Now That's Funny!: Jokes and Stories from the Man Who Keeps America Laughing

by Andy Simmons

  And that, Dear Reader, is how I landed in South Dakota and in this Jolly Dump.

  Let Me Get My Red Pencil

  Every once in awhile, I get to try my hand at editing an article that’s more than fifty words.

  The big editors don’t always trust me with anything too long because I get bored easily and start coloring in the o’s. But give me a case of Red Bull, a red pencil, a dictionary for beginners, and I’m raring to go.

  Writers aren’t perfect, even the big ones represented here, like P. J. O’Rourke or Jerry Lewis, and that’s where I, as their editor, come marching in. For example, sometimes they’re off with their punctuation. But then, so am I. Why, just the other day I toodled over to our copy editor Paul and complained, “There’s a piece of lint in the middle of this sentence and I can’t get rid of it.” Banging his head against his desk, he moaned, “That’s” BANG “not” BANG “lint” BANG, “that’s” BANG “a” BANG “comma” BANG, “you” BANG “blithering” BANG “…” I never did find out what I was because by then he’d knocked himself out.

  Something you have to understand about copy editors: They live to place commas. Oh, how they love it. Paul rings a little bell every time he successfully squeezes a comma into a sentence. I swear, sometimes working here is like working in a car dealership.

  I know how they feel, though. I love hyphens—they make punch lines stick out. And colons: They make punch lines stick out, too. Sometimes I’ll add an exclamation mark, because exclamation marks mean something’s funny! Really funny!! No, really, really (I also love italics) funny!!! But here’s where I get messed up: (Ooh, a colon!). Is it an exclamation mark or an exclamation point? I’d ask Paul, but he’s busy placing commas.

  Now here’s something most people don’t know—editors have their own language. For example, STET is editor-talk for “keep this text” and is to be used after you’ve spilled half the ink in your ballpoint pen crossing something out and writing STUPID!! STUPID!!! STUPID!!!! (in this case, the exclamation points—or is it marks?—do not mean something is funny) next to it, only to realize a minute later that you’ve been reading the article upside down, and that if you just turned the page right side up, it’s not so bad. STET!

  I also like how STET sounds like STAT, which is very doctorish and adds to my daydreams during those long, tedious articles that are longer than fifty words.

  Here are some more words in editor-speak: HED is the title. DEK is the subtitle. LED are the first few sentences. Clearly, these were conceived at a time before copy editors existed. Here is some new slang I’d like to add to the editorial lexicon:

  UGH: This guy’s life is weirder than mine.

  HIC: I’m hitting the bottle if he doesn’t get to the point soon.

  ZZZ: I fell asleep halfway through the LED.

  KIL: She’s funnier than me. Delete before boss reads.

  SOS: I just gave myself a paper cut.

  HEN: Remember to buy eggs.

  Here now are some of the funniest articles I’ve edited from people not named Andy Simmons. They chose names like Lenore Skenazy, Lance Contrucci, and Jimmy Tingle.

  There’s one other name in the mix, one that might sound a bit familiar. That’s because he insists on using my last name. The guy goes by the name Matty Simmons and claims he’s my father. The fact that I’ve seen him hanging around my mother since the day I was born and he paid for my college tuition lends some credence to his argument. Among his many accomplishments (like eating twenty-five cherrystone clams in under a minute), Dad is a movie producer. His films include Animal House and Vacation. And in this chapter, I’m reprinting an article he wrote for Reader’s Digest regarding that great mystery: What, exactly, does a movie producer do?

  People wonder if being his son is how I got into the ha-ha business, and I always respond, “Damn right!” Dad put me to work at National Lampoon, which he created so I would have something to do after school.

  A lot of people shy away from nepotism; not me. I’m a big proponent of it. In fact, it’s worked out so well for me, I wonder why everyone doesn’t try it. I’m always shocked when someone admits that they got their job through hard work and perseverance. Why? I try to tell them that their life would have been far simpler had they only had a well-connected father. But they usually mumble something under their breath that includes the words spoiled, brat, and firing squad.

  I’ve tried to repay the favor by using Dad in the pages of Reader’s Digest. He’s a font of stories. Like the odd memo he forwarded to me that his friend, writer/director Harold Ramis, received from a movie executive regarding a script Harold had worked on. The exec’s request: “Can you tone down the subtlety?”

  Dad also likes to collect weird stage directions from movie and TV scripts he’s read. Here are some that we ran a few years ago:

  • “The detective enters a room and finds a body. (You don’t have to use a real dead body. You could use a dummy or give a real actor knock-out drops to make sure he was still and looked dead).”

  • “Seeing the suspect drive off, the detective starts the motor of his car. First, he opens the door and gets in the car.”

  • “A very weird looking woman greets him at the door. She should be very gaunt and nervous, sort of like the MGM executive on this picture.”

  • “He is shot in the chest. It hurts.”

  But the best thing about Dad is that he knows where all the commas and punctuation are supposed to go. I pass his articles on to Paul, sit back, and watch him struggle to fit in a comma.

  The Petrified Woman!

  BY LENORE SKENAZY

  Stop! Are you about to eat a scoop of onion dip? It could cause meningitis. Showing some kids around work? For God’s sake, keep them away from the stapler. Planning a walk? Bring plenty of water or you could end up in a coma!

  And let’s not even talk about what could happen if you take the kids to the mall and find yourselves contemplating an escalator ride. Suffice it to say, you should tie their shoes, insist they hold the handrail, place them in the center of the step, and say your prayers (but not on your knees, for obvious reasons).

  “Perhaps most important, learn where the emergency shutoff button is so you can turn off the escalator if someone gets trapped while riding,” says an American Academy of Pediatrics report, ominously titled “Hidden Dangers and Child Safety.”

  That’s right: If you want to be safe—and who doesn’t?—every time you ride the escalator with a child, you should first make sure you can leap into action and slam off the calamitous contraption, mid-mangle.

  That’s not too much to think about when you’re on a little shopping trip, is it?

  I say it is. I say we are being warned about the weirdest, wildest, least likely, and most far-fetched, ill-founded, and downright bizarre possibilities to the point where we are being scared stupid. “Watch out” mania rules the media. As Ellen DeGeneres joked in her best newscaster voice, “It could be the most deadly thing in the world, and you may be having it for dinner. We’ll tell you what it is tonight at eleven.” With warnings coming at us thick and fast from every media source, and especially from Dr. Oz—a one-man worry machine—we are in danger (Danger!) of becoming too scared to even get off the couch and go to the bathroom…which is probably just as well because did you know there are germs lurking in the toilet bowl? Pretty scary!

  All the warnings above are real; the stapler one came from a friend’s interoffice memo. But they’re just the tip of the iceberg. (Watch out for those, too!) For about a month, I watched TV, cruised the Internet, and read a bunch of books, magazines, and e-mail “tips” to see what the average American gets warned about in the course of everyday life.

  The result? I am typing this from inside a giant safe-deposit box. You can feed me—but no onion dip, please—from a hole I drilled in the side.

  I don’t have a cell phone, because it could give me a brain tumor. I don’t have a bottle of water, because the plastic could disrupt my endocrine recepto
rs and turn me into a woman. Oh, wait. I already am.

  Well…see?

  I don’t have a mattress, because the fumes could be toxic. I don’t eat meat; it could give me asthma. I can’t have a pet; I could trip over it. I can’t wash my hair, because shampoo could be carcinogenic (and also because I’m in a box). But I can’t leave the box and go to the grocery store, because I might be tempted to put my kid in a shopping cart. And according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “parents are strongly encouraged to seek alternatives to transporting their child in a shopping cart until an effective revised performance standard for shopping cart safety is implemented in the United States.”

  That’s right: The modern American shopping cart is just too dangerous. Parents must come up with an alternative. Maybe a dogsled? A mini Hummer? A kid-size version of those exercise balls you put gerbils in to roll around?

  Oh, well, I probably shouldn’t leave my box anyway, because if I go out in the sun, it could give me cancer. Then again, so could sunscreen. Then again…Oh, heck, I’m not really in a box. That was just a bit of hyperbole, a trick I learned from the warning industry itself. It works this way: The media will dig up some new study or, alternatively, find some tragic example of something really strange that may sort of prove that someone somewhere is somehow in at least a smidgen of danger. The next thing you know, it’s “Why you should never _______________ [fill in a verb].” Or “Up next! Is your _______________[fill in a noun] dangerous?” The answer to the latter is always yes!

  Let’s take a look at some of the warnings out there:

  Watch Out for Dip!

  Dr. Oz was celebrating Super Bowl Sunday, or, as he said his family likes to call it, “Super Germ Sunday.”

  What fun they must be.

  Anyway, Dr. Oz had some woman serve dip at her church, and then he sent the dip remains to a lab to see what was in it, besides the inevitable onion soup mix.

  Guess what. The lab discovered Group B streptococcus, bacteria generally found in the intestinal tract that can probably be traced to the detested double-dippers. Furthermore, said Dr. Oz, these bacteria can lead to things like…meningitis!

  He neglected to add that strep B is usually a hazard only to newborns (who aren’t big dip enthusiasts), and bacterial meningitis is quite rare. Instead, he left viewers ready to lynch the next guy who sticks a half-chomped chip in the guacamole.

  But it’s not just dip that’s going to kill you. Dr. Oz has devoted other segments to the dangers of cosmetics-counter makeup (which he recommends you spray with disinfectant), tanning beds, shoes, nail salons, and that silent scourge: the mints you get next to the cash register in restaurants. Really, he did a whole big thing on these, and his grossed-out audience swore off them forever.

  As if so many millions have been felled by free mints.

  In Dr. Oz’s world, pretty much anything that anyone else has ever touched, you shouldn’t. He considers this common sense. I consider it obsessive-compulsive disorder. Since we’re both alive and healthy, you can pick your camp.

  Mine gets to keep eating free mints.

  Watch Out for Overheating!

  Warning! “Hot weather can have a dire effect on senior health,” reads the website Everyday Inflated Fears. Er, sorry—Everyday Health. So what are the symptoms of overheating? You’ll never guess. Tops on the list: thirst! Then come those ever-so-subtle hints, including “staggering,” “fainting,” “high body temperature,” and, in case you still didn’t get the message, “coma.”

  My God, is there any way to avoid this stealthy danger? Thankfully, yes. Try these obscure but possibly helpful remedies: “Drink plenty of liquids.” Also: “Avoid exercising in the heat.” And: “Cover windows that are in direct sunlight.” Do you think?

  Not that I ever want to see seniors suffer from overheating, but I also don’t want to see seniors suffer from being treated as if they’ve got bingo chips for brains. Anyone who’s been around for sixty or more years has probably figured out by now that when you’re thirsty, you should drