Category: anti-humor

I Love to Eat

Rilaly1 Comment

“How many of you love to eat? I’m talking to the people who love to eat tonight. C’mon, how many of you love to eat? Let me hear you!” Barry asked the audience in Kalispell, Montana.

“That line never gets much applause. Most applaud politely and softly, thinking, ‘I don’t know where you’re going with this, but yeah, I enjoy eating a thing or two.’ Very few people leave their seat with, “EATING! YEAH! Sing it sista!” Yet, we have to eat food to sustain life. It’s true. Look it up. In your research, you’ll find that not only does eating food sustain life, it provides the protein and vitamins we need to maintain certain energy levels and strength, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to rise up and scream at the top of our lungs to express our passion for it in an open forum like this one, because people are going to consider us a pig.

“But even those of you who were on a half-bun, ready to rise and scream your heads off about the glory of eating, won’t do it on the first date. It’s just … It’s not a good look. Most prospective lovers won’t mind hearing that we enjoy eating, as long as we do it in moderation. They don’t want to hear about our plans for massive weight gain. “You like what you see here, babe, because there’s going to be a whole lot more of it soon. Once you start to love me, and make me more comfortable with myself and my physical appearance, it’s only a matter of time before this,” Barry said loosely circling his belly, “becomes a big mess of Frito’s and Skittles. That’s right, this is only the beginning. I love to eat hon’.”

“Women don’t demand skinny, most don’t anyway, but they don’t want us to be all hooting and woo hooing about food either. They do it, though. That’s right, they don’t mind talking about how much they love to eat, because they’re all thin and stuff. They’re not afraid to share it with the world. “I love to eat!” They say it all the time. Really? You love to eat? I don’t think you do. I don’t think you love it near as much as I do sweetie. Here, here’s a rack of spare ribs. Prove it!

“Starting today! Right now! If you’re a little chubby, or planning to be, shout it with me. “I love to eat!” Shout it loud, shout it proud. I like sleeping, and sitting around, and do nothing for unusually long, unhealthy stretches, but nothing compares to eating. 

“Have you ever had a friend say, “Let’s go grab something to eat, and then we can-”

“Wait, wait, hold on, hold on, there little doggie,” I interrupt. “For me, there is no and then. I don’t know what you plan to do after this meal, but the meal is the event for me, the night out, and the fun. I’m sure your other plans will be a blast, but I’m old, and keeping these beautiful curves ain’t as easy as it used to be, so I’m not into your and then. If I’m only going to be able to eat two meals a day now, and one of them has to be a light one, and you’re going to tell me to reduce my sugar intake and cut back on all those delicious, salty snacks that are probably going to lead to a painfully slow, premature death, you better bring your A-game if you’re going to ask me to have a meal with you. Use your words. Seduce me.

“Hey, I want to live a long life as much as the next guy. I want to live so long that someone at my funeral whispers, “Good God he was old!” and I know I’m going to have to sacrifice some to get there, but at some point, I’m going to have to sit down with a spreadsheet with one column titled, ‘How long do I really want to live?’ and the other titled ‘How much fun do I plan to have while I’m here?’ where I add, multiply, subtract and divide the quality of my life from a proposed quantity.

“Meals are the event of the day. They’re what we look forward to throughout the mind-numbing hours of inputting data into a computer. The meal is our reward for putting up with the family, home repairs, and the dog that we wanted so bad at one time. We do what we’re supposed to do. We drop the kids off at school on time, pick them up on time, and we work our tail off to crunch the numbers for Mr. Jamison to try to get one small smile out of him, and then we’re supposed to go home and eat a sensible salad with a side of broccoli? Screw that! I want meat. I want a steak. I want a big old artery clogging ribeye, with a side of mashed potatoes and a beer as my reward for putting up with all that.

“I’d love to eat all I want and be as slim and trim as you, so I don’t have to see all of my chins in photographs, but to do that they suggest that we might want to consider skipping a few meals, or at least think about mixing in a salad here and there. Have you heard this joke? This ‘Feel free to mix in a salad’ they say, or, ‘Have you ever heard of a salad?’ Yes, yes, I’ve heard of salad. Somebody, somewhere told me about how they ordered a salad instead of a steak at one of the finest steakhouses in our city, because he thought he could use a little more ruffage in his diet. He didn’t order it as an appetizer. It was his main course. He wanted to be healthy, and he thought it might help him live longer. You can eat salad with a side of broccoli all you want, to live longer, but I got news for you, brothers and sisters, you’re probably not going to outlive me as much as you think. I’m not going to live forever, I know that, we all know that, but while we’re here we should live like we’re going to die tomorrow, and a portion of that means I’m going to eat whatever the hell I want.

“If you don’t view meals as the event of the day, it’s because you’re not married. The first question the wife hits you with when the two of you arrive home from work is, “What do you want to eat tonight?” It happens so often, you should be prepared, but you’re not. “Ah, crap, I didn’t even think about it today, sorry.” It’s almost stressful.

“Then, when you do come up with something, she uses her veto power.”

