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 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.