Category: psychology

Know-Nothings vs. Mr. Know-It-Alls

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“You’re such a Mr. Know-it-all,” she said, he said, they all said.

“A know-it-all? Me? Are you serious? I’ll have to check my ledger, but I’m pretty sure I’m about seven I.Q. points away from a know-nothing.”

The first time someone accused me of being a Mr. Know-it-all, I did not know what to do. What defense are we supposed to mount? “Actually, Sandy, when you get to know me, you’ll realize I’m actually quite the dullard.” Prior to that charge, I was pretty sure my plight in life would consist of various insults regarding my lack of intelligence, so Sandy’s charge left me speechless. I thought it was absurdist humor on her part. You know that joke. The jokester holds the tongue-in-cheek preposterousness of their joke in, and they hold, hold, until ultimate seriousness is established, and then they break, “I’m just kidding.” I waited for that break, and not only did it never arrive, she turned to someone else to engage in an entirely different conversation, confident that her point hit home. The idea that she was serious only made the charge seem so absurd, ridiculous, and hilarious.

“She just called me a Mr. Know-it-all,” I whispered to the guy to my right, who knew me better, but he decided not to join in on the laughter.  

We all know a Mr. Know-it-all. They usually wear silk, magenta robes while smoking imported cigars, saying, “You’re just so unsophisticated” and “I don’t agree with you, because I choose to think deeper.” I knew I was not one of those, because I knew to be sophisticated, you had to have “a great deal of worldly experience and knowledge of fashion and culture.” To qualify for Mr. Know-it-all status, I also thought you had to be complicated, and when someone questioned the veracity of your claims, you said things like, “It’s complicated.”

I don’t care how you break down your definition of a Mr. Know-it-all, if you tried to tell my good friends and family that I was one of them, they’d laugh harder than I would, and they wouldn’t have been kind to me in their assessment. In an effort to appear objective, I must admit that if a number of people level such a charge there might be something to it, and I might be substituting an exaggeration of the term Mr. Know-it-all to clear myself of all charges.

***

In his BBC Science Focus Magazine article, titled The Hidden Psychology of ‘Know-It-Alls’: Why They Think They Know Everything, with a You don’t want to do it like that, you want to do it like this subtitle, writer Dean Burnett attempts to tackle the psychology of the Mr. Know-it-all phenomenon from the “Don’t you just hate them” perspective. He also tackles the issue from a “It turns out know-it-alls are always wrong for a variety of psychological reasons” perspective.

He concludes his article with the note: “It could be that to become a know-it-all, you have to know far too little.” It’s a nice, theatrical summary of his thematic “Don’t you just hate know-it-alls” piece, but if you “know far too little” aren’t you a know-nothing?

For those of us who make it a habit of reading articles from the other perspective, as some of us are inclined to do, we think Mr. Burnett loathes people who are right most of the time. We can only guess that he has been corrected, correctly, so often that he was probably pounding his keys when he wrote this article. We can all empathize, because it is annoying when we start in on a heart-felt discussion, only to have someone step in on our story and correct us on some seemingly insignificant fact. When it happens often enough, it can build a level of resentment that leads us to write an article on it.

We could be wrong, and since we’ve never heard of Mr. Burnett prior to this article, we must assume we probably are. Yet, we have to think that Mr. Burnett wouldn’t build such resentment for a know-nothing who is easily checked and always wrong. We have to assume that if Mr. Burnett decided to write an article on this subject after running into a lot of people who know more than he does, and his reservoir of patience for people who call him out dried up long before he sat behind a computer.

I write this as a former know-nothing who supposedly became a “Mr. Know-It-All” to some, but I learned. I learned to avoid the bullet points of a Mr. Know-it-all, because I learned that everyone loathes a Mr. Know-it-all.

If I were commissioned to write an article on know-it-alls, I would avoid Mr. Burnett’s populist, “Don’t you just hate them” clapter angle and try to focus on the gestation cycle of the know-it-all, as I know it.

Who are the know-it-alls that we’ve all come to loathe, and how did they come into being? My guess is they followed a path similar to mine. For all of the conscious and subconscious reasons listed in Mr. Burnett’s article, the know-it-alls I know are uncomfortable, insecure types who seek to prove their newfound knowledge. We, like presumably Mr. Burnett, grew tired of them correcting us, and when we did our research to call these people out on their corrections, we found out that … we were wrong. It is so embarrassing that it can prove humbling to the point of that thin line that separates humble from humiliating, and we never wanted it to happen again, so we went out and gathered ourselves some information.  