“I don’t want to eat there, Henry. We ate there so recently.” Why is it so important to space out restaurants, because if we eat at the same place, in a too narrow a space in time, it will ruin the event of eating that particular meal. “Let’s try something else,” she says, “and I don’t want red meat tonight, and no more pizza, for God’s sakes Henry.” Ok, well, I don’t know where to eat then. You pick. “I picked last time.” This unlocks the dreaded ‘who picked last time?’ phase of the back-and-forth. Why is this important, because you both know your tailbone is on the line to pick the greatest place to eat every time out. She picked last time, and the two of you both know what an epic failure that was, and she can’t take the pressure of picking two times in a row, especially after that last one.

“Do you have these little, internecine battles with currents and undercurrents of tension flowing back and forth between your words? We all do, right? Eating is what we must do, and what we talk about nonstop. The what, when, where, and with whom are we going to eat tonight dominate all discussion topics. “I don’t want to eat at that place, because I hate their side items. The entrees are all right, I guess, but their sides are so ordinary and bland.”

“If you’re anything like me, you take such criticism personal. You have no stake in the success or failure of that restaurant. You don’t own any of the corporation’s stocks, but you love their food, and she knows it, and that agitates us, because she seems to reject everything, we hold dear. She doesn’t do it with that purpose in mind, and we know it, but we like that place so much that it’s kind of our place, and some weird part of us takes proprietary ownership of that place in our marriage to the point that any insults directed at it are personal. Yet, we abide her veto power, and we come up with another place. “I don’t want to eat there, either, the service sucks, and their bathrooms are dirty.” Their bathrooms are dirty? I’ve heard this more than twice. How did the cleanliness of a bathroom become a bullet point in this debate? What are you going to do in there? Exactly! You’re going to do your part to dirty that tiny, poorly ventilated room up. “Cleanliness of bathrooms, she says,” we mutter as the squabble comes to a close.

“Except, we don’t mutter that, because we know what starts out as a minor rebuttal can turn a back-and-forth discussion into a squabble, which can lead to a back and forth that can somehow escalate into an argument, and on rare occasions even a fight. A fight over where to eat? If that’s not a first world problem I don’t know what is. The larger point is that the two of you will never look back on the incremental progressions of this fight with a laugh, because it’s such a silly thing to fight over. You won’t, because you know that this is the meal, the hallowed parent’s night out meal. The parent’s night out meal is not just important, it’s an existential pivot point. If we want to continue to enjoy the freedom and fun that comes with our Tuesday nights out, and we hope to keep our marriage exciting and new, we know we have to do this night up right. We have to plan, discuss the details of that plan, and iron out any differences to one day, hopefully, look back on this night as that night. “You remember that night, right?” The ‘that night’ designation is the gold standard for all nights in romantic relationships, and those of us in such relationships fear we might never get back to them, and there’s no sense in trying to duplicate them either.

“Why don’t we just eat at home?” she says as we enter the ‘give up’ phase of our process. I do not want to eat at home Mildred, we always eat at home. “It’s healthier and cheaper.” It’s not healthier. Do people ever ask you that question? They ask me that all the time. ‘How often do you eat out?’ It doesn’t matter what we say. We could say we haven’t eaten out since the Coolidge administration, and they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s so unhealthy. You have to eat at home more.’ Screw you, I like to eat out. It’s special, and I’m paying them to treat me special. When they don’t, God help them, I’ll rage. When people say it’s healthier to eat at home, I say, “Doesn’t it depend on what you eat, no matter where you eat it? What if I chose a healthy entrée and healthy sides at a restaurant? Now, I don’t, I won’t, and we all know I won’t, but what if I did?  

“When we’re not talking about what we’re going to eat, we talk about what we ate, and where we ate it. Have you eaten there yet? No, OhmiGod, you absolutely must eat there, and you’ve got to eat there now, before they have to start feeding you through a tube. 

“You are what you eat. We’ve all heard that. I have a friend who won’t eat chicken. Chicken. I understand not eating red meat and pork, but chicken? She said she doesn’t like the texture. Every time I run into her, ‘How could you not like chicken?’ is the first and last thought in my head. I have more of a problem with her than I do vegetarians. I actually respect vegetarians and vegans. I could never be one, but you have to respect the amount of discipline it takes to go into a backyard brimming with all those gorgeous smells of red meat and pork and say, “I think I’ll take the beans, lentils and organic chia seeds on that side platter over there.” I take my hat off to them, because I could never do it.

“I respect you if you’ve managed to limit your diet to legumes, flax, and chia seeds, and you only drink water that comes from the finest springs in Demark. I respect anyone who can limit their diet in that manner, but my question is always why? Well, to be healthier, they say, and being healthier actually leads to more happiness. I would never say that consumption alone leads to happiness, but it’s definitely part of the equation. If you doubt that, try having someone try to take it away from you. I saw that firsthand. Someone very dear to me told his caretakers he would rather die than give up oral consumption. He went to the extreme of threatening a lawsuit over it, because when someone threatened to take eating away from him, he wrote: “I’d rather die! Eating is the only joy I have left in life, and I’d rather die than have that taken away from me.”

“Some of us who have no limits on our joy of oral consumption choose lentils and legumes over barbecued ribs and steak, because they think those decisions will help them outlive the rest of us. They might be right, if we take accidents and other freak occurrences out of the equation, but will they be happier? It’s a leading question, because I know they won’t. They can’t be happier. We’re talking about the quality of life here.

