Road Apples
Sept. 29, 2008

More about Brevity being the Soul of Wit

By Tim Sanders

Again, the age-old question of what is and what is not humorous rears its ugly head. Sometimes news articles appear which strike us as funny, but when we attempt to make humorous commentary, we find that all the humor was in the story itself. As in the following article dated September 23, 2008:


"SOUTH CHARLESTON, W. Va. (WSAZ) – As if getting a DUI wasn’t enough, a man arrested for driving under the influence got in a lot more trouble at the police station.

Police stopped Jose Cruz on Route 60 in South Charleston Monday night for driving with his headlights off.

Then he failed sobriety tests and was arrested.

When police were trying to get fingerprints, police say Cruz moved closer to the officer and passed gas on him. The investigating officer remarked in the criminal complaint that the odor was very strong.
Cruz is now charged with battery on a police officer, as well as DUI and obstruction."


Now granted, we–by which I mean humorists in general, not necessarily only me and my tapeworms–could have made a few comments about the various and sundry humorous characteristics of the human poot. We could have, but such information would have been superfluous. The simple news release was sufficient. The only thing we can add is that we admire policemen wherever they are, and sympathize with them when the job of protecting the public puts them in ... well, in the line of fire, so to speak.

We also admire people like Ben and Jerry, the ice cream guys. Oh, okay, so we don’t necessarily admire them, but we did sympathize with them when they recently got a letter from PETA representative Tracy Reiman. According to a September 23 press release on PETA’s own Media Center website, Ms. Reiman’s letter urged Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Cofounders of Ben and Jerry’s Homemade, Inc., to stop using cows’ milk in their ice cream and switch instead to human breast milk.

We read the letter, and then reread it to make sure we hadn’t hallucinated the first time. But no, it was as good as anything the PETA organization has ever put out. It was as powerful as their support of voting rights for rhesus monkeys, as effective as their assertion that consuming buffalo wings was devastating America’s bison herds, as profoundly meaningful as their naked protests against the practice of torturing earthworms for fishing purposes, and every bit as deeply symbolic as their condemnation of Colonel Harlan Sanders for war crimes against chickens. When humorists want good, dependable, knee-slapping material, PETA always comes through.

But again, like the story about the West Virginia cop and the inebriated pooter, there was really no need for additional commentary. Oh sure, a trained humorist could have gone into some detail about just what kind of dairy farms would be necessary for wholesale production of human breast milk, what sort of milking machines would be used, and how expensive a quart of Breast Milk Cherry Garcia would be, but the humor was already there and any additional comments would have seemed silly. PETA folks aren’t what you’d call really big into details, anyway.

So we won’t even attempt to comment on the story passed on to us by Post Editor Scott Wright about the Lentini family in Newton, New Jersey who, through the efforts of several middle school boys, a teacher, and local farmers, have installed a fine, state-of-the-art giant pumpkin catapult on their farm. This article led us to find that not only are pumpkin catapults nothing new, but in fact each fall the World Championship Punkin’ Chunkin’ Championship is held in Sussex County, Delaware. There are several categories and subcategories of pumpkin chunking machines, including "air," "centrifugal," "trebuchet," "human powered," and "tortion," and these are separated into adult and youth divisions. We were unsure as to just what these subtle distinctions meant, but we did learn that in 2005 the World Champion Adult Catapult "Fibonacci Unlimited II" propelled a pumpkin 2,862.28 feet, and that record still stands.

There’s really nothing a humorist can add to that information. Catapults have been around since the Middle Ages, when Viking raiders gathered outside huge medieval castles and catapulted really large, rotting pumpkins over the walls until the inhabitants responded by hurling vegetables back at their tormentors. Some hurled cauliflowers, some hurled parsnips, and some, who couldn’t afford vegetables, just hurled. Many Europeans perished from salmonella poisoning during the Great Viking Pumpkin Sieges of the 10th Century. The fact that the United States is now building up her pumpkin catapult arsenal to protect us from the Iranians and the Chinese is encouraging, but certainly not humorous.

So since there was nothing I could add to those news stories, I had decided instead to write about the growing snoring problem in the U.S., and cover the many anti-snoring devices on the market today. I’d planned to include a) Christian Goodman’s patented Stop Snoring Exercise Program, b) the Snore Mate mouthpiece which gently holds the lower jaw out a little further, giving the sleeper a creepy kind of Eddy Arnoldish underbite, c) the Anti-Snoring Inflatable Jacket, which uses strategically placed balloons to keep the sleeper from rolling onto his back, and of course d) the Snore-Shock Electrode System. I personally prefer those Breathe Right strips, which help the snorer breathe by spreading his nostrils wide open while he sleeps. My wife suggested I try the strips for a week, and I can honestly say that my snoring has improved dramatically. I may still snore, but according to my wife I’ve increased my musical range by at least two octaves. I don’t like to brag, but she claims that instead of lying in bed next to a bass fiddle with a few broken strings, she’s now lying next to an entire symphony orchestra.

I would gladly continue with the anti-snoring column, which believe me would have been both humorous and informative, but I’d promised several readers with pistol permits that I’d limit this week’s column to 1,000 words, and I’m already over my limit.