Um-- Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean

by Erard, Michael.

  “Hear, hear,” Tate said.

  “—than mixed or all men.”

  “When I started my career, I’d speak in front of anybody,” Tate said. “You want me to do that? I’ll do that. But now it’s very limited. I’m at a place in my career where I can choose my assignments.”

  “The women want to love you more,” LaCroix added. “The guys are like, ‘I should be the one up there.’ The women see you up there, and they’re like, ‘Hey, let’s have fun.’”

  The next morning, the day of the contest, I caught up with David Brooks and Jim Key wading into groups of admirers, laughing, signing autographs. Around them people were filtering into their seats in the vast ballroom buzzing with two thousand anxious Toastmasters. The day before, I had seen some videos of previous contests, but the videos hadn’t prepared me for the tension in the room, or how distant the chairs seemed from the broad stage, or how the room, hung with black curtains, felt like an immense cave.

  The contest began promptly (Toastmasters are very punctual) with the emcee introducing former world champions from the audience; Brooks rose from his reserved seat, tossed a graceful wave, and smiled a large grin, an image that was projected onto two twenty-foot video screens. Tate, LaCroix, and Key had a moment, too, as did Dana LaMon, the 1992 champion.

  The emcee explained the rules. The audience can’t talk. We may laugh and clap, but talking’s forbidden. Toastmasters pride themselves on being the model audience—the evening before, the champions told me their most favorite audiences in the whole world were other Toastmasters, who listen best and laugh the loudest. Securing the room’s borders is key for cementing the bond between the speaker and the audience. Once the contest begins, the doors are closed, and no one is allowed in or out.

  And then the first speaker was announced. One by one the contestants came onstage for their seven minutes, most of them reaching center stage with a fake lope that comedians use to signal enthusiasm. Everyone smiled. Because the speeches are designed for multipurpose appeal, the ones that day were tied to no current events. They’re all mother, home, and heaven. David Brooks had prepared me for this. Critics of the contest, he said, frequently complain about its intellectual shallowness. It was true: the speeches were perfectly, faultlessly delivered, and they were vacuous. Though the anecdotes were winning and the specifics shown, not told, the underlying messages were polished smooth, like rocks in an eternal river: love your children and listen to them, because they know the truth about existence. Persevere; don’t abandon your dreams. You should live by your values. Have fun. All of it proved that speakers can deliver a speech flawlessly yet move their audience no farther than if they’d stood wordlessly on the stage.

  But who really knows why the eighteen judges score as they do? Even David Brooks doesn’t predict that the winning speaker will be a large, red-nosed man in a tuxedo whose speech, all 779 words and seven minutes, twenty-four seconds of it, featured dogs, car crashes, two men nicknamed “Fat Dad,” a toppled statue of Mary Poppins, love, a death by cancer, and a chair.

  It was also the only speech with verbal blunders.

  The winner was Randy Harvey, a fifty-three-year-old human resources director in a school district near Eugene, Oregon, who comes from a long line of storytellers from Oklahoma. He practiced his speech, “Lessons from Fat Dad,” three to four times a day for seven weeks in his head and gave it about twenty-five times to various Toastmasters clubs. His speaking style resembles Garrison Keillor’s brand of urban corn pone and came, he told me, from sitting on a porch as a kid with his grandfather who was drinking whiskey and “just spinning these yarns.” The stories would change, based on who was listening and how much he’d drunk. Fat Dad was a nickname first given to Harvey’s great-grandfather. Harvey’s father, the third Fat Dad, was also a constant storyteller. By the time young Harvey left home at eighteen, he knew all the versions to tell of his tales, a Fat Dad on the rise.

  Growing up poor and rising far gave Harvey various ways to talk to people. His great-grandmother was Cherokee; his mother worked as a secretary; his father once did time for armed robbery. “We’re what you’d call white trash,” he says with a merry air. He’s worked so hard to put this past behind him, he can hardly now sit back to enjoy what he’s built. He has a PhD in educational administration, is a private detective, runs a labor consulting business, and is slated to finish a law degree in two years. Most of the time he plays the methodical, logical professional. But storytelling, he says, has helped him the most. “The reality is,” he told me, “if you tell people a story, you capture their attention.”