We sought information outlets, and we found good, great, and no-so-great outlets. We gobbled up all that information up like the nutrient-deprived individuals we were. Were we right, no, but we were learning, and the learning proved intoxicating. Did we lord this newfound information over others? We might have, but it wasn’t about that for us. We wanted to prove ourselves to ourselves that we were no longer dim-wit bulbs. We were never those gifted intellects who have known nothing but certitude and confidence in our intellectual abilities. Those types rarely need to prove themselves in these arenas. We did, because we just got sick of being run over. 

We learned everything from the “important” to the silly and inconsequential to try to avoid being called a know-nothing ever again. We wanted answers to the five Ws on the ways in which the world worked. Our motivations were not altruistic of course, as we wanted to prove ourselves, but when we saw our friends wrestle with their own know-nothing stigmas, we thought we might be able to help them out. We were eager to share all of the information we were gleaning. 

“[Know-it-alls are] individuals who will enthusiastically lecture you about any topic or area,” Mr. Burnett writes, “despite blatantly having little to no expertise in what they’re talking about. And often, even though you do.”

We’ve all been in those conversations with a group of let’s say four-to-five people, and we’ve heard them drop all the typical platitudes and takes. We stand in the middle of all that, politely listening and waiting for people to finish. “Hey, have you ever heard this [different perspective on a topic we all thought we knew so well]?” we ask when they are done. 

“Okay, Mr. Know-it-all,” they say with exasperated fatigue.  

“No, I’m not saying you’re right or wrong,” we say. “I just thought you may have never heard that perspective before.” The other perspective is the cookie they were supposed to chew on, and they’re supposed to say, I don’t think that’s right, but what an interesting perspective. Let me chew on that for a bit. 

We love it when others open up other avenues of thought, and sometimes we make the mistake of thinking others love it as much as we do. We think it might ignite another thought process in their head and stimulate further conversation. It doesn’t, because those who loathe Mr. Know-it-alls loathe different perspectives, because it challenges their worldview. Mr. Know-it-alls learned the hard way that some of the times it’s just easier to go along to get along.

Mr. Burnett argues that Mr. Know-it-alls base their assumption of superior knowledge of a subject on a psychological quirk we call the ‘naïve realism’ phenomenon, “[Naïve realism] describes how people instinctively assume that their perception of the world reflects objective reality. In actuality, everything we perceive and ‘know’ about the world has been filtered through a complex mesh of cognitive biases, sensory shortcuts, shifting emotion-infused memories, and more.”

This is undoubtedly true, but isn’t that what we call a quality conversation? If you bring your subjective insight into a conversation, and I bring mine, it might be possible for the two of us to arrive at an interesting conclusion that leaves us both stimulated and satisfied. Even if we don’t, different perspectives can result in different perspectives that might act as a linchpin for greater insight. It might also lead to an interesting conversation. No? I’m the Mr. Know-it-all here? 

If you’ve ever reached a point where you thought you knew-it-all, you encountered another know-it-all who may have been a know-nothing, but they dropped that one, tiny little “What was that again?” nugget on you that shifted your perspective on the matter just enough to make you think they were not such a know-nothing after all. I love that. I love when someone manages to disprove all of my preconceived notions about them.

As an alleged Mr. Know-it-all, I appreciate my species in one respect. When I meet a different genus of my species, I see it as my intellectual duty to defeat their thesis to bolster mine, and in the process, I gain greater understanding of my philosophy on an issue.

Some of you might read this and think, I’m not a Mr. Know-it-all, or a know-nothing. I follow a fundamental understanding of the way the world works, I just don’t lord it over my friends, family, or co-workers. I’m just Larry.

“Ok, Larry,” we say almost instinctively dismissing the ‘D) none of the aboves’ who strive to achieve the hallowed nothingness status to avoid the ridicule of believing in something. Larry strives to avoid being a know-it-all, and it’s pretty obvious that he’s not a know-nothing, but as we watch him drive away, we realize he’s probably a Mr. Bumper-sticker-guy. Mr. Bumper-sticker-guy covers every inch of his bumper with stickers, because he has no outlet. He doesn’t correct anyone, because he fears someone perceiving him as a know-it-all, but it eats at him in a way that could lead some to believe that he might be a know-nothing, so he wears T-shirts that say important stuff, and he informs those driving behind him that he is kind of a big deal. I’ve learned to avoid Mr. Bumper-sticker-guy more than Mr. Know-it-all, because Mr. Bumper-sticker-guy often walks into a conversation packaged in a pressurized swimsuit.  

