Paul Blart: Mall Cop helped me get a PhD.

I sat down to write my final exam. It just had one question: I had to write an essay applying Derrida’s ideas of deconstruction to Saussure’s linguistic theories. I looked at the paper and realized: *I have no idea what any of this means.*

I’d spent the whole semester just watching Paul Blart: Mall Cop, day after day, instead of studying. It was, I thought, a mistake.

It turns out it was the best decision I’d ever made.

Taking a bold stand, I just wrote one sentence as my answer: “The mind is the only weapon that doesn’t need a holster. – Paul Blart (Mall Cop).” Then I handed it in.

The class gasped. We had three hours to write it, and I was done in five minutes. *How does he know the material so well?* they were all wondering.

I gave it to the professor. He looked at it. Then he looked at me. Then he said, “Are you telling me that all you wrote on this paper was a single quote from Paul Blart: Mall Cop?”

I stared him in the eye without even flinching and dropped another classic Blartism on him: “I know a lot about sharks.”

He looked back at the paper, back at me one more, and then nodded. He pulled out his red pen, wrote “A+” on the page, and then just said, “Sick reference, man. Sick reference.”

Thanks to his recommendation, I was first choice for the direct-entry PhD program.