“Eat eggs,” they say. “Eat tons of them. They’re nature’s perfect food.” “Don’t eat eggs; they’re evil.” What? “It depends on how you prepare them.” Drink coffee, don’t drink coffee. Eat steak, don’t eat steak. Eat butter over substitutes, and everything your body recognizes in the digestion process. Everything in moderation: Eat less, play more.

“Various studies suggest that if you eat less, you will have more energy to play. It makes sense and it doesn’t. We need food to sustain energy levels, but if we eat too much, the digestion of it saps our energy. Even without the science we know what happens when we eat huge. To prove their point, the study brought on some fella who tight ropes the very lowest levels of caloric intake possible. He says he’s happier and healthier than he’s ever been. I don’t question the science, but I know what I know, and I know that if I go out to eat at a big steak house, and I choose salad with a side of broccoli, I’m not going to be happier. I might have more energy, and I might be healthier, but when I’m 105, playing pickleball and parcheesi, I’m still going to be thinking about all the steaks I passed on in life. Healthier? Yes. More energetic and playful, sure, with some asterisks. Happier? No.

***

“You see me here tonight. I could stand to lose what 10, 20 … 30 pounds?” Barry asked. He turned to an audience member with a smile. “You think I could stand to lose 40?” All right, I could stand to lose a lot of weight, but I’m not a glutton. Yet, I receive sensorial joy from eating delicious food, and I find going to a restaurant and eating their food eventful. I, like the distant kings and queens of yore, get to point at a menu selection, “I shall have your finest meal on this eve.” When the server walks out with my food, or what I think is my food, most of them understand how majestic we consider their arrival. The ones who do it up right, share a knowing smile with us, and they add a very subtle element of pageantry to their arrival. If you watch them, the best of them, they have it in their stride, both of us knowing our moment has arrived. They also have a big, glorious ‘your moment has arrived’ smile on their face.

“We all know this ‘your moment has arrived’ smile. When it’s directed at us, it’s glorious. I think, I think she just directed that smile at me. Praise the heavens, she did. When I was younger and more attractive, and young women gave me that ‘your moment has arrived’ smile, it meant something entirely different. It took me a while to deal with the fact that that’s over for me, but I’m okay with it now if it means food. I’m okay with it, because when I see that smile now, it comes after I saw all the other tables around me have had their moment arrive first, while I silently implored my server to bring my food.

That smile suggests she knows what we’ve been through. Even though were good little soldiers, silently waiting, she knows. We know she knows, because she a couple minutes ago she stopped by to say, “Don’t worry, your moment is near. I just checked with the cook. It will only be moments. I promise.” Then it happens. “Look, there she is! She has that big smile and that majestic stride. She knows. She knows, and she’s still young enough, and she hasn’t done this so often that she’s lost her enthusiasm. She loves this moment as much as we do. “Wait a second, did I see pork on her tray. I think I saw pork. No! God, no!” That smile was for someone else. If feels like, in a weird way, that’s hard to explain, that she’s cheating on us, when she gives that big, glorious ‘your moment has arrived’ smile to someone else.

“What the hell is going on here?” we say, rolling our head up to the heavens. “I’m going to say something.”

“Don’t,” the wife says.

“I’m sorry, I have to say something. This is getting ridiculous.”

Then the true moment arrives, and the server knows firsthand what this means after everything we’ve been through together. She has a majestic, almost parade-like stride to deliver our food. How many of us go to the bathroom, hoping, just hoping that our moment will arrive while we’re in there? We all do this right? We all think things up to pass the time until our moment arrives. We talk. We look around at our neighboring tables, and we whisper awful things about them just to waste time, until our moment arrives. We go to the bathroom, and some of the times it works, but most of the time it doesn’t.

“And you, you in your distant, ivory tower of health and nutrition, you want me to give all this up? To what? To live longer? You’re telling me that I shouldn’t go through the cinematic highs and lows of food arrival for nutritional and health reasons? Yeah, I’m not going to do that, and I’m not even going to cut back, even if it means I’ll only live to 65 as opposed to 105.

“The event today was this big, old beautiful ribeye. Ribeye was the word that popped into my head when I woke up today. Do you hate mornings? Everyone does. We hate waking up? Today, I sprang out of bed singing, “Good Day Sunshine, Good Day Sunshine!” and I was doing it with this smile on,” Barry said pointing to an exaggerated, toothy smile. “This is my ribeye-eating smile. Ribeye was the first thing I thought about when I woke up, and it was the only thing on my mind when people spoke to me. They all became a Simpsons’ jokes, talking ribeyes.

“It sang out to me, this ribeye, calling me like some evil siren beckoning me to my doom. I couldn’t understand the lyrics, but I can tell you that she had a beautiful, alluring falsetto voice.  

“When our moment finally happened, the server slid that big old block of meat in front of me. I love everything about that moment, the majestic arrival, the “Who had the ribeye?” question, and the, “Right here!” answer I give with pride and joy of ownership in my voice, followed by the almost cinematic sound of a plate sliding across the table. These are a few of my favorite things.