On those rare occasions when a Larry cannot maintain his silence, we see him transform from mild-mannered Larry into Qualifier Man. Qualifier Man’s powers are cased in efforts to appeal to everyone all of the time. He can’t talk about the temperature of the water in the cooler at work without prefacing his comments with at least three qualifiers. His qualifiers please us, because he’ll openly admit that he doesn’t know enough to know what he’s talking about, but after about three or four displays of his prowess, his qualifiers become tedious. “Just say it!” we mentally scream at him. By the time Qualifier Man finally begins his “it’s just my opinion and feel free to disagree” characterization of the temperature of the water, he’s too late. We’ve already summarily dismissed his opinion in the manner his qualifiers require.

Larry makes sure that we know that he knows that others’ opinions differ from his, and he concludes that buildup by offering up a milquetoast opinion that tries to appeal to all of the people all of the time. “Just put your stuff on the line,” we mentally scream when he’s done, and while we’re all thinking that, his advocates, his opponents, and probably even a Mr. Dean Burnett dismiss him. The important note here is that we do not seek to dismiss Larry, but it’s a natural reaction to his “I could be right, or I could be wrong,” and “I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with what you’re saying,” qualifiers that take so long that we don’t like him or dislike him. We dismiss him. Say what you want about all of the Mr. Know-it-alls, but you respect them for taking a stand, believing what they believe, and being unafraid to say it amid the “Don’t you just hate them?” crowd. When you’re debating how Latin American grain prices affect American farmers, is Larry your go-to-fella? No, you go to that blowhard, Mr. Know-it-all, because you almost accidentally respect his opinions more, even when you disagree with them. 

“If you’re going to be wrong,” my 8th grade teacher taught me, “be wrong with conviction!” She said that after I wrote an assigned opinion piece in which I carefully considered all opinions all of the time in that paper. Mr. Burnett alludes to the idea that a Mr. Know-it-all strives for respect, and we can see that, but respect is a nebulous result. In a world of Dean Burnetts, hating those who correct him, I would suggest that the art of gaining respect has less to do with being correct (though a lengthy track record of being wrong will lead to a Mr. Hot-Air characterization) and far more to do with a confident presentation, or “going after it with gusto” than being a pleasant, nice Qualifier Man, who fears being a Mr. Know-it-all, ever will.

Getting the “REACTION!”

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Why did I wiggle and shake the book rack of my fellow high school student in front of me, because it was annoying. I didn’t just want to be annoying I didn’t just want to annoy them either, I wanted to hit something deep in their psyche to find that deposit of anger they had buried for so long that it gushed out of them like a pressurized oil deposit being struck for the first time. There was something wrong with me back then, but here’s the concerning thing, I still consider those shimmy shakes hilarious. Except my enjoyment now comes from the idea that most people think I should feel bad, apologetic, or some level of guilt for doing all that. I don’t. I still think it’s hilarious.

*** 

“I need to pay attention in this class, I need the grade,” Willie said when I ignored his initial, very polite pleas to stop shaking his book rack. “I’m trying to get into Georgetown.” He was trying to get into Georgetown by paying attention, and presumably getting an ‘A’ in an elective class that Georgetown probably would’ve dismissed either way. Yet, he did it. He got into that prestigious school with a full-ride scholarship. He did it by paying attention to the little details that I didn’t, and he probably went on to lead a prosperous, happy life, but I got the giggles watching the otherwise placid expression he wore on his face 24-7 turn from pleas, to frustration, and then anger. My peers were shocked. Not only had they never heard Willie speak, they didn’t even know who he was. When they found out who he was, and that I drove him so crazy that he eventually started screaming at me, they were astounded. It was my biggest accomplishment in life at that point, and I considered it on par with his full ride to Georgetown. 

*** 

“You might want to stop doing that to Max,” a kid named Joe warned me in a different year. “I know him, and he’s nuts. I’m not talking a little off. I’m saying, I went over to his house a couple months ago, and he had what looked like a science exhibit in his room. He had this cord laid out on his bedroom floor, a cord that he cut open on one of those little, oscillating fans in his bedroom, and he pinned that cord back to expose the wires within, and then he plugged it in. ‘What is that?’ I asked him. “My sister keeps coming in my room when I’m not here,” he said. “I want to give her the shock of her life.” That’s what he said, the shock of her life.”

“That’s funny,” I said, “but what does it mean to me?”

“Well, I find it hilarious when you wiggle his chair,” Joe said, “but you might want to be careful doing it to him, because if he’s going to do that to his own sister, what is he going to do to you?”

