Need a little comic relief? There’s a new Wastebook out – though Sen. Tom Coburn has retired, the task of documenting farcical government spending has been taken up by Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.

This year’s Wastebook has been appropriately subtitled, “The Farce Awakens.”

“Monkeys running in hamster balls on a treadmill,” Flake wrote. “Zombies in the White House. Sheep in microgravity. Cartooning in India. A life-size Pac-Man game. Jazz lessons for robots. A cloud city on Venus!”

These are just some of the more comical examples of federal spending in 2015.

“Washington equates caring with the amount of dollars spent. But there has been an awakening in the farce,” he wrote. “When the same group who created the problems are the same ones trusted to fix them, what amount of dollars and cents can make up for the lack of commonsense in how the money is spent? For instance, last year Congress approved billions of dollars of additional funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to erase the medical backlog that was literally killing veterans. A year later, the number of veterans waiting to see a doctor increased.”

Some 2015 spending achieved the opposite of its aims.

“Over a half a billion dollars intended for defense and security were squandered on projects that did nothing to make us safer and some that actually made us less safe,” Flake noted. “The $500 million Pentagon program to combat ISIS in Syria ended up instead arming an al-Qaeda affiliate. In Afghanistan, the Department of Defense squandered $110 million lighting and heating hundreds of empty buildings while soldiers in Kandahar went days without lights or heat … More than $700,000 of military supplies to assist Yemen fight terrorists are wasting away in warehouses in Virginia incurring storage fees and now must be destroyed at an additional cost to taxpayers.”

Enough with the serious stuff. Now the comedy.

“Taxpayer-funded science projects even sounded like they were concocted at a frat house rather than a government research agency,” Flake wrote. “The National Science Foundation is studying whether a koozie does, in fact, keep a can of beer cold, what makes those looking for love online decide to swipe right, and how to date someone out of your league. It is also developing a ‘fat detector’ to determine if someone is overweight just by looking at their face. And NIH research concluded pizza is as addictive to college students as crack.”

Let’s not forget the musical robots.

“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is spending $2 million to hire a team of musicians and researchers to develop musical machines including robots capable of performing a trumpet solo and jamming with human musicians,” Flake reported. “Known as the Music Improvising Collaborative Agent (MUSICA), the system – it is hoped – will be ‘capable of musically improvising with a human player.'”

As Flake pointed out, “None of these studies is likely to unlock a cure to cancer or solve any of the other real challenges facing our nation.”

But they do provide some comic relief.