dollars. What were they gonna do, start their own space program? ’Let’s send the monkey to Mars, Dad!’

This line comes from Lewis Black’s early-2000s stand-up material reacting to the Adelphia Communications scandal, in which founder John Rigas and his sons were accused (and later convicted) of looting the cable company through concealed debt and self-dealing. Black uses the case—three family members extracting roughly a billion dollars—as a springboard for his broader theme of corporate and political absurdity in the post–Enron era, when major accounting scandals were dominating U.S. news. The “space program” riff is a comic escalation meant to underline how surreal the scale of the theft sounds when reduced to ordinary human motives.

Black riffs on the Adelphia scandal—widely reported in the early 2000s—where the company’s founding family was accused of treating corporate funds as personal money. The repetition of “a billion” and “three people” heightens the absurdity and moral outrage: the theft is so large it becomes almost unimaginable. The punchline (“start their own space program… send the monkey to Mars”) uses comic exaggeration to translate abstract financial crime into a vivid, ridiculous image, underscoring how detached elite wrongdoing can feel from ordinary life. The bit also satirizes rationalizations for greed: no plausible personal need can justify that scale of taking.