In my twisted sense of reality, I considered this a challenge to continue, until I saw how much Joe enjoyed it. “Do it again!” Joe whispered between giggles. That whisper ruined the whole aesthetic value this act had for me. I didn’t do it to entertain others, as your garden variety bully might. I did this for my own personal amusement. 

In my non-scientific studies to understand the fragility of the human psyche, my subjects pleaded with me to stop. When that didn’t work, they would resort to some display of frustration that would often evolve to uncontrollable rage. “Stop wiggling my chair!” one fella shouted loud enough for the teacher to hear. After the teacher admonished me, I stopped … for the day. The next day, I was at it again with a vengeance. Another guy tried punching me in the chest. I laughed, but I stopped … for the day. The next day he shouted, “You might be the most annoying person I’ve ever met,” between clenched teeth, and I stopped wiggling his chair or anyone else’s for that matter. His level of rage was one I’ve never seen without a physical followup. We both stared at each other in silence, waiting for a progression, and when it didn’t happen, we went on with our day. Seeing that level of rage gave me an unusual feeling of satisfaction, coupled with this idea that he basically handed me a crown of being the best/worst there ever was at something satisfied a number of needs I never considered before.

Every subject is one great teacher away from being interesting

As I scour my brain to understand who I was, and why I did all that, the best answer I can come up with is that I considered it an antidote to boredom. The structured learning they employ in school wasn’t just boring to me, it was a violation of my constitution. We were all bored in school, of course, but my boredom went beyond an itch to do something, anything else to something that bordered on a hostile rebellion. I considered forcing me, a bubbling cauldron of energy and testosterone, to sit and learn for eight hours a day a violation of nature. It’s okay to do that on a blah day, when you’re not feeling it, but there are days when we’re just on. When you’re having one of those glorious days, it almost feels like a waste to spend them sitting in a classroom, listening to a lecture from a teacher who doesn’t want to be there any more than we did. 

I considered school a prison of the mind that I needed to escape, even if just for a moment. I didn’t have an alternative, of course, but I didn’t want to do that. The prison guards held my aimless aspirations in check with attendance records, “Fail to attend and there will be consequences!” I attended class, but one revelation led to another. The first revelation I had was that I was a poor student, but that didn’t move anything, as my grades proved that. The earth-shattering revelation that changed everything for me occurred when someone said, “Did you ever consider the idea that we just didn’t have quality teachers!” This didn’t nullify the idea that I was a poor student, because I could’ve and should’ve found a way to overcome that, but it did relieve me of some of the guilt and embarrassment I felt for getting such poor grades in school. It wasn’t all my fault, in other words, that I was so bored, easily distracted, and anxious that I ended up wiggling the bookracks in front of me.    

I know we’re supposed to praise teachers for the sacrifices they make to teach young minds how to be well-informed, responsible adults, but most teachers, like most people, lack the energy, passion, and charisma necessary to reach students. School administrators know this, of course, so they try to make their teacher’s job easier by providing them a lesson plan and a structure for their lectures. Even with that, most of them cannot avoid speaking in monotone. Most teachers, like most people, also cannot take a step outside the box to provide a brief, interesting vignette from their lives, or the stories they’ve heard, to prove a point or make a lesson plan more interesting. 

I feel for teachers in one respect, I cannot imagine teaching the exact same thing over the course of five to thirty years. I also understand now that part of their job is to teach to the slowest learners in the class. If I was fresh out of college, and someone hired me to teach something as boring as Economics or Anthropology, I have to imagine that I would struggle to come up with an interesting presentation. I would also find it difficult to muster up some passion for the topic. If I did it, it might take me a year or two to develop a level of confidence that could lead to a passionate presentation of the facts. If I were able to accomplish all that, and I understand that’s a big if, I have to imagine that my passion would begin to wane by about year five or six. “You’ve been teaching the same subject for thirty-five years? Congratulations, and I feel sorry for your students.” 

The Glorious Mr. Schenk

When Mr. Schenk entered the classroom, he did not excite that passion. He was not a person who anyone would confuse with an imposing character. He was short, soft-spoken, and mousy. He wore stereotypical school teacher sweaters, and he wasn’t one to look people in the eye. Mr. Schenk was also not a passionate, charismatic speaker, but the difference between Mr. Schenk and all of the other teachers we had prior to Mr. Schenk, was he knew it. He appeared to know that he couldn’t keep students awake during lectures, so he decided to forego the traditional lecture format. 

