The “laughing paramedics” element of the story almost deserves to be classified as a separate legend, except that it always appears attached to an account of another mishap. In this chapter, for example, laughing paramedics enter the scene following an exploding toilet or another hilarious accident involving a man on a roof. When you think about it—except that nobody does think about these things—paramedics nowadays use wheeled gurneys, not hand-carried stretchers, and they surely must be trained to maintain a dignified professional reserve and to hang on to the patient, no matter how ludicrous the accident they are attending. But the “laughing paramedics” is a slapstick scene inserted into several comical legends.
Another nice thing about these laughing paramedics is that they clue listeners in to how they are expected to react. So if you’re trying to get full effect from a funny story you’re telling, just throw in an accident, followed by some paramedics who are laughing their heads off.
* * *
“Lost Denture Claim”
A clerk in an insurance company was processing a claim for a lost pair of dentures. He requested more information on how they were lost.
The policyholder explained that it all started when she ran out of toilet paper. She came home from buying some at the store and realized that now she had to answer a call of nature rather urgently. So she headed quickly for the bathroom while tearing open the package of toilet paper.
In her haste, as she entered the bathroom, she tripped and dropped the package of toilet paper. She lunged for the dropped package and simultaneously reached out with her arms to break her fall; her left hand hit the handle of the toilet just as her chin hit the edge of the bowl. Her dentures were jolted into the toilet bowl, and the swirling water flushed them down the drain.
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“The Exploding Toilet”
GREAT MOTORCYCLING RUMORS
We have heard this story told and seen it printed half a dozen times in the last 30 years. It is always related as fact. Most recently, one of our editors heard it from a paramedic who was teaching a seminar on emergency medical care.
Robert Enriquez
The story begins with a new owner cleaning his bike on the patio outside a plate glass door or window. When he finishes cleaning, he starts the bike. Somehow he manages to lose control, sending him and the bike through the plate glass window. In the process, he suffers multiple lacerations and paramedics are called. He is summarily rushed to the hospital for stitches. His wife is left to deal with the fallen bike, which is now dripping gasoline on the living room rug. Unable to lift the motorcycle, she uses toilet paper to soak up the gas. When the TP is saturated, she replaces it with more and puts the gas-soaked paper in the commode.
Finally, her husband returns home sporting stitches and bandages. He rights the bike, returns it to the patio and retires to the bathroom, where he seats himself on the commode and, inevitably, lights a cigarette. He drops the match into the commode, which is full of gasoline-soaked paper and fumes. The commode explodes, launching him through the glass shower door. The paramedics are called again, but they are laughing so hard as they try to remove him to the ambulance that they drop the stretcher.
The bike is sold the next day.
This is from Motorcyclist magazine, September 1991. The same magazine also had published the story in February 1984. My colleague at the University of Utah Adrian “Buzz” Palmer spotted both stories. In a variation on the theme, the man is trying out a new mini-bike he has bought for his children when he spills the gasoline. In a version from New Zealand the man is working on his “leaky car petrol tank” and drains the tank into a toddler’s potty, which his wife then pours into the toilet. Whatever the set-up, these variations invariably describe broken glass, spilled gasoline, the wife’s involvement in the accident, and (of course) laughing paramedics. There are also many nonvehicular versions of “The Exploding Toilet” in which the volatile material put into the toilet is hair spray or insecticide. Yet other versions begin with a different accident that sends the husband to the hospital; in his absence, the wife paints the bathroom and pours paint thinner into the toilet, leading to the second mishap. In 1988 a version of “The Exploding Toilet” was reported as news from Tel Aviv and rapidly spread worldwide in the media until it was retracted by the newspaper in Israel that had first reported it. An analysis of this incident, plus a history of exploding-toilet stories back to the days of outhouses, is included in my book The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story, in the chapter “A Blast Heard ‘round the World.” The punch line in the rural prototype of the legend was, “It must have been something I et!”
“Stuck on the Toilet”
This story was told to me many years ago by a friend of mine who said his father, a physician, was present at the hospital in California where it happened.
A young doctor had the day off and a pair of tickets to a concert. He puttered around the house, did some chores, then picked up a baby-sitter and took his wife out for the evening.
During the intermission they called home to check on things. There being no answer, they hurried back. Dashing into the house, they called the baby-sitter’s name and heard her respond from the bathroom. There they found her stuck tight to the toilet seat, which the doctor had re-varnished that morning.
Unable to free her, they unbolted the seat, covered the girl with a blanket, and took her to the hospital emergency room. But even the specialists there were unable to detach the seat from the sitter. When all else failed, they put the poor girl on her hands and knees on an examination table and began to use a scalpel to slice away the varnish just a micron away from her skin.
As word of this strange predicament spread among the hospital staff, the emergency room attracted a crowd of doctors and interns. At this point, the chief of staff, who was making his rounds, walked in. An intern standing next to him, trying to act nonchalant, asked the chief, “Have you ever seen anything like that?”