“When I finally have that big, old before me, I cut the entire thing up into small, serving portions. I no longer have a big, huge ribeye before me. I have all these little ribeyes. It makes me think I have more ribeye. I don’t and I know it, but a secret part of me thinks I can fool myself into thinking I have more. I also want to enjoy chewing each bite as much as I possibly can, and cutting them into smaller portions allows each piece an ability to do that for me. If I don’t cut up my steak before taking a bite, I’ll either cut while I’m chewing, which diminishes my enjoyment somewhat, or I’ll be thinking about my next cut while I’m chewing. Either way, I’ve calculated that I’m diminishing my enjoyment of a chew by fractional percentages by cutting while I chew or thinking about my next cut. By cutting my steak into small pieces before I take my first bite, I also get all the work out of the way, so I can sit back and enjoy those cuts of beef without having to worry about any future cuts while I’m chewing, savoring, and soaking it all in.  

“We all know it’s not healthy to eat large portions, but when that server puts that plate of ribeye before me, I don’t see plate, fixings, or side items. It’s all ribeye. I’m not going to complain. I’m not going to tell that server, “I’m sorry, that’s too much ribeye.” Have you heard people do this? “Oh, that’s too much ribeye.” Excuse me, excuse me, what the hell is too much ribeye? I ask this not to boost a joke. I’m genuinely curious. How can there be too much ribeye? The premise of this guilt makes no sense to me.

“I really shouldn’t have eaten all that,” is another way they express guilt. Yeah, you didn’t say jack when they slid all that in front of you. Some people suffer gastrointestinal issues in the aftermath, and they say that that seductive, siren song I hear is the voice of a gargling monster in their head who says, ‘Go ahead, but you’re going regret it,’ followed by maniacal laughter. Food fights back some of the times. I know that, but I think most people say it just to say it, because they feel guilty eating too much.   

“So, the question I hear in your heads is, do I feel some guilt when I have a twelve-ounce ribeye sitting before me? Some? They stress that word some as if it will unlock some false wall we have before guilt. No! No, I don’t feel guilty. Not only do I not feel guilty, I think I’ve found my purpose in life when a ribeye sits before me. I feel guilty about a lot of things, I’m Catholic, but eating a big, juicy, medium rare ribeye is not one of them. We all think we were put here with a greater purpose in mind. “What’s my purpose?” they say. “I need to find my purpose.” “It’s your job in life to find your purpose.” We all say various forms of that. Well, I found mine. You can laugh and call it stupid and simple, all you want, but when it slides across the table at me, I know I’m going to love that piece of meat so much that I will make noises eating it. “And some of them won’t be what you classify as human noises,” I warn my date.

“They listen, they nod, and do you want to know what they say, it’s so cute, they say, “Hey, I like to eat too Barry, and we all make noises.” They think they know what they’re talking about when they say noises, but they ain’t ready, as evidenced by the fact that they’re all shushing me a couple bites in.

“Hey, I told you I love to eat,” I say, “and I told you that I make noises.”

“I know, but people are staring, Barry. They’re uncomfortable. We’re all … uncomfortable.”

“Then, some busybody saunters over to the table. You know what he looks like. I don’t even need to describe him. The minute he steps up to the table, with his phone out, you just know he’s going to drop some kind of busybody crap on you, talking about how he and his family are trying to enjoy a meal, and how his kid is crying, because she’s scared. He says all that, and then he adds something about public noise ordinances. Noise ordinances? Did you just say noise ordinances? Noise ordinances are about firecrackers, sirens, and barking dogs. It’s got nothing to do with the sounds a fella makes eating a delicious ribeye. Mr. Busybody shows me his phone, saying, “Here you go,” and he conveniently has a copy of section 27 of article 4 of the city’s noise ordinances all pulled up, “And you’ll see here,” he says with professorial authority, “that subsection C of article 4 specifically addresses public eating noises in restaurants.”   

“People like this busybody, some of my friends, and the women who state they’ll never eat with me in public with me again, think these noises are a problem, a real problem. We all know I could control myself, and these noises better, but I have to tell you that I don’t consider it a pressing issue. I wish I could find some way to enjoy eating more, and I fear that if I tried to temper my noises that might diminish my enjoyment of the meal by fractional percentages, and that’s just not a risk I’m willing to take at this point in my life. Because, as great as the meal of the day is, it doesn’t last long. I eat and what seems like a minute and a half later, I’m done. It’s all over. The whole event I looked forward to all day is … over. It was so hot and juicy that I ate it too fast. I didn’t chitchat. Chitchat ends with the sound of a plate sliding across a table. I don’t even look around the room when a big, old juicy ribeye sits before me. Taking in my surroundings is over too. I even forget, sometimes, that I have someone sitting across the table from me. I hate reaching the end of a meal and having to force down the last few lukewarm bites. I want it hot! So, I eat all of those beautiful cuts of ribeye so fast that some of the times I can’t even remember how good they were. I know I just met these delicious, little morsels, but in a strange way that’s tough to describe to those of you cringing throughout my testimonial tonight, I kind of miss them. I miss them so much that, look at me, I’m salivating. I know it’s disgusting, but I can’t help myself. I loved eating them so much that I almost wish I didn’t eat them, so I could eat them again. I apologize for getting so emotional, and I know I shouldn’t get so emotional over such a stupid thing. It’s unseemly and not very professional, I know. I just love them so much that it’s hard for me to accept that they’re gone now. All of them. They’re all gone. I just loved eating them so much.