“Just write!” he said that first day. “Write, write, write!” Just write became his mantra throughout the semester, and just write we did. Anytime we hit a brick wall, he instructed us to “Write your way through it. I’ll correct it, then we’ll correct, and you’ll learn from it.” I can’t remember how many different pieces we wrote, but there were a plethora of them. Mr. Schenk’s modus operandi was that you can’t teach writing. It’s just what you do. It involves something we call kinesthetic learning, or doing it so often that you learn. 

“You should learn how to spell, how to conjugate a verb properly, and you should know the fundamental rules of grammar,” Mr. Schenk said on day one, “but that’s something for other teachers in other classes. For us, it will be about learning everything you can outside this classroom, learning from our mistakes, and learning from others. We’ll spend a majority of our classes dissecting and critiquing what we’ve all written in the prior week.” 

Creative writing was not a subject I found particularly thrilling when I walked into Mr. Schenk’s class, but I might’ve tried to run through walls for him at the end, without questioning why we consider this such a great analogy for loyalty. Mr. Schenk encouraged us to seek out alternative sources for knowledge on the subjects we would cover. He provided a list of suggestions, but “These are just suggestions. As you work your way through our ‘just write’ format, I think you’ll find that the more alternative, the better. We’re seeking creativity here.”

I excelled in that class. The method of seeking alternative sources for knowledge fit into my wheelhouse. I learned more from those dynamics than I did any other class I ever took. Mr. Schenk’s class is one of the primary reasons I’m writing this article today. Mr. Schenk assigned one paper exclusively focused on storytelling, another on style, and one specifically devoted to pace. There were so many more themes that I can’t remember most of them, but Mr. Schenk encouraged us to seek outside sources to understand these disciplines better. The day after would involve a “What did we learn from our studies?” intro. “Drop the hads!” one student who had understood the assignment would say. “No more you-yous,” you might add, and “You must try to avoid using the word that too often,” and that student would continue to try to avoid that which avoided referring to that too often.  

I wanted Mr. Schenk’s undisciplined, chaotic style of teaching to succeed so much that I chose to succeed within it. I understand that this teacher was a community college teacher, teaching an elective, but I wanted him to trumpet this idea that one of the laziest, most ADHD students who ever sat behind a desk actually excelled in his idea of a lesson plan. I wanted him to spread the word among his colleagues that this might be the key to unlocking the minds of poor students and prevent them from being so bored that they distracted their fellow students by wiggling their book racks.

It probably wouldn’t work, seeing as how lazy and undisciplined young people are, myself included of course, but I thought his teaching style of offering a subject and then allowing the students to learn it on their own, from alternative sources, could succeed in the internet world of charismatic influencers on YouTube. Teachers have some performance reviews, especially in college, but how many teachers are actually fired based on the idea that their lectures are boring and tedious? In the capitalistic struggle for hits and subscriptions, a YouTube influencer needs to find unique ways to maintain an audience, and their struggle involves spending money on graphics and clips that make their presentations interesting and fun. The teacher could say, “This week’s assignment is King Henry VII, go learn everything you can about him, and we’ll discuss it next Tuesday.”  

It’s too late for me now, of course, but this idea goes out to poor students who think different. We all know how individualistic the human brain is. I’m not informed on the science behind it, but for some reason we all learn in different ways. Some are audio learners, visual, and kinesthetic. Minds like mine will never succeed under the current format, but I don’t write that to suggest that I was a misunderstood genius or a prodigy. I may have been such an anxious kid with so much nervous energy that I may not have succeeded regardless the format, but I had teachers who hit me where I lived. Mr. Schenk, Mr. Reardon, and that one woman who interpreted and defined Hamlet for me. So, some teachers woke me up, and they reached me on a level that should’ve defined for me sooner that I wasn’t the horrible student I thought I was. Were they more energetic, I don’t consider that debatable. Were they more passionate and informed, again, not debatable, but they reached me on a level that I still remember with a large asterisk in my life.

To escape what I considered the life-draining minutes of structured learning, I wiggled and shook the book racks of the students in front of me to get some kind of “REACTION!” from them. That was really what it was all about for me, the reaction. The more frustrated and angrier, the better. I thought it was funny most of the times, but I did it so often that it began to lose its edge. I continued to do it, because that’s just the type of (fill in the blank with your favorite invective) I was, am, and forever will be. The difference between then and now is that I’ve learned how to channel all that nervous energy.  

