You Can Say "Monkeying Around" but Not "Orangutaning Around"

We need more road rage like this.

Humor is subjective. And, for some people, it evolves over time.

When I reflect on the things I once thought were funny — dare I say hi-LAR-ious — frankly, I cringe.

THEY'RE LIKE SMALLER, HAIRIER, FUNNIER HUMANS!
One of the high points of hilarity for me was, at one time, the orangutan. Apparently, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, many other people did, too.

Can't argue with the orangutan's place in the comedic animal kingdom. You can snap a cute pic of a dog, cat, even a walrus, but only an orangutan can do a number of things that (most) humans do — walk, fart, crack open a beer — but do them all in a funnier way than, say, your hirsute Aunt Hilda, because it's an orangutan!

Once my brother and I outgrew Disney cartoons, my mother transferred the movie-chaperoning duties to my father. (After we'd return home, my father would then describe to my mother the film we'd just seen, and his explanation always ran longer than the actual movie.)

Sometime in 1981, when I was either 9 or 10, as we departed the theater for a film I can't exactly remember — I perused the Wikipedia list of American releases from that year in order to make this anecdote as accurate as possible; maybe it was the original Clash of the Titans (it certainly wasn't My Dinner With Andre!) — we noticed that they'd already changed the marquee for the following week's releases.

One of the new releases was a film called Going Ape! (the exclamation point is part of the title), and my brother and I were disappointed because we would rather have seen that instead of whatever it was that we'd just watched. (Dad took us to a movie maybe once a month, if we were lucky, unlike the way I am with my own kids today, looking for any excuse to get the hell out of the house and kill a couple of hours.)

With the magic of the Internet I've been able to satisfy many of decades-long nostalgic longings, like using an emulator to play any Atari 2600 game or watch cartoons that I'd forgotten even existed, but I never actually had the urge to track down and watch Going Ape!

But on that night in 1981, I couldn't think of anything else...

Christmas Carols That Suck, and Other Musings

Hell yes.

I really wanted to say something profound about the Occupy Wall Street movement, but instead I'll share my opinions about the Christmas songs I do (and do not) like.

(As I was thinking about which songs would fall into which category, I discovered that the Onion's AVClub wrote a similar article. I have not read it yet, but you have my permission to do so.)

It's a little harder to create these lists than in years past because now I listen to Pandora — I'm tuned to the "Dean Martin (Holiday)" channel — so I'm able to get my fill of the songs I like without having to endure the crap that I used to face when I'd listen to the streaming versions of the radio stations pumping out all-Christmas tunes this time of year.

And I Never Learned Mister Softee's First Name

My second father.

All that blogging I did for Tuesday's post about ice cream, combined with Father of the Anthony Show's birthday yesterday, brought back some summer memories that involved the ice cream gentlemen who roamed my neighborhood.

The main guys who worked the territory were Mister Softee, who usually showed up in the early afternoon, and the Circus Man — I still don't know what circuses have to do with ice cream — who'd swing by after dinner.

When my brother and I were young, too young to have any money of our own, the only truck we were allowed to patronize was Señor Softee. Dad's logic was that Monsieur Softee sold actual ice cream, not the "candy and junk" that the Circus Man offered. Back then, a basic soft-serve cone cost only 50 cents, so Dad could send us out of the house with a buck and we'd be rather satisfied for the next 20 minutes.

My brother and I never went to camp, except for one horrendous two-week experience that I'll probably blog about at another time, so the ice cream man appearances helped us know what time it was during the summer.

Stupid Is as Anthony Does, Part 2

You know the drill.

Here we are again, talking about some of the stupid things I've done at various points throughout my life, as I've done in a previous post. There have been so many of these embarrassing incidents that this subject could probably be a weekly series. The memories I thought I'd obliterated have been re-materializing like medical waste washing up on the sands of Jones Beach.

I given a lot of thought to my stupidity, and I believe these events can organized into a number of categories:

• Curiosity. I consider myself very cautious, but I often am the guy who just has to push that shiny delicious red button that we were warned not to press.
  
• Speaking or acting without thinking. Again, I think I'm a pretty cautious person, but I can be a little too impulsive, especially when it comes to saying something that I'll regret later. Anyone who's viewed my Facebook wall during my "Facebooking While Full of Red Wine Night" will know what I mean.
  