[Standup comedian Barry Becker is The Unfunny comedian, and this is one of his sets. If you enjoy this style of comedy, there’s more available at The Unfunny.] 

The Exorcising

RilalyLeave a comment

Rachael Noye added a joke to the tail end one of Tyler Drummond’s, while they walked through a Wichita, Kansas mall, hand in hand. He thought her joke was so funny that he held his stomach. He continued walking and holding his stomach, until his face turned laughter to a grimace. “I don’t feel so good!” Tyler said moments before collapsing in agony. He didn’t fall flat initially. Initially, he went to a knee, but when that didn’t gain him any relief, he slowly lowered himself to the ground. When that didn’t offer him any relief, he tried to sit up, but he couldn’t. Tyler had no idea, at this point, how much pain he would experience over the course of the next eight minutes. 

“It happened so fast,” Rachael would later say. “One minute he was laughing his tail off. The next, he’s groaning on the floor. I thought he was playing. ‘Get up,’ I said. ‘People are watching Tyler, get up’. He did things like this before, and I didn’t want to fall for it again.” 

Tyler was in such excruciating pain that he could not respond. 

After a couple seconds, Rachael knelt down next to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. She still wasn’t sure if she was the product of one of his jokes, until he let out his first unintelligible yells. “Tyler was not one to bring attention to himself, and he yelled loud,” Rachael added. “That’s when I knew something was really wrong.”

“Help!” Rachael cried out when she realized how serious this was. When no one responded, she said, “Help me! Help us!” When a few people broke ranks to help, she shouted, “Someone, someone call an ambulance!” over them.  

Two different patrons did just that. Others rushed forward to help in any way they could. Two of them attempted to help Tyler sit up, but he refused their requests. He continued rolling back and forth, holding his gut. Tyler’s face was one of complete agony. 

Rather than say, “Is there a doctor in the house?” One of the onlookers, seeing Tyler Drummond writhe around on the floor in pain, making unusual, guttural sounds of anguish, said, “Is there a priest in the house?” 

A priest happened to be in the mall that day, dining in the food court. “I’m a priest,” Father Danielson said running to the man. “What’s going on?” When the throng parted to allow his entrance, the Father Danielson went to a knee before the man, “What’s wrong with you sir?” the priest said, taking one of Tyler’s hands. Tyler attempted to answer, but his voice was so strained that Father Danielson couldn’t understand him. Tyler continued holding his stomach with the other hand, sweating profusely, and shouting at the top of his lungs. Some say he was probably swearing, but no one could understand a word he was saying.

“What happened?” Father Danielson asked Rachael when Tyler proved unable to answer.

“I don’t know,” Rachael said. “One minute he was fine, laughing, all that, then he said, ‘I don’t feel so good,’ and he just collapsed.”

“What’s his name?”

“Tyler,” she said. “Tyler Drummond.”

Not knowing what else to do, Father Danielson continued to hold Tyler’s open hand and said. “You have to tell us what’s wrong, Tyler. You have to tell us how we can help you.” Father Danielson began asking Tyler more pointed questions, and Tyler either couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. The priest began silently praying for the man.

“No,” Rachael. “He needs more than prayers.”

“All right,” the priest said. He then began administering Last Rites on the man. 

“No,” Rachael said, in the throes of panic. “He doesn’t need Last Rites either. He needs an exorcism. I’m Catholic. I know the difference.”

“I don’t think-” the priest said, but Rachael cut Father Danielson off with more pleas for something more.  “I think he needs a doctor-” the priest tried to say, but the growing throng of shoppers around them cut him off this time, imploring him to follow Rachael’s instructions and do something more. At the two minute mark, some proceeded to call the priest out for not doing everything in his power to end this man’s pain, others shouted him down, and some even began screaming:

“Do something! He could die!”

Tyler quieted a little when the priest began praying over him quietly. Tyler listened to the prayers, but members of the throng later said they only made Tyler more agitated and fearful.

The ever-growing crowd around them grew as fearful and agitated as Rachael and Tyler, “What are you doing?” they shouted. “Do the exorcism, like the woman said!” Father Danielson wasn’t sure what they wanted, but they were growing so unruly that he began to fear for his own safety. He wasn’t sure if they wanted him to begin speaking Latin, which would be a problem because he didn’t know any, or what they wanted, but they appeared on the cusp of violence.

“If he dies it’s on your hands!” a man in an Ivy League hoodie shouted, three minutes into Tyler’s agony. Three minutes might not seem a long period of time, but anyone who has experienced acute pain knows three minutes can feel like an eternity.

Tyler then began screaming louder than before, as the priest made up some prayers, he thought might calm the crowd. “Do it again!” one of the women in the crowd shouted at the priest. “It’s working.” The priest continued holding Tyler’s hand throughout, but he began mumbling the prayers, so the crowd around them might think he was speaking Latin. 

“Get it out of me!” were the first words Tyler said that anyone could understand. He rolled to and fro, while retaining a tight hold on Father Danielson’s hand. “GET IT OUT Of ME!”

Tyler’s screaming, and the crowd’s urging that the priest do something more, compelled the priest to mumble faster at the five minute mark. These sounds went back and forth in dramatic waves, until Tyler’s screams began building in intensity. Sensing that, the crowd that had been pushing forward to see more of Tyler’s incident, began backing away in unison. They didn’t know what was going to happen, of course, but they all, in various ways, described how they thought this might progress into something unexpected and something unprecedented.  

