by Dave Barry
The TV cartoon shows aimed at little boys don’t help, either. They’re infested with characters who have biceps the size of prize-winning hogs and names like Commander Brock Gonad and His Hard Punchers of Justice. In an effort to please government regulatory agencies and child-psychology experts, these shows pretend to involve uplifting themes such as racial tolerance, ecological awareness, and nonviolence, but in fact they almost always involve macho behavior:
COMMANDER GONAD: Uh-oh, Sarge, looks like we have company!
SERGEANT STEROID: It’s Anthrax, the evil villain from the planet Polluto! With no concern whatsoever for the environment! And it looks like he has …
ANTHRAX (in evil voice): That’s right, you fools! I have the Giant Atomic Fluorocarbon-Emitting Hairspray Container of Doom, and I am going to spritz the entire Earth and destroy every living thing on it!
SERGEANT STEROID: Uh-oh! That would mean …
ANTHRAX: Yes! That would mean the extinction of the Spotted Owl HAHAHAHA!
COMMANDER GONAD: We’ve got to stop him! By nonviolent means if at all possible! Listen, Anthrax! Be reasonable!
ANTHRAX: No!
COMMANDER GONAD: Okay, then! (He beats the shit out of Anthrax.)
SERGEANT STEROID: Whew! That was a close one!
COMMANDER GONAD: Yes! Every species is important, which is why we need to protect our planet and recycle whenever possible and eat hearty nutritious meals including the breakfast cereals advertised relentlessly on this program!
SERGEANT STEROID: Part of this complete breakfast! By the way, action figures based on our characters are available in toy stores everywhere! Sold separately!
COMMANDER GONAD: Collect them all! Speaking of licensed characters, look who’s here! It’s Corporal Token!
CORPORAL TOKEN: That’s right! Please note that I am an African American!
COMMANDER GONAD: Right on, “homes!” “What it is!” And here’s Lieutenant Woman!
LIEUTENANT WOMAN: Speaking of owls, please note that I have an anatomically impossible set of hooters! (General Laughter)
This is the kind of show my son watched. And don’t tell me that it could have been prevented by not allowing him to watch television. Modern children don’t need the medium of a TV set. The human race has evolved to the point where children can receive broadcast waves directly from the atmosphere, just as they can program VCRs and set digital watches without reading the instructions.
For a couple of years my son was deeply into a TV-show hero and licensed character named “He-Man.” Rob had He-Man sheets on his bed and wore He-Man underwear.4 Of course he also had a vast collection of He-Man action figures, which were ludicrously muscular and disfigured in various ways to reflect their special individual powers, reflected by their names. One of them had insectlike wings that enabled him to fly; this was “Buzz-Off.” Another one had a skunklike stripe down his back and gave off an unpleasant aroma; his name was “Stinkor” (I am not making up these action figures).
At one point I believe I had more money invested in He-Man action figures than in my Individual Retirement Account. Rob was determined to collect all of the figures, which was of course impossible, because no matter how many I bought, the people who created these things—I imagined them as being a bunch of pudgy balding guys whose idea of a tough physical challenge would be placing a conference call—kept making more. It became difficult for me to keep track of which ones Rob already had and which new ones he wanted the most. Around Christmas and birthday time I spent long periods in the He-Man aisle of Toys “®” Us, scratching my head at the vast array of figures, sometimes consulting with other parents:
ME: Excuse me, but is Man-at-Arms the one that can shoot out a hook with a rope attached to it and hook onto things?
SECOND PARENT: No, I think Man-at-Arms is the sidekick for Skeletor.
THIRD PARENT: No, Man-at-Arms can’t be Skeletor’s sidekick. Man-at-Arms is a good guy. He’s He-Man’s sidekick.
SECOND PARENT: Then which one is Skeletor’s sidekick?
THIRD PARENT: I think his name is something like DungHeap.
ME: Is he the one who squirts brown glop from either end?
SECOND PARENT: No, I think that’s WormLord.
THIRD PARENT: Is he good?
