Caught People Who Couldn't Stop Digging Themselves Deeper

Calling someone a bad liar is actually a pretty nice compliment -- it means they haven't gotten much practice. Well, if that's the case, we're about to compliment the shit out of the people on this list; when they got caught in a scandal, their attempts at spin and cover-up were pure comedy gold.

#6. Todd Courser Fabricated An Email Claiming He's A Bisexual Porn Addict To Cover Up An Affair

Nancy Derringer/Bridge Magazine

The Damage:

The story of Michigan state reps Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat is like something out of a Tea Party version of Romeo And Juliet. After falling madly in love (presumably over their shared love of tricorne hats), their star-crossed relationship was threatened by the lamestream media, which threatened to expose the fact that the two were banging each other while technically married to other people. Deciding that he couldn't blame the whole thing on Obama, Courser did the next-best thing.

The "Control":

Courser's plan was to paint himself as a Tea Party martyr by making it look like he was the target of a smear campaign, with the "rumors" of his affair being just the first salvo in the attack on his good name. Courser took aside one of his aides and told him to concoct an email that accused Courser of "male-on-male sex" and other unseemly acts.

Rod Sanford/Lansing State Journal
"Hot dudes only. No ugmos."

When the aide (who began recording the bizarre conversation) refused to play Courser's game, the state representative got angry and sent the email himself from an anonymous address.

The email was received by several GOP operatives who read all about how Courser was both a "gun-toting, Bible-thumping, cock-sucking freak" and a "bisexual porn-addicted sex deviant." His logic was flawless: If he wasn't in fact "fucking and screwing man-on-man" like the emails claimed, then surely his alleged trysts with Gamrat were equally a bunch of made-up nonsense.

Todd Courser
"To prove I'm not bisexual, I will now not have sex with a man! ... There!"

For a while, things seemed to have actually worked out for Courser ... until he fired the aide who had proof that the emails were phony. Of course, the aide went straight to the newspapers and offered up the recording, sending reporters and late-night comics into a state of utter euphoria. Courser resigned in shame, while Gamrat was expelled, which we suppose beats a double suicide by poison and dagger.

#5. Paul Reubens Said He Couldn't Have Been Masturbating In Public Because He's Strictly Right-Handed

Kevin Winter/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

The Damage:

Paul Reubens hit pay dirt in 1986 when CBS picked up Pee-wee's Playhouse, a television show aimed at entertaining children and scaring the ever-loving piss out of potheads unlucky enough to accidentally tune into this madness. Five years later, Reubens decided to celebrate the success of his show by masturbating in an adult theater in Florida. That's when the cops suddenly raided the placeand arrested Reubens for indecent exposure.

Warner Bros.
Can't hop on your bike to escape when your pants are around your ankles.

The "Control":

Pee-wee's first idea to keep this pee-wee out of the headlines was to bribe the arresting officers, not with straight-up cash or lavish gifts but with ... umm, a children's benefit for the local sheriff's department. We hope he realized how this sounded the second he said it out loud.

His efforts at burying the story became futile, so Reubens' legal team thought about arguing that their client wasn't really masturbating. It only seemed that way because at the time of the arrest he totally looked like a guy who masturbates in cinemas.

Sarasota County Sheriff's Department
A lot.

Their "proof" was that the detectives claimed that Reubens was masturbating with his left hand, which he apparently would never do because he is strictly right-handed. The whole case was dependent on the testimony of scientific experts from the Masters And Johnson (*snigger*) Institute who posited that in their 30 years of research, they had never found an instance in which someone masturbated with their non-dominant hand.

We're not sure what kind of boring-ass vanilla jerk-off artists the Masters And Johnson Institute interviewed, but every guy ever knows how stupid that idea is. If people are willing to sit on their hand until it's numb and give themselves The Stranger just for the sake of variety, then merely changing hands cannot be that much of a stretch. Someone must have thankfully pointed that out to Reubens, because he ended up pleading no contest and instead opted to wait until the world just sort of forgot about his little indiscretion.

That ... seems to have worked.

#4. New Zealand's Prime Minister Thinks Tantalizing Ponytails Are Meant To Be Pulled

Stacy Squires/The Press

The Damage:

In 2015, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key made international news after a waitress called him out on pulling her ponytail every time he visited her cafe. The first question on everybody's mind was, of course, "Why?" Followed by, "Is it a sex thing? It's a sex thing, isn't it."

The "Control":

Unfortunately for Key, he was seen by scores of people tugging the waitress' hair many times over the course of seven months, so he couldn't exactly deny the whole thing. Instead, he went the other way and didn't stop until he reached Cuckooville. For one, Key didn't seem to comprehend that what he had done was wrong at all. He even said the whole thing was "a lot of fun and games."

US Embassy New Zealand
Caution: If John Key asks if you want to play a game, run and find the nearest police officer.

Key also allegedly told the waitress things like, "That's a very tantalizing ponytail," and hummed the theme from Jaws before coming up behind her and pulling on her hair. And if that's not creepy enough, New Zealand reporters later dug through their archives to look at old news footage and found other cases of Key pulling on young girls' hair:

TV3
Like trying to stay out of frame is gonna hide you.

Eventually, Key did try apologizing to the woman by bringing her a gift, namely two bottles of wine with his initials on them, which just happened to come from his very own winery. We can only assume that the bottles came with a super creepy note, probably something like: "This way I can finally be inside you."