When Father Danielson was unable to do anything as immediate as the man in the Ivy League hoodie instructed, the man panicked. He was one of the first spectators on the scene, and he proved one of the mot agitated throughout. His agitation with either the priest, or the situation, progressed until he couldn’t take it anymore. He had been making a sign of the cross on himself throughout the situation, but when the situation appeared to only be growing in intensity, he made one final sign of the cross, kissed his fingers and impulsively and violently pushed and shoved his way out of the throng, screaming, “It’s coming! Get out! Get out while you still can! It’s coming!” If the throng gathering around Tyler, hadn’t been so large, the hysterical man would’ve probably knocked the woman standing behind him flat, but the man behind her caught her before she could go down. The shouting man continued making the sign of the cross, some spectators later said, and he continued shouting, “It’s coming!” until he was safely in his car, peeling out of the parking lot, and driving away as fast as he could. 

Seconds after that hysterical man fled, and three others followed him, one with a small child, it began. It began six minutes after Tyler Drummond collapsed to the floor in the middle of a Wichita, Kansas mall. Some spectators described it as a hiss, a hiss more similar to the sound one might hear from air slightly escaping a balloon, as opposed to the snake’s hiss. This was followed by further evidence of Tyler’s agony, as he began to wail loud and long wails. Two more spectators exited, and the rest backed up more. 

“Anyone who tells you they weren’t scared,” one of the spectators said, “is lying. Straight up lying.”

“Oh, absolutely terrified,” a middle-aged woman said, “I’m a little embarrassed to admit it now, but I got into a screaming match with a woman who had her seven-year-old child with her. ‘Get her out of here!’ I shouted at the woman. I thought it was irresponsible that she kept her daughter there. I mean, we didn’t know what was going to happen.”

“It reminded me of the screams a woman will make while in the final stages of childbirth,” another said.

When the hissing sounds “Progressed from hissing sounds to flapping sounds” at the seven minute mark, four more people left the crowd that gathered around Tyler Drummond. Their departure wasn’t as violent as the man in the hoodie, but they were described as bug eyed in their departure. They ducked and weaved their way through the throng and out of the mall. Those who departed would never hear the sounds progress from the unusual flapping sounds to the more familiar sounds of flatulence, and we can only guess the stories they tell of their day at the mall that afternoon, if they didn’t seek out the news stories on what ended up happening.

Some spectators say that the flatulence lasted minutes, others say it might’ve lasted thirty seconds, but the priest said, “It might’ve lasted maybe seven seconds, but it was long and loud, very long and very loud.” It was also, according to all of the spectators there, quite foul. One of the primary reasons for its regrettable, and some say unforgettable, smell was that when Tyler began to feel some relief from his initial push, eight minutes into “the most painful gastro intestinal pain I’ve ever experienced,” he pushed harder. He pushed so hard that some diarrhea followed the flatulence.

When it was finally over, and everyone realized what happened, Tyler smiled an embarrassed smile. His smile emanated through the sweat that drenched his hair and left his face beaming with sweat. The priest also noted that the alarming redness of his face, slowly dissipated, until his normal color returned. While sitting up, Tyler actually managed a laugh. This caused others to others to laugh, until just about everyone was laughing.  

“It was a laugh of relief,” Father Danielson said later. “Euphoric laughter.” Tyler didn’t even mind that the laughter was directed at him. He took it in stride, and apologized a number of times to the crowd if he upset them in anyway, and he thanked them for their concern.

“I’ve never been so relieved to hear another man fart,” a senior citizen said before shaking Tyler’s hand.

“Oh, I know it,” Tyler said. He was laughing while shaking that man’s hand, and his face colored again, in embarrassment. “Thank you, for your concern.”

“Thank you most of all, father,” Tyler said, standing up to shake Father Danielson’s hand. “I really thought that was something far more serious. Thank you for staying with me.”

“Well you’re welcome,” the priest said. “What do you think it was?” he asked. “What caused it?”   

“I don’t know,” Tyler said still holding the priest’s hand. “I just know that I’m glad you were there for me, with me, thought all that. That was a bad one.” When Father Danielson gently pressed a little further, Tyler said. “I honestly don’t know, father, it might have had something to do with the 2-for-1 sale at Arby’s. I took advantage of the sale and downed two steakhouse garlic ribeye sandwiches. I heard someone joke one time about gastrointestinal issues, saying, some of the times food fights back. Maybe that was it.”

The Phallic Car Trope: A Comedy

RilalyLeave a comment

Quick. Guy pulls up next to you in a sports car. This beautiful machine is widely regarded as one of the fastest cars on the road, and it’s loud. This car, with its modified muffler, is so loud, you can’t hear anything your wife says in the passenger seat. Quick, what do you think of this Fast and Furious wannabe?