Those Funny, Funny Faces of Death

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Do you crave a story so side-splitting, funny and unbelievably wild that it doesn’t matter if it’s true? We all do. We’ve all been there, laughing hysterically until someone chimes in with, “That story you’ve been telling,” they whisper to us in confidence. “Yeah, it’s been thoroughly debunked.” We all probably know at least one debunker. They might spare us the embarrassment of debunking us in public, but that doesn’t change the fact that they love debunking us. They study our face and smile at us with compassion that borders on condescending glee. I don’t know if it’s jealousy, but they obviously cannot stand the laughter we receive telling a side-splitting tale that is so wild and funny that it almost doesn’t matter if it’s true. Yet, the storyteller and the debunker both know that it does matter in the sense that the difference between true and it kind of doesn’t matter if it’s true is the difference between hilarious and “It’s still funny, regardless,” and the debunker enjoys dragging our side-splitting story into the latter category.

It’s our fault, we should fact check these stories to see if they’re true, but when a storyteller gets ahold of a great, side-splitting story, we get all jacked up, and we can’t wait to share them. It’s in our blood, and it’s such a part of our identity that we end up laughing harder than anyone else, because it appeals to our storytelling nature.

Most of these stories, just to be clear, are so dumb and inconsequential that we don’t really care if they’re true, and they’re so funny that a part of us doesn’t want to check, because we hope that they’re true. That’s when the “truth trolls” come marching in to destroy our story’s comedic value. Why do they do it, they probably don’t even know the finer, psychological motivations behind it. It’s just something they’ve done for so long that it’s just kind of what they do.

Fact-checkers love to tell us that these fun stories just happen to be false, debunked, or an urban legend. If this is you, you might just want to consider moving along, because we find you exhausting. About three beats after we unleash our side-splitting yarns, their faces get hued by smartphones. “Umm, not true,” they say when they manage to become unhued, “according to (fill in the blank.com) that story has been debunked as an urban legend.” To put an exclamation point on their attempts to suck the fun out of our story, they show us their phone.

Some of us enjoy hearing, and reading, a great story almost as much as we enjoy telling them and writing them, and it’s not a gift given at birth. It’s a methodical process fraught with failure, but those who love it, learn it, and learn to love it. It’s not something that we learn so well that we never make mistakes either. It’s an ongoing process. As much as we storytellers enjoy that process, fact-checkers enjoy their end of it almost as much, as they’ve found it to be an excellent way to discredit, delegitimize, and unfunny, storytellers they just don’t like.

“I just get so tired of their BS,” they add after sucking the smiles off everyone’s face. 

Feature Story #1

A zoo keeper grows concerned with how constipated his beloved elephant is. He and his fellow zoo keepers, management, and the zoo community try everything to provide her some relief. In total desperation, the man learns of an effective, all-natural cure of herbs and oils. He places it on a wire brush and inserts it, and it works. It works so well that the elephant unloads on the zoo keeper. The zoo keeper is hit by the violent discharge so perfectly that it knocks him down, and he hits his head so hard that he unfortunately experiences a temporary and fatal moment of unconsciousness, as two hundred pounds of dung suffocates him.

What we’re talking about here are silly, inconsequential stories that we share in employee cafeteria. We’re talking about those stupid stories that no one will remember thirty seconds after they’re told. We’re talking about telling stories that might cause some to smile, others laugh, and still others to roll around with hysterical laughter, and the minute the truth trollers pull out their phones, everyone groans. The truth trolls cannot abide by all that laughter. They need to thoroughly vet a story before they can even smile, and they won’t even smile if they happen to find out it’s actually true. “Well, it turns out that one is true,” they say with same look they have when eating a sandwich. If they find out one of your stories doesn’t pass the test, they have a smug, “I’m just calling you out on your BS!” look on their face. That appears to be the only source of satisfaction they gain from their otherwise joyless existence. 

Feature Story #2

A man in Oklahoma, enters the highway, and after a couple of miles, he clicks his Recreation Vehicle (RV) into cruise control. Nothing different than anything any of us have done over a hundred times. Except, this driver, allegedly unaware of the full functionality of the cruise control feature on his RV, walks into the kitchen area of his RV to make himself a sandwich. We have to imagine that the man didn’t have enough time to get the meat between the slices of bread when all hell broke loose, as the RV drove off the road and into the ditch. Some versions of this story suggest that the man died as a result of the ensuing accident. Others claim that he not only survived, but he won a settlement with the manufacturer $1,750,000 and a new RV, because the manufacturer did not specifically document for him the full functionality of the RV’s cruise control. This story isn’t half as funny as it once was, based on the current technology that allows some cars self-driving functionality, but back when I first heard this tale, it seemed impossibly hilarious that a grown man (or woman, depending on the version of the story) could think that they could make a sandwich (or cup of coffee) in the back while the car was in cruise control. 