  I admired Harvey’s artful omission of specific details—the color of the car, the smell of pipe tobacco—which invited the listeners to interact with his speech, making it their own. I also liked his aw-shucks delivery. At least it was genuine corn pone. And the speech genuinely moved me, exactly because it was a story, not a sermon. He could have written a speech that aggrandized himself, or told of the ups and downs of his career, but he opted for sweetness. I told him all this. And, I added, you were the only contestant who blundered. At first he was shocked—he reminded me he grew up uneducated, of course he might not have used words correctly. I don’t mean those kinds of errors, I said, explaining Goffman’s “knows better” and “doesn’t know better” errors. I meant the “knows better” errors, the ones that would be noted by an audience that prizes control.

  Harvey immediately wanted to know what I’d heard. One was early in the speech, I said, when you’re describing buffing the car, when you stumbled on the word “hand.” But you quickly recovered and kept going. Harvey nodded, Yes, that was one moment. The other, I told him, was when you said, “It was like ice water being thrown on you in a cold shower” instead of “in a hot shower.”

  Harvey explained that both moments involved recent additions to the speech that he hadn’t practiced that much. He also felt proud that his speech had broken with Toastmaster tradition. No one had won the contest with a speech in which someone dies, and he was happy to point out that, in his speech, two people had died.

  “Toastmasters don’t expect you to be a perfect speaker,” he said. “They can be technically perfect in their pronunciation and their body language, but the message has to ring.”

  7

  The Birth of Bloopers

  In 1952, on a live television broadcast, the actress Betty Furness tried to open the door of a Westinghouse refrigerator during a commercial break on The Rube Goldberg Show. She pulled. She yanked. But the door stayed shut. “Who’s the comedian?” she muttered through her teeth.

  A professional, Furness continued to talk about the appliance’s virtues, tugging on its door, as the camera pulled in so tightly on her face that it loomed in the screen. Witnessing the prop failure and Furness’s frustration was the producer of the show, a veteran radio producer, talent agent, and television pioneer who in that moment envisioned an empire of books and records built on the embarrassed tongues of broadcasters, performers, and celebrities flubbing their way through their appearances, a blooper franchise that would live on, making people laugh, long after he was gone. When Kermit Schafer died in 1979 at the age of sixty-four, he’d made millions of dollars putting out thirty records, a dozen books, a bunch of television shows, and a movie, Pardon My Blooper. He sold the rights to the “bloopers” trademark to television empresario Dick Clark, whose production company continues to assemble and air blooper shows until the present day.

  Schafer was the first to transform other people’s flustered speaking, slips of the tongue, and inadvertent solecisms from television and radio broadcasts into gold. In his hands, a blooper wasn’t just a mistake. It was a noteworthy event, a slice of everyday media life, otherwise evanescent, that he shined up for display. There was the Vick’s 44 Cough Syrup commercial that guaranteed “You’ll never get any better!” Or as the stumbling newscaster said, “Also keeping an eye on the Woodstock Rock Festival was New York’s governor Rockin Nelsenfeller.” In Kermit
Schafer’s many blooper books, the bloopers are listed one after another, three or four lines of text separated by a space, then another blooper. A disc jockey said, “COCM Stereo Land now presents popular Hawaiian favorite Don Ho with Tiny Boobies…uh…Tiny Bubbles.” Ralph Nader, who was investigating false nutritional claims by food manufacturers, came on The Mike Douglas Show and announced they were “looking into some of the claims made by a leading booby foob company.” A Canadian announcer said, “This is the Dominion Network of the Canadian Broad Corping Castration.” An actress announced that “the fog was as thick as seepoop.”

  Why did blooper humor work? Because it stripped the dignity from public figures and celebrities. Bloopers also split the media persona from the actual human being, puncturing the performance and with it the cool persona. Bloopers weren’t attached to a single figure, as spoonerisms were linked to Reverend Spooner; the blunderers Schafer depicted were frequently anonymous, and each blooper incident offered something to dissect.