FOURTH PARENT: I don’t think so, because he’s friends with what’s-his-name, the one who has a scary face and giant powerful claw arms, yet fears melted butter.
FIFTH PARENT: Lob-Stor.
SECOND PARENT: Let’s all go to a bar.
That’s what we should have done, anyway. But instead we brought more He-Man action figures home. The house was infested with them. Wherever you turned, you’d find them—on the floor, on the furniture, clinging to curtains, standing defiantly on top of the toilet seat, etc. It was forbidden to move any of them, because Rob had carefully positioned each one to play a role in a gigantic action-figure battle that lasted, to the best of my recollection, three years.
The battle consisted mainly of arch-enemies He-Man and Skeletor making dramatic statements to each other in Rob’s deepest four-year-old voice, using the stilted language popular with hack cartoon-dialogue writers:
SKELETOR: He-Man, you shall die, and Castle Greyskull shall be all mine!
HE-MAN: I think not! (He hits Skeletor, knocking him ten feet, which is the equivalent of about 250 action-figure feet.)
SKELETOR: You shall pay for that, He-Man!
HE-MAN: I think not! (He knocks Skeletor another 250 feet.)
Even though Skeletor was the most evil being in the universe, I felt kind of sorry for him. He took a tremendous amount of physical punishment. He got thrown out of windows. He got slammed in doors. He got run over by a tricycle. He got frozen solid in the freezer. He got dunked in Rob’s beets. But he kept coming back for more.5
My point here is that the toys marketed for boys, like the TV shows, tend to encourage the boys’ already aggressive nature, which could be why boys spend so much time acting like what trained professional psychologists call “jerks.” Or it could be that boys are born with some kind of jerk gene, and the toy and TV people are merely cashing in on this. Whatever the cause, I know I spent a lot of time envying parents of girls. I’d take my son and his friends to a Burger King, and I’d see a table of little girls, and they’d be eating and talking, just like miniature humans. Whereas my son and his friends seemed to have some kind of nervous-system linkage between their mouths and their hands, so that they could not chew without punching. Eating with them was as relaxing as amateur eyeball surgery.
“Stop punching,” I’d say.
They’d try to stop, sometimes succeeding for as long as .00014 seconds. Then the Punch Reflex would overwhelm their tiny mental circuits.
“Stop punching!” I’d repeat.
“We’re not punching!” they’d say, punching.
“YOU ARE TOO PUNCHING!!” I’d shout, spewing out pieces of semichewed hamburger. “I CAN SEE YOU PUNCHING!! NOW STOP PUNCHING!! AND STOP BLOWING BUBBLES IN YOUR MILKSHAKES!! AND STOP SQUIRTING THE KETCHUP PACKETS AT EACH OTHER!! JUST EAT!!”
They’d look at me as though I were insane. Their feeling was, if you were only going to eat, what was the point of going to a restaurant?
Then I’d look over at the table of little girls, who’d be chatting and thoughtfully passing each other the napkins, and I would wonder how we ever permitted my gender to get control of, for example, the government.
At this point you are saying, “Dave, in all fairness, there is more to boys than just punching. As they enter preadolescence and prepare to accept their roles as productive and independent members of society, they begin to display many other facets to their personalities, such as the burping facet and the farting facet.”
True. Looking back on my own childhood, I would estimate that my friends and I spent about 75 percent of our waking hours from fifth through eighth grades burping, farting, or laughing hysterically when somebody else burped or farted. We never grew tired of thes
e activities; they invariably struck us as life-threateningly funny. One of my friends, Harry Tompkins,6 had developed the ability to burp and fart on command,7 and we considered this to be a far greater achievement than the polio vaccine.
Virtually all of my memories of Boy Scouts involve farting. I spent several years in the Boy Scouts, ultimately attaining the rank of Second Class, but I can’t remember the Morse Code, or how to hang your backpack from a rope so the raccoons can’t get your food, or how to start a fire by rubbing pine cones together, or how to tie important tactical knots with names like the “sheepskank.” What I can remember is being out in the woods on scout-troop camping trips, at 1:30 A.M., lying in a sleeping bag in a tent with three other guys, none of us even close to falling asleep due to the fact that we were entertaining ourselves by ritualistically telling jokes that we had all heard upwards of four hundred times, such as:
“What’d you have for breakfast?”