Small penis, right? The guy who selected this automobile to drive around in, and then he modified his muffler to draw extra attention to himself, must have a minuscule member. It’s such an automatic association that it’s almost reflexive now. Guy buys a top of the line sports car, we know it’s all about the hoo hoo. It’s one plus one equals two to us now. It’s the joke we’ve heard and told so often that everyone over the age of 25 knows it when they see that car. In order for a joke to be funny, truly funny, there has to be an element of truth in it, and we all find this joke funny, because we know that knock knock jokes can be kind of funny, but if we want to be hilarious, we have to hit people where they live.

The general premise of the scenario confuses us. Why would a man, average age 29 and above, with, presumably, a full-time job, a wife and kids, and a mortgage to pay plunk down an extra forty to fifty thousand for a method of transportation? Even most irresponsible men, in such financial situations, don’t plunk such money down in cash. They take out a five-year loan with interest or they lease. Regardless, it creates a financial burden on the family that might require little Timmy or Tammy to take out their own loans for college. Why would this man do that to his family? If we know the man, and we know his concerns, it seems so impossible that he would take such an irresponsible risk. We dig for answers, and if we dig deep enough, we arrive at the size of his Gerald (I knew a guy named Gerald, and I didn’t think much of him). We don’t know if it’s true with our friend, but if it is, it’s so sad it’s funny. If his wife drives the final dagger into his humiliation and forces him to return it and pay the penalties for early cancellation of the contract, it’s funny, but is it so funny that it’s hilarious, and if it is hilarious, is it because it’s so sad or so true, or some hybrid of both?

Who cares, it’s funny? Who cares, because men who drive those obnoxiously loud and fast things around are so annoying that we don’t mind it when others take shots at them. We love this joke so much that the minute a comedian starts talking about some ass face in an obnoxiously loud and fast car, we cannot wait until he gets to the joke at the bottom of the barrel involving that guy’s low hanging fruit.

This association gets repeated so often that we now call it a trope, the phallic car trope, and we repeat it with such confidence, that some of us believe it’s 100% true, 100% of the time. We see some guy in a brand new, modified Charger, and we know the size of his Herbie is smaller than what medical science declares average size. Then, when we drop that joke, we do it as if no one’s ever heard it before.

“That thing is an incredible combination of design and engineering!” we say in appreciation of another’s car, not their willy.

“Yeah, you know why he bought it don’t you?” they say with a knowing snicker.

“So, you mean to tell me that if he had a 5.5-to-6 schwanzstucker, at the very least, he might have preferred a more moderately priced sedan?”  

I don’t own one of these obnoxiously loud and fast vehicles, and I’m not here to defend those who do. They annoy me as much as you, and when I hear them drive by my home, jostling my innards, I think that the driver probably has something ridiculous ticking inside. I don’t seethe at them though, like some of you. We all know who you are, and the jokes you tell about his purple-helmet warrior of love running around in your head, with a whole lot of exclamation points to follow. You mean it too, and you mean it mean. I’ve heard you. I know the jokes, and I’ve seen the faces you make when you tell the joke. Me, I don’t think that way, because I knew some gearheads growing up. I called two of them my best friends. They grew up loving everything loud and fast, loud music, fast cars. They started out loving fast bikes, then loud and fast motorbikes, and then cars, and they loved tinkering with them. They spent way too much of their youth modifying, tinkering, and souping them up, to make them louder and faster than anyone else has ever seen or heard, but I can tell you that for them, it wasn’t about the hoo hoo.

One of these gearheads, a kid named Mark, was absolutely crazed at a very young age. Mark raced his whole life, with whatever he could find, because he had what the screenwriter of Days of Thunder called, “A need for speed.” He had little-to-no natural ability. He couldn’t throw, he couldn’t catch, and I used to cream him in foot races. So, I thought he compensated for all that by manipulating the greatest technology his fellow man developed to be faster through mechanical know how. I never looked below his 39th parallel, but other friends informed me that Mark wasn’t compensating for a lack of natural, athletic ability. He was, they said, compensating for his underdeveloped mushroom head. Okay, but he was nine at the time.

He and I snickered at pee pee and wee wee jokes when we were nine, but we loved the well-timed good fart joke, or any joke that contained the words poop or diarrhea in it. You remember that song, “Diarrhea pfft pfft, diarrhea pfft pfft! When you’re running down the gutter, with a piece of bread and butter, diarrhea pfft pfft, diarrhea pfft pfft! When you’re sliding into home, and your pants are full of foam, diarrhea pfft pfft, diarrhea pfft pfft! When your stomach’s feeling wavy, ‘cause it’s making anus gravy diarrhea pfft pfft, diarrhea pfft pfft!” That was one of our favorite songs for far too many years, and if you tell that joke now, to a nine-year-old, their squealing laughter will tell you that some jokes never die. 

The yoinker is little more than a front tail that dispenses waste to a nine-year-old. Pee is funny, but jokes about the length, the girth, or whatever they might see in showers and bathrooms? They’re not there yet. They’re nine, and most nine-year-olds, with monitored viewing habits, don’t even understand how the size of an organ might benefit one over another. They just don’t think that way, not yet. So, you’re telling me that Mark, or any other nine-year-old, would want, or need, to have a faster big wheel, bicycle, or motorized product to compensate for this deficiency? I can almost guarantee this wasn’t a conscious, or subconscious, concern of Mark’s. He was keyed into speed and racing, as opposed to football, Star Wars, or Lego, because he was just wired different. We’re all wired different, and some of that wiring makes so little sense to us that we grow up making jokes to explain it.