  In some bloopers, you can catch the mistake right off; in others, you must discern the off-color meaning in a perfectly innocent statement. In either case, you had to listen intently, even aggressively, not passively. By carving out the moment of interest, the blooper targeted your attention, and in so doing taught a way to listen to and watch the new broadcast media. The phonograph (in the early 1900s), radio (in the 1920s), and television (in the 1950s) brought the public and commercial spheres into the privacy of people’s homes in successive waves, each more penetrating than the last. Suddenly people had access to public figures, such as Franklin Roosevelt in his fireside radio chats, not as public speakers but as talkers; just as suddenly, advertisers had access to them. Unanswered questions abounded about the news bulletins and constant entertainment. Should the devices be turned on all the time in the background of home life? Should they be turned on at special times? Was it entertainment or education? Who were the announcers and other figures of the emerging media elite, and could they be trusted? Why should they be trusted at all?

  To people who wanted to duck the broadcasting juggernaut by finding its faults, Schafer became a hero.

  Kermit Schafer was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, New York, where he was a boyhood friend of Allen Funt, creator of the radio show Candid Microphone and the television show Candid Camera. Working separately, Schafer and Funt were among the first to help us appreciate twists of unscripted reality—especially if they were caught on film or video or tape. Before World War II, Schafer worked mainly in radio, though in 1940, he produced a television special of Babes in Arms for NBC. After spending four years in the U.S. Air Force as an entertainment director, he went back to television. His blooper fascination began as a hobby; he collected fluffs and outtakes from military training films and played them for friends. But it was his work producing Allen Funt’s Candid Microphone album that showed him that bloopers had commercial promise.

  Schafer’s first production was a 1953 book, Your Slip Is Showing, which he followed in the same year with a record, Radio Bloopers. It sold 4.75 million copies.*44 His LP, Pardon My Blooper!, volume 1, hit number 9 in 1954, and volume 2 hit number 12 the same year. The bloopers were such hot commodities that by 1956, at least two other records by imitators had been released: Excuse My Fluff by Don Meyer and Slips, Fluffs, Boners by Roy Freeman. Schafer claimed to have coined the word “blooper,” but the word was already in use. (He did trademark it, however.) Since the 1920s, it had referred to the howl or whoop from a radio picking up interference, which made a “blooper,” a radio set that regularly made the noise.

  To feed the demand for bloopers, Schafer trawled the media world. He produced records such as All Time Great Bloopers, Citizen’s Bloopers, Funny Bones, 100 Super Duper Bloopers, Best of Bloopers, Washington Bloopers, Comedy of Errors, Slipped Disks, Prize Bloopers, Super Bloopers, Off the Record, Station Breaks, Funny Boners, and Foot ’n Mouth Club. He told interviewers that he wanted a quote from Alexander Pope carved on his gravestone: “To forgive is human; to err, divine.”†45

  Schafer also became a regular visitor on talk shows. Broadcast live into the 1960s, they were verdant with mistakes, long after other shows where Schafer had found bloopers were pre-recorded. Once shows were prerecorded, bloopers were edited as outtakes and set aside; these snips of tape eventually found themselves in Schafer’s hands. He appeared with Johnny Carson, Dinah Shore, David Frost, Dick Cavett, and Mike Douglas to hand out a gold figurine with its hands over its lips, the Bloopy, an award given to actors prone to gaffing. His collections included bloopers from the hosts themselves, such as the time that Merv Griffin told a guest, “We sure thank you for taking time out from your busy sexual…I mean schedule.” There’s also the time that Johnny Carson said, “Here’s how to relieve an upsex stomach…I mean an upsep stomach…with Sex Lax…Ex-Lax!”

