By Scott Graber
It is Saturday, early, and it is brisk. This morning I have my coffee — Starbucks Medium Roast — and the Wall Street Journal. This morning, the WSJ gives us a piece by Peter Funt that recounts his father’s television show, “Candid Camera.”
I know that many of those who read this column are too young to remember the practical jokes that were televised on “Candid Camera” in the 1960s.
One of these (sometimes elaborate) jokes that I remember involved a person who was, apparently, having trouble trying to parallel park his Buick. That person, an actor, asks a passing pedestrian to help him park by signaling (with his hands) when he should stop backing-up.
The stranger agrees — not knowing the scene has been staged — and the “driver” proceeds to crash-into the parked vehicles, both front and back, notwithstanding the frantic waving and screaming by the good Samaritan who agreed to help.
I must confess I found this funny and — when I went to college — found that I had landed in a perfect test bed for this kind of humor. I found myself at a rigid, regulation-bound military college where one’s conduct was severely circumscribed by rules. If one violated those rules there were penalties that often involved walking “tours” with one’s M1-Garand rifle while others were walking with young women along Charleston’s High Battery. Notwithstanding these penalties, there was a yearning for laughter that sometimes compelled us to break the rules.
A favorite “joke” centered on inspections and the fact that passing room inspection on Saturday morning meant getting leave on Saturday afternoon. This joke also involved shaving cream then sold inside a canister of compressed air. It involved tossing that canister, pierced by a nail moments before delivery, into the inspection-ready room of an upperclassman.
If the piercing and the delivery part of this prank were done properly, the “shaving cream bomb” would coat every exposed surface of the immaculately prepared room with several centimeters of menthol- scented shaving cream. If delivered in the early morning hours just prior to inspection — while the room’s occupant was still sleeping — the shaving cream was almost impossible to remove.
Another, just before inspections prank, involved the “spit shine” that was required on one’s shoes. This shoe shine required a hot, water-soaked rag and the circular application of small amounts of polish using the index and its neighboring finger. After hours of work one usually got a patent leather-like finish.
And so, at meals, bald-headed plebes were sometimes tasked with crawling under the long mess tables and applying just one small blob of mayonnaise on the shoes of an unknowing upperclassman. A mirror-like, inspection-ready shine could be instantly destroyed by the application of Hellmann’s Mayonnaise.
I would like to think that these sapper-like missions required stealth and steadiness; and some of these cadets would soon be crawling through semi-submerged rice patties in the Republic of Vietnam. I would like to think this was cadet-inspired practice in the use of explosives. I would like to think that the targets of this rough justice were self-important prigs, cadets who were unusually tough, jerks who needed to be taken down a notch or two.
But if the truth be told, we were just looking for a reason to laugh at our precisely-programmed lives and, maybe, tell the cadre what we really thought about the life lessons learned by the long, patient application of black shoe polish.
The Journal’s piece goes on to say “there seems to be a dearth of quality pranks these days.”
“Last April two highly reputable outlets offered suggestions so lame that they, themselves, were a joke. NBC’s ‘Today’ presented ’23 hilarious April Fools pranks to pull on family and friends.’ Among them; ‘Swap out the contents of their underwear drawer for bathing suits for an early morning prank that’ll get all the laughs.’ Good Housekeeping’s ‘20 best April’s Fools Pranks’ included; ‘Buy fake poop and place it literally anywhere; on the toilet, in the car — seriously, you can’t go wrong.’”
I don’t want to say — in this time of Trump — we have completely lost our sense of the absurd. I don’t want to say that our obsession with accountability, being correct, or steering clear of anything remotely risky has erased our sense of humor. But if this generation’s notion of humor has deteriorated to “fake poop” and replacing underwear with swim suits, that, my friends, is reason for concern.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