“Pea soup.”
“What’d you have for lunch?”
“Pea soup.”
“What’d you have for supper?”
“Pea soup.”
“What’d you do all night?”
“Pee soup.”
(Laughter, followed by shouts of “BE QUIET!” and “GO TO SLEEP!” from the scoutmaster’s tent.)
So we’d be lying there, trying to giggle as quietly as possible, and one of the guys—probably as a result of eating our usual Boy-Scout-camping-trip food, which consisted of semi-warmed baked beans mixed with Hershey’s chocolate and Tang—would have some kind of gaseous nuclear chain reaction in his bowels, and there would be a sound like
BWAAARRRRRPPPPPPP
and flames would come shooting out of the victim’s sleeping bag and the tent walls would bulge violently outward, and the other three of us guys, in a desperate effort to escape before the tent was filled with the Deadly Blue Cloud, would lunge for the tent flap, still inside our sleeping bags, all trying to get out simultaneously, so that, from the outside, the tent looked like some bizarre alien space pod giving birth to giant crazed green worms.
“GAS ATTACK!” we’d shout, causing the startled raccoons to drop our Hershey bars.
“BE QUIET!” the scoutmaster’s tent would shout, but by now we were totally out of control, rolling around on the ground, howling, setting off chain reactions of laughter and fart noises in the other tents.
Boy Scouts: It made me the leader I am today.
Of course what I’m describing here is the humor of preadolescent guys. As guys grow older and become more mature, their humor begins to reflect and ultimately revolve around a fundamental and universal human theme that will remain the focal point of the guys’ existence for the remainder of their lives, namely, their private organs. Guys are absolutely fascinated with their privates. There is no explaining this. I mean, women also happen to have sexual organs; in fact they have dozens of them, highly complex biological units that, if unrolled, would extend for miles, and that are capable of performing astounding feats of reproduction. Yet you never hear women giving their organs pet names, or viewing them as a major source of humor. But put two guys together, and before long they’ll be exchanging private-parts jokes, even if they are highly sophisticated guys such as John Updike or myself.
Women generally do not see the hilarity in this type of joke. I attribute this to a lack of humor sophistication on their part, caused by the fact that, for some reason, women do not dedicate large sectors of their brains exclusively to the appreciation and storage of jokes. Most guys have done this with their brains, which is why they can remember jokes they learned in the third grade, whereas they can’t always remember exactly, down to the last digit, how many of their parents are still living.
Guys are deeply interested in jokes, as you know if you have ever been in contact with the vast, high-speed Global Guy Joke Network. This is a worldwide complex of millions of dedicated guys who, the instant they hear a new joke, are willing to drop whatever they’re doing, especially if it’s work, and immediately pass the joke along to other guys all over the world at company expense. Guys take the responsibility for joke-propagation very seriously, and they pride themselves on their ability to develop and transmit jokes in response to major tragedies such as the Space Shuttle disaster or the Branch Davidian cult compound fire. When events such as these occur, the U.S. economy is virtually shut down by concerned guys using every available phone, fax, modem, satellite, etc., to transmit urgent new tragedy-related jokes, such as how you pick up women in Waco, Texas.8 In July of 1991, within minutes after Milwaukee police revealed that Jeffrey Dahmer had been keeping enough body parts in his apartment to form a complete football team including field-goal unit, there were Dahmer jokes flying all over the world. You could have gone to a remote area of the Amazon River basin, where there is no electricity or phone service and all long-distance communication is accomplished via drums, and you would have heard the following exchange reverberating through the rain forest:
FIRST DRUM: BEAT BEAT BEAT BEAT. (Say, did you hear what they found in Jeffrey Dahmer’s freezer?)
SECOND DRUM: BEAT BEAT BEAT. (No, what did they find?)
FIRST DRUM: BEAT BEAT BEAT BEAT BEAT. (Ben and Jerry.)
SECOND DRUM: BEAT! (Har!)