Some great stories combine fiction and non in a manner we call creative non-fiction. I remember mentally toying around with the concept of the total capacity of cruise control, soon after I bought a car that had a working one. I thought the possibilities of a fella over-estimating its capacity could be funny, and I’ll be damned if someone didn’t consider the same plotline, either fictionally or in non-fiction. Is this story 100% true, tough to know 100%, but does it have enough truth in it to be funny? At some point, I think we should all hit that “off” switch in our cranium that analyzes, deconstructs, and refutes such stories. Just laugh or don’t laugh, but they can’t. They love pretending that they’re a reporter, and that they’re taking a story, or its storyteller, down. 

Feature Story #3

Elvis Painting in Cheese

Elvis Presley had a soft spot for cheese. His favorite sandwich, according to sources, was the grilled cheese sandwich. Elvis was from the deep south, and the home he grew up in an environment that was anything but rich. After achieving a level of fame and fortune those who were never a Beatle or the primary singer on the album Thriller would never understand, he probably enjoyed the finest delicacies in the world, but he couldn’t kick his love for the grilled cheese sandwich. Elvis ingested so many drugs, and so many different kinds of drugs, that we cannot dismiss them as a contributor to his eventual demise, but what does cheese do? It stops us up, and among the numerous other things Elvis poured into his body was a truckload of cheese. As Dan Warlick, chief investigator for the Tennessee Office of the State Chief Medical Examiner, stated, Elvis’s death was brought on by something called the Valsalva’s maneuver. “Put simply, the strain of attempting to defecate compressed the singer’s abdominal aorta, shutting down his heart.” The coroners found that Elvis had “Compacted stool that was four months old sitting in his bowels.”

Did cheese take The King down? These stories are snowball stories. As they roll from one storyteller to another they gather facts, details, jokes, and out and out fabrications, until they arrive at some finished form of funny. I don’t want to know most of the time, because most of these stories are so dumb that I honestly don’t care, and the primary reason I’m writing this article is that I don’t understand why those with a dreaded and incurable hued nose disease do.  

I just want to laugh, but I’ve been fact-checked me so often that I now wonder if what I’m being told is 100% true. I want to laugh, but more than that, when I hear a great story, I want to repeat that story so often that it becomes mine. If it’s going to be mine now, I have this newfound urge to fact-check it, so I don’t get fact-checked, and I so want to go back to “Who cares, as long as it’s funny!” mindset.

“The idea that you loathe fact-checkers so much only makes them seem a little more legitimate to me,” third parties say when we complain about truth trolls checking our stories.

I don’t know if it has anything to do with the fact that I’m Irish, but there are few things I enjoy more than sitting in a circle of friends, all with beer in hand, telling a story that has but one agenda, to make them laugh. “There’s no way that’s true,” they say between laughs, and I have no problem with that because I know that for most people that line gives them license to be free from naiveté, and it also frees them to laugh harder. We all know that that story is so sensational that it can’t be true, but we don’t care in that small space in time where all we can do is laugh about it. “That guy is so full of crap, it’s not even funny,” we might say to a third party after the storyteller leaves the room, but the next time he enters, we’ll be all over it when he tells us he has another story to tell. 

Truth trolls won’t go through any of this with us. They might want to, but they can’t. They have some odd belief, probably born of some childhood experience that left them vulnerable to the charge of naiveté, that if they believe that, they’ll believe anything. They believe that if they believe our silly, stupid story, their credibility is on the line. Their noses contract a blue hue, and they come out, “Not true!” Now I will grant you that if a story is 100% true, it might slide it a little higher on the funny scale, but by how much? Does it lift such a story from funny to knee-slapping hilarious? If we add, “It’s true, all the fact-checkers checked it and sourced it out, and they found that it’s 100% factual.” How much does that truly add to the entertainment value? If you’re a hue-faced truth troller who has neck problems, because your head is permanently fixed in the 45-degree position, will you go back to 90-degrees with an “It’s true” and laugh? No, and you might even be a little disappointed by your findings, right? Yeah, I’m looking at you. 

Feature Story #4

A raging alcoholic was informed by his doctor that he had a form of throat cancer that would end his life quickly if he chose to continue to drink alcohol. The alcoholic peppered the doctor with questions, “Cut back, wean myself off of it over time?” 