I wanted to win when I was nine. I wanted to win in everything I did. I wanted to win at football, basketball, parcheesi, and I wanted to beat other kids in races. Mark, and this is key to understanding the mentality, didn’t just want to beat me in bike races, he needed it. He needed it, like some of us need praise, compliments and laughter when we’re young. It frustrated me when I lost, and I probably cursed a little with my nine-year-old swear words, but like every other normal nine-year-old, I forgot all about it a half minute later. Mark would rage. He raged so often that someone nicknamed him “rage”. He was so obsessed with beating me in a race on our neighborhood street that he started cheating in any way he could dream up. Then he stole a top-of-the-line bike one day, and he beat me from then on. In my anger, I told him that his victories were tainted by the fact that he stole the bike. He didn’t argue, because he didn’t care about particulars. He won, I lost. Turning around to see me struggle to keep up with him was what the French call his joie di vivre. It was the moment he started to really love life. He was smiling so hard he was laughing so hard he was crying. It took me years to understand how essential this need was to his constitution, and he carried that into adulthood, but it had nothing to do with the size of his dingaling.

A group of psychologists from University College London found out that I am wrong. The research tests they performed didn’t involve nine-year-olds, of course, because why would they test anyone in their formative years? No, their research found that men over 29 often prefer sports cars when they believe that their reproductive organs are smaller than the average male’s. The inference of this test is that these men walked into the research study with little-to-no desire for luxury muscle vehicles, until they found out their members were below average in size. See, the research scientists tricked their subjects into thinking the average size of the male kebob was seven inches, as opposed to 5.5. This deception allegedly altered their subjects’ desire to have a fast sports car to compensate for it. The psychologists performed another test where the tricked the subjects by telling them that their personal wealth was lower than the average males, and they performed another test that suggested that their health was inferior comparatively. Nothing, they found, tweaked the subject’s desire to have a fast sports car more than hearing that the size of their Humphrey was below average. It was only one test, and they only tested 200 men, but they believe they validated the phallic car trope.

Ok, we’ll play then. Let’s say the phallic car trope is 100% correct. If that’s the case, then everything else surrounding this notion must be true too, right? If it’s as true as we all think, with no asterisks or exceptions, then the opposite must be true too, right? If a man is of average size, and he knows it, then this man will probably be purchasing moderately priced sedans that bring little-to-no attention to himself, because he doesn’t need to bring attention to himself. He knows that he is average in size, and that leads to average attention from women. That should be axiomatic and one plus one equals two too. He’s already packing average-sized heat, so why would he want, or need, the attention a luxury, muscle car to attract? Then there’s the man, the big one, the Mount Kangchenjunga of men. He is so well-endowed that he apparently knows what The Beatles went through during the height of Beatlemania. If the phallic car trope is so consistent that we can research test it with a group of men so common they prove the trope, then Kangchenjunga will obviously be purchasing … the Smart car. That’s right, the man with a bowhead whale in his pants (or the baleen mysticetus, for those who prefer the Latin derivative), prefers a car that others find so small that they’re almost a joke. He not only doesn’t need to attract attention, he purchases a car that he hopes might finally give him some peace. If the phallic car trope can be proven and disproven then the opposite must be so true that interested parties should be falling all over one another to get with the Smart car driver.    

Men love sports cars. They love the look, the feel, and the feeling of power is so thrilling that some men, big and small, find them intoxicating. This isn’t to say that some men don’t seek some sort of augmentation. I don’t know how representative such notions are to be honest. The only thing I know with absolute certitude is what I’ve witnessed firsthand, and the gearhead friends I knew grew up in families where the car you owned was everything. Even if they know you well enough to know you’re a relatively happy person, from a relatively happy, loving home, if your parents drive a green on green Malibu Classic, they’re going to think that we’re suffering from delusions of adequacy. 

Are such gearhead families doomed to walk the earth with a diminished downstairs department? I was never so bored, or interested, to check. I just knew that while my family was obsessed with football, theirs were obsessed with cars.

Another theory I’ve heard from another group of psychologists is that most of our personality is formed at around six years old. They go so far as to say that if we knew a kid really well in kindergarten and we met that same kid forty-years later, that man would not be remarkably different from the kindergarten kid we knew so well. If that’s the case, what changes around the age of 29? Nothing, something, everything? Is it all about willy winkus? And who cares anyway, it’s funny.

No matter what we say here today to prove, disprove, validate, or refute this phallic car trope, it’s not going to change anything. You’re still going to laugh the next time Mark pulls up next to you in his brand new, sparkly, modified well-oiled machine. You’re going to laugh at him no matter how many ways we analyze it, but is it funny? Yes, yes it is in that sad but true kind of way. We might even go so far as to say it’s hilarious, because knock knock jokes are funny, but if we strive for hilarious, truly hilarious, we have this sick sense that someone’s got to get hurt. And no matter how much pain you figure this guy must have experienced in high school gym locker rooms, you’re still going to laugh at the next guy who pulls up next to you at a stoplight with the idea that he thought he could drop an extra $40-to-$50 grand for a loud, luxury muscle car to rectify it. Lookatme now! What you think ladies? Even if my rod ain’t so hot, look at the hotrod I got beneath me now.