The chief replied, “Yes, many times. But never with a frame around it.”
Sent to me in 1989 by Cliff Thompson of Gahanna, Ohio. The punch line here—a feature more typical of a joke than a legend—is a sure sign of the farcical nature of this story. In other versions, injuries are multiplied when the doctor sits on the edge of the bathtub while trying to free the girl, slips, and either breaks a limb or suffers a concussion. Sometimes his accident is caused by his uncontrollable laughter, and occasionally, laughing paramedics enter the scene. Another contemporary stuck-on-the-toilet story describes a very fat passenger who becomes stuck fast onto the plastic seat of a toilet on a cruise ship or an airliner; there is some evidence that such accidents have actually occurred, although most retellings are strongly influenced by the stuck-toilet urban legends. These modern legends, in turn, may derive from older folk stories that described people becoming stuck to chamber pots.
“The Man on the Roof”
A 32-year-old roofer was jerked to the ground and dragged almost 200 feet when his wife drove away in the family car with his safety rope tied to the bumper!
David Willis was hospitalized with a broken leg, cracked ribs, concussion and numerous bumps and bruises after the bizarre accident.
But he told reporters in Cape Town, South Africa, that he’s lucky to be around to talk about his close call.
“One second I was hammering the roof and the next I was plowing up tomato plants in the garden,” he continued.
“Everything happened so fast it was like a dream. But I was in so much pain I knew that what was happening was real.”
Willis said the drama unfolded a few minutes after he climbed onto the roof of his house to replace some weather-beaten shingles.
He tied one end of a safety rope to the chimney and pulled the loose end through the belt loop in his pants. He then dropped the rope down to his 9-year-old son and told him to attach it “to something secure.”
The dutiful child promptly tied the rope to the bumper of his mother’s car and scamper
ed off to a nearby park to play.
“My wife and I spoke to each other as she got into the car to go shopping,” said Willis.
“But neither of us noticed that the rope was tied to the bumper.
“I turned around and started hammering on a shingle just as she pulled away. I hit the ground hard and shot right through the garden fence.
“I figured I was dragged about 200 feet through the grass before the rope finally broke.”
Willis’ wife Michelle didn’t realize what happened and drove off into the distance.
A neighbor found Willis writhing in his front yard and called an ambulance.
“I’m in no condition to spank my son even if I wanted to,” said Willis.
“Actually, I don’t think I need to. He knows his thoughtlessness almost killed his daddy.”
Article by Irwin Fisher from the tabloid Weekly World News on September 19, 1988. The named locale, plus the phrase “attach it to something secure,” identify the story as being greatly expanded from a brief Reuters news item circulated in January 1980. Ladder humor is a staple of slapstick comedy, whether in films or folklore. “The Man on the Roof” has been a popular urban legend both in the United States and abroad since at least the mid-1960s. The man sometimes climbs onto the roof to adjust his TV antenna or to shovel down a heavy accumulation of snow. Often the story merges into “The Exploding Toilet” when the wife decides to paint the bathroom during her husband’s hospital stay. She pours used paint thinner into the toilet just as her husband is arriving home, and she neglects to flush, setting the poor man up for a second accident. Naturally, those laughing paramedics are waiting in the wings to enter this slapstick comedy during Scene Three. The man pulled from his roof becomes an airline pilot working at home in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a version included in Cabin Pressure, a 1989 collection of flight attendants’ anecdotes compiled by Elizabeth Harwell and Corylee Spiro. However, in another airline version a mechanic is working on the wing of a large aircraft while secured by a rope that is tied to a portable piece of large ground equipment. The modern legends may have originated with a popular European folktale about a farmer and his wife who decide to switch tasks. The husband makes a complete mess of the household tasks, even putting the cow to graze on the grass roof of the house while he cleans up from various mishaps he caused inside. To secure the cow, he ties a rope around its neck, drops the loose end down the chimney, and ties the other end around his waist. Naturally, the cow falls off the roof, dragging the man up the chimney upside down. I’ve searched for a variant of this folktale that includes laughing paramedics, but the ones I’ve found so far just have the wife laughing her head off.
“The Exploding Bra”
This happened around 1960 to my aunt, who was at that time a very glamorous young lady. She wore a platinum beehive hairdo, gold spike heels, capri pants—and she wore an article of underclothing I have actually seen, an inflatable bra. This was briefly popular in the early ’60s, and consisted of a plastic falsie which was blown up with a straw to the desired fullness and inserted into a special bra.
The story goes that my aunt and her husband were in an airplane when the decompression effect resulted in her bra expanding alarmingly. She raced for the restroom; in some versions she made it in time, but in others she was in the middle of the aisle when her frontage loudly exploded.
I showed your story of the inflatable bra exploding to a colleague who mentioned hearing similar stories 25 years ago in Western Colorado when he was in high school. The stories he heard were about girls wearing inflatable bras to the prom and having their dates pin a corsage on and the bras popping and/or deflating.