THIRD DRUM: BEAT BEAT BEAT! BEAT BEAT BEAT BEAT BEAT! (Hey you guys! Stop telling jokes on company drums!)
Why do guys do this? Why do they make fun of horrible tragedies? Could it be that they are trying to deny the anguish and fear they feel when these tragedies force them to confront the terrifying fragility of human existence? Don’t make me laugh. Guys do this because they’re sick. This is also why they think it’s funny to hurl moons at nuns or tip cows over or stay up all night on the eve of a wedding, taking the groom’s car completely apart and reassembling it inside the happy couple’s new fourteenth-floor apartment. I am not apologizing for this kind of behavior, mind you; I happen to find it childish and unappealing, and I wish that guys would just for God’s sake grow up. I am certain that you feel the same way, so I will not burden you with the stupid and tasteless joke about the guy who catches the fish with the seventeen-inch penis.9
1 Available on request.
2 Come to think of it, he probably could have conquered the real France.
3 Needless to say, the Gun Fairy never leaves batteries.
4 So does Sylvester Stallone.
5 I mean more punishment. Not more beets.
6 Harry, if you’re out there: Hi, and I hope you haven’t become a federal judge or anything.
7 The command was: “Harry! Burp and fart!”
8 With a Dustbuster.
9 There is no such joke. Made you look.
4
Tips for Women
How to Have a Relationship
with a Guy
CONTRARY TO what many women believe, it’s fairly easy to develop a long-term, stable, intimate, and mutually fulfilling relationship with a guy. Of course this guy has to be a Labrador retriever. With human guys, it’s extremely difficult. This is because guys don’t really grasp what women mean by the term relationship.
Let’s say a guy named Roger is attracted to a woman named Elaine. He asks her out to a movie; she accepts; they have a pretty good time. A few nights later he asks her out to dinner, and again they enjoy themselves. They continue to see each other regularly, and after a while neither one of them is seeing anybody else.
And then, one evening when they’re driving home, a thought occurs to Elaine, and, without really thinking, she says it aloud: “Do you realize that, as of tonight, we’ve been seeing each other for exactly six months?”
And then there is silence in the car. To Elaine, it seems like a very loud silence. She thinks to herself: Geez, I wonder if it bothers him that I said that. Maybe he’s been feeling confined by our relationship; maybe he thinks I’m trying to push him into some kind of obligation that he doesn’t want, or isn’t sure of.
And Roger is thinking: Gosh. Six m
onths.
And Elaine is thinking: But, hey, I’m not so sure I want this kind of relationship, either. Sometimes I wish I had a little more space, so I’d have time to think about whether I really want us to keep going the way we are, moving steadily toward … I mean, where are we going? Are we just going to keep seeing each other at this level of intimacy? Are we heading toward marriage? Toward children? Toward a lifetime together? Am I ready for that level of commitment? Do I really even know this person?
And Roger is thinking: … so that means it was … let’s see … February when we started going out, which was right after I had the car at the dealer’s, which means … lemme check the odometer … Whoa! I am way overdue for an oil change here.
And Elaine is thinking: He’s upset. I can see it on his face. Maybe I’m reading this completely wrong. Maybe he wants more from our relationship, more intimacy, more commitment; maybe he has sensed—even before I sensed it—that I was feeling some reservations. Yes, I bet that’s it. That’s why he’s so reluctant to say anything about his own feelings: He’s afraid of being rejected.
And Roger is thinking: And I’m gonna have them look at the transmission again. I don’t care what those morons say, it’s still not shifting right. And they better not try to blame it on the cold weather this time. What cold weather? It’s eighty-seven degrees out, and this thing is shifting like a goddamn garbage truck, and I paid those incompetent thieving cretin bastards six hundred dollars.
And Elaine is thinking: He’s angry. And I don’t blame him. I’d be angry, too. God, I feel so guilty, putting him through this, but I can’t help the way I feel. I’m just not sure.
And Roger is thinking: They’ll probably say it’s only a ninety-day warranty. That’s exactly what they’re gonna say, the scumballs.