  In his publicity photos, Schafer often posed as the secret listener perpetually on post. Bloopers are more appealing when they’re freshly captured, like fish. But Schafer also played with the image of the ham radio operator—the amateur who spreads international goodwill—and of spies eavesdropping on enemy governments. Pictures accompanying a profile of him published in Magnetic Film and Tape Recording in 1955 show Kermit and his wife, Mickey, a former model, seated side by side at tape recorders with earphones on, presumably scanning the airwaves from their home, high on a hill in New York State.

  His mountaintop aerie, the profile reported, “is a veritable listening post and monitoring station for radio and television Bloopers,” and the house is “entirely wired with audio circuits to allow recording or listening to be done anywhere.” Timed circuits turned on recorders to tape certain shows, and Kermit could control the television from bed. The whole thing was playfully calculated to look as if Schafer was turning technology back on the industry itself.

  Schafer crafted his image as a watchdog of the airwaves, tirelessly roaming the frequencies, protecting his fans and listeners not from the Communists but from broadcasters’ errant control. “When someone commits a Blooper on the air,” the profile wrote, “he is less concerned with all the people who heard it than with the man who might have been listening—that man being Kermit Schafer.”

  In truth, the king of bloopers wasn’t really a snoop. Schafer claimed that his collections were authentic, “gathered from video tapes, kinescopes, sound tracks, off-the-air recordings, and other bona fide sources.” But Schafer was a deft manipulator of “authentic” and “bona fide.” His 1974 feature-length movie, Pardon My Blooper! splices film clips to create the sense of being present at the exact moment of blundering, which had been caught only on audio. One scene juxtaposes a shot of a church and a troop of nuns with a woman’s voice announcing “our peter-pulling contest at St. Taffy’s Church.”

  However, many of his radio bloopers were re-creations or reenactments. Schafer claimed to have a recording of the first slip ever made on the radio: CBS’s Harry von Zell in 1931 making a birthday tribute to the president of the United States, Hoobert Heever. Schafer may have had the original recording, which was likely made on a wire recorder. But the quality of its sound would have been lower than it sounds on Pardon My Blooper! because Schafer had rerecorded it using a voiceover actor. A consummate entertainer, he was always willing to opt for the laugh over the truth. In his book Blooper Tube he claims to have been the first producer to blow the whistle on deceptive quiz and game shows in the late 1950s. He himself had produced some shows and told a United Press reporter, “You can’t run a panel or quiz show without some planted answers and ad libs.” Schafer always told the truth about the lies that television tells.

  The blooper products married older forms of straight-up language humor to that old standby, the sexual innuendo. If bloopers are regular slips of the tongue into which sexual content has been read by an alert, attentive listener, then Kermit Schafer had a stereotypically masculine sense of humor. Bloopers clearly bear the mark of Playboy magazine. In fact, late in his life Schafer adopted the swing
er’s garb: leather jacket, sunglasses, gold chain.

  Not surprisingly, the bloopers that Schafer seems proudest of (and so gives central billing to) are decidedly blue. Veiled jokes about boobs, dicks, balls, and butts outnumber jokes about shit, death, drugs, or race. It must have provided quite a kick to a generation worried about Communist infiltrators to realize that obscene material was being inadvertently broadcast directly into their homes. For every ten interviews with a newlywed woman (“Are you staying in Los Angeles for a while?” “Yes.” “At a hotel?” “Oh, no, we have relations in the Valley”), every thirty inadvertent titty jokes (“Stay tuned for Dickens’s immortal classic, the Sale of Two Titties!”), and every forty close calls with obscenity (“Just drop by the colonel’s place for delicious finger lickin’ Kenfucky fried chicken”), there’s only one or two about race, and none about Communists or events on the national political scene (though political figures like Adlai Stevenson, Senator William Fulbright, and then vice president Richard Nixon appear).

  Bloopers also represented a new kind of dialect humor for the media age. American humorists used to mock how African Americans, Jews, Mexicans, Germans, and hillbillies talked, making fun of the recent arrivals, the people who didn’t know the rules. Bloopers made fun of another new American group: people on TV, whether part of an emerging media elite or of the anonymous American street. Bloopers were funny because they played out a kind of identity slapstick, peeling off the mask of the media persona to reveal the errant human being beneath.