• Not paying attention to the dangerous world around me. As I stress positive characteristics of my personality right before I provide evidence to the contrary, I would like to note that I consider myself a very aware, "in the moment" kind of guy. But that doesn't stop me from those kinds of moments you likely had as a kid when your mom/dad/teacher/priest asks, "Why did you do that [thing that makes absolutely no human sense whatsoever]?" and you can only reply sheepishly, "I don't know."
  
  As a parent, I now find myself asking that question all the time, as does Mrs. The Anthony Show. But in her case, she's usually asking me that question at least once a week.

Enough prologue. Let's get to it...

The Mother of All Blog Posts

Normally I'd save a post like this for Mother's Day, but I don't feel like it.

During my school years I spent much of my time trying to be funny. In many cases I ripped off humor from other sources, including

• Mad magazine
• Bugs Bunny cartoons
• The Unknown Comic from The Gong Show, about whom I might dedicate a later post 
• Stuff I'd heard from other people

Once in a while I'd come up with an original idea. The following post is about a humorous idea I briefly launched in sixth grade.


A BRIEF DIGRESSION ABOUT MOTHER JOKES
During the time I was in sixth grade, the most offensive thing you could do to a fellow student was insult his mother. Personally, I was never more offended by jokes about my mother than jokes about, say, my father, and not because I didn't hold my mother in high esteem. But the kids I went to school with, their mothers were sacred. "Your mother" jokes were rampant, and they could often lead to fights.

I swapped mother jokes with my friends, but we weren't trying to insult anyone. Amusingly, most of the time I didn't understand the jokes. Take this one:

Your mother's like a phonebooth in the rain: wet rubbers going in and out.

I had no idea what that meant. Even if I did know what that meant, I don't think I would have concentrated much on the actual imagery, only that it's supposed to insult the other party.

There was an old Warner Brothers cartoon where crazy familial insults were exchanged. I don't remember it as the one below, but the following cartoon, which I pulled from a Romanian site and is thankfully not dubbed into Romanian, contains a number of outdated and possibly offensive insults, including Porky Pig's topper (at the 6:50 mark, almost at the end): "Eh, your sister drives a pickle wagon!"

Anyway. One time, I was at the bus stop and when a different bus drove by I'd insulted the mother of one of the kids (we'll call him Jasper) on that bus (the window was open) with the following joke:

Your mother's like a gun: two cocks, and she blows!

Note that this joke, at the time, made even less sense to me than the one about the phonebooth and the rubbers, but I knew there was something offensive about it. I bore no ill will toward Jasper, but the time was just ripe to spring it.

This had caused quite a scandal. Jasper, who was a couple of years younger than me, and his brother, who was my brother's age, were both, as my mother would label children of this sort, "troublemakers." The kind who would fight someone for far less than in the chivalric defense of their mother's honor. So I quickly and humbly apologized, probably within a day or two.

A week or two after that, my family and Jasper's family were at church together; they were a row behind me. I noticed that the mother was with them, but there was no father. I don't think their father lived with them, or he was one of those guys who worked all the time as a mechanic or something, which probably had something to do with why the kids were always in trouble. I looked at the mother and she seemed very tired, very pious. It was then that I actually felt bad for saying mean things about a woman I'd never met.

ANYWAY, THE OTHER "MOTHER" THING
Oh yeah. So, the thing I did for a while in sixth grade was go up to somebody, let's say Jim Johnson, and I'd say: "Your mother!"

And Jim would go, "WHAT DID YOU SAY?"

And I'd quickly reply, "...is Mrs. Johnson."

And he'd be relieved, and unclench his fist, and go, "Oh yeah! She is! Good one!"

I did that bit for a while until I pulled it on someone whose mother had died. It wasn't as bad as you'd think it would be, because she knew I had no idea her mother had died. It probably helped that the mother died some time ago and it was obvious that I had no idea (this was after a school merge, so I knew the girl for only like two months), so I didn't come off like a total creep. But at that point I realized it was time to retire that line of humor.

In the meantime, enjoy this little ditty from Mr. T regarding mothers. It probably was released while I was in sixth grade, because that's when The A-Team was pretty big, so I should have heeded the message.