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.