Eve Golden of Secaucus, New Jersey, sent me the first story in 1989; after I published a column on the topic, I received the second version from my friend Dan Lester, then living in Durango, Colorado. Jearl Walker, in his 1975 book The Flying Circus of Physics, includes an even more slapstick version of the story. He reprints an undated Associated Press report of an airline stewardess whose inflatable bra “expands to about size 46,” whereupon the stewardess uses a passenger’s hatpin to pierce the bra, leading “a man of foreign descent” on board to grapple with her, intending to prevent the stewardess from injuring herself. More recently I have heard of breast implants rather than inflatable bras supposedly expanding when cabin pressure in an airliner changes suddenly.
“The Nude Housewife”
The following incident took place in an apartment house near Homewood, Illinois, and for obvious reasons I shall use no names. A housewife washed her hair, put it in curlers, and then went to the basement laundry room with some dirty clothes. Soon she was waiting for one load to finish in the dryer as she put the second load into the washer.
At the last minute she decided that the dress she was wearing needed cleaning, too. She removed it and threw it into the washing machine, knowing she would get a change from the dryer in a moment or two. Standing there in her shoes and brief undergarments, she noticed a cobweb in the corner. She decided to remove it. She didn’t want to get her hair dirty, so she pulled a discarded football helmet over the curlers, and got ready to sweep down the cobweb. Just then the meter reader walked into the basement. The lady froze quietly in the corner, hoping to avoid his attention. She thought she had been successful, but as he departed he looked at her and said, “I do hope your team wins.”
From Jerome Beatty, Jr.’s, “Trade Winds” column in Saturday Review, July 4, 1964, where a discreet illustration is included. In the November 1970 issue of Esquire, Beatty described telling this story to friends as something that had happened to “a friend of a friend of mine in Illinois” and then having another version from the March 1961 issue of Reader’s Digest pointed out to him. The Digest also illustrated the story, for modesty adding “an old raccoon coat” to the woman’s attire. This oft-told slapstick story with a joke-like punch line is a favorite of Ann Landers, who has published it in her columns at least six times between 1975 and 1992 and who was also credited with it in a 1966 book called Family Laugh Lines. Landers described the housewife putting on her son’s football helmet to protect her hair curlers from leaking pipes, but she mentioned no spider web, broom, or raccoon coat. Erma Bombeck modified the story yet again in her 1979 Aunt Erma’s Cope Book by having the housewife wearing her son’s full football uniform when the washer repairman arrived. The best treatment of the plot I have seen appeared in Gerald Kloss’s column “Slightly Kloss-Eyed” in the Milwaukee Journal in 1988. Kloss, in a parody of urban legend research, pretended to have collected several texts from his readers. From “Helena Handbasket” of “Dry Prong, LA” he quoted the story of a 275-pound defensive tackle for a pro football team who was surprised by a female meter reader while he tried to repair a leaky faucet while wearing only a football helmet. The meter reader quipped, “I hope you win the game Sunday, mister,” and the player replied: “Thanks for your support. You can talk about all the money we make, but we’re really playing for all you fans out there, and you can count on us to put out a 100-percent effort. Our running game’s shaping up and if our pass defense holds up, I think we’ve got a good chance of going all the way.” Beautiful!
“The Nude in the RV”
This is not a funny book, but we’ll begin it by telling a funny story. It’s about a couple of veteran campers and we tell it only because (1) it happened needlessly, (2) it might have ended in tragedy, and (3) anything as silly as this won’t happen to you if you follow our philosophy of restricting weekend camping to within easy driving distance of home.
It happened to John and Jane Doe (we call them that in order to protect them from the laughter and ribbing of the many friends they’ve made over the years in campgrounds throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico) while homeward-bound after weeks on the road in their pickup-truck camper. And it happened on the last day.
Three hundred miles usually was the limit of a day’s driving for John and Jane on any camping trip they ever had taken. But on t
he end of one of the most pleasant journeys of their lives, as day dawned they were 450 miles from home, and so they decided to press on until they got there.
Then, a good breakfast under their belts, coffee pot, frying pan, dishes and knives and forks washed and safely stowed away, campsite policed for stray scraps of debris they might have overlooked, John got behind the wheel of their camper and Jane on the seat beside him.
Nine hours later and still about 75 miles from home, John had had it. He pulled to the side of the road, turned to Jane and said: “You drive, I’m going to climb into the sack and take a nap.” He got out of the cab, walked to the camper’s rear door, climbed in, took off his shoes and stripped down to his BVDs, stretched out on a bunk, pulled a cover over him and within minutes was dead to the world.
Jane, totally out of sight and without means of communication with John in the back compartment, tooled merrily down the highway thinking nice thoughts of spending that night in the coziness of their long-unseen home—until suddenly she came to a fork in the road and did not know which to take, left or right.
Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends Page 37