“I don’t think you understand the severity of this,” the doctor said going over the biopsy and the image test results with the alcoholic. “This is what we call stage four cancer, and if you quit now, cold turkey, you have a chance, about a 39.1 percent chance to live five years. Keep drinking, even a little amount, and you’re likely dead in months.”

This scared the alcoholic. He did not want to die, but he couldn’t imagine going weeks and months without a small swig of alcohol here and there. In some respects, it was psychological torture to him to see everyone around him drink so casually, and have so much fun, but he kept coming back to the idea that he didn’t want to die.

It hurt to drink alcohol too, and that was really one of saddest things in this alcoholic’s life. It was the only reason he went to see that doctor. Once the doctor took alcohol away from him, he realized that he never learned how to live. He didn’t have any hobbies, friends, and he didn’t know how to fix things. He had family, but they distanced themselves from him a long time ago. He was a man who worked his tail off and came home to drink alcohol with his beloved wife while the two of them watched TV together, and he couldn’t even enjoy that. In short order, this man became depressed and desperate to live the only life he knew. He did some research on his computer and discovered something called butt-chugging, or boofing.

“We’ll be using this device,” he informed his wife, “to deliver alcohol to my system by enema. It won’t touch my throat and exacerbate my condition.” His wife was hesitant, but the alcoholic broke her down. “What most people don’t know is we all have enzymes in our stomach and liver that break alcohol down and dilute it. Regular butt-chuggers say that it stings a little, initially, but after a while some say that they start to enjoy the sensation. They even have a term for those people. They’re called klismaphiliacs. Due to the fact that you’re essentially bypassing all of the biological protections our body has in place by going the enema route, they say there’s no hangovers and no puking involved.”  

Some dispute whether or not the wife obliged the alcoholic, but she was charged with negligent homicide for delivering what turned out to be a lethal and fatal dose of two 1.5-liter bottles of sherry into her husband’s system. In her defense, the wife claimed innocence by declaring that he did it himself. “He did it all the time,” she pled. “He was always giving himself enemas. Coffee enemas, alcohol enemas, and even soap enemas. He even had enema recipes.” The case against the wife was dropped due to insufficient evidence. 

One of the primary lessons this alcoholic-turned-butt-chugger didn’t consider is that puking, while uncomfortable, disgusting, and painful, it serves a biological purpose as important as coughing, sneezing, and bumps on our arms. It is the body attempting to push what it cannot dilute, absorb, or handle out. While we’re puking, it’s difficult to consider that this is probably our body protecting us from the damage of what we do to it, and that it’s actually a good thing that our body knows how to protect us from the debilitating and at times, fatal things we do it.    

I am not a regular patron of the sites and shows that feast on the misfortunes of others in this manner, but I used to occasionally enjoy an episode of Thousand Ways to Die, and The Darwin Awards email lists we used to pass around the office. Their entertainment value, while short and limited, can produce a guilty smile or a laugh behind a hand. There’s really no sense in trying to deny that we love stories involving the misfortune of others, “You mean he died?” we say with an oh-my-gosh face on, and we experience a hybrid of laughter and horror. It’s a part of us.

In researching some of the new ‘believe it or not’ sites for this article, I found some new sites I never heard of that preyed on our misfortunate few, and they had “100 percent true” stamps all over them, as if that’s the primary purpose of their existence. The administrators, and authors, of the stories on these sites are careful to properly source each story with links, footnotes, and various other forms of attributions to perpetuate this idea that they’ve learned from those past publications we all enjoyed that focused on sensational stories that had little-to-no foundation of truth in them. Thus, we can gather that the older sites and publications probably got fact-checked to irrelevance, which, in essence, opened up a niche for these new guys to prosper, but the problem is their stories, while guaranteed and certified to be 100% true, are actually kind of blah and mundane. Their stories amount to, “There was this one guy, from some town in a state who made an unwise decision,” and we un huh them with some excitement as we read on, “and well, no one was hurt or anything, and no one died, but wasn’t that a foolish decision?” Well, yeah, it was, but I was kind of looking for some entertainment here. These sites learned from the past, and they decided to forego the sensational for the factual. As much as it pains me to see this need to have certified 100% guarantees, I understand it’s now the price of doing business in this arena, because in this incarnation of the Information Age, everyone has a phone, and everyone has a site to help them bunk, debunk, or take the bunk out of things, and in this case, it’s better to give than receive, because it can be embarrassing and even a little intimidating at times when fact-checkers discredit, delegitimize, and unfunny every stupid, silly, and inconsequential story we tell, but that’s just what they do, they’re fact-checkers.