(Watch this guy's video, it's great, despite the talk of Christianity. I'm not Christian, but this guy knows what he's talking about, tries not to be redundant, and just generally has a pretty good video essay/analysis here).
That high school musical comment at 26:40 hath struck me with inspiration.
I now declare an au where a bunch of high school characters convince their grumpy teacher's wife to join their play/musical where Grumpy Teacher is the bad guy. It's very corny and it's supposed to be, because the wife only agreed to it as a cute joke on her husband.
The bad moments are intentionally bad, played straight, and people in the audience laugh because they know it's a joke on their teacher.
The plot is flimsy because the students weren't trying to write a good play, they were trying to make their class and school laugh.
Grumpy Teacher is grumpy about it at first, but comes around to it (he loves his wife so much).
(Because of the library in the movie, I'm gonna say he's an English teacher).
He takes the whole thing in good humor and uses the shoddy play as and assignment and/or final project, challenging his students to create a compelling story, and every rewrite that you've seen on the internet is a student's assignment.
He does this project every year now, and those student's little joke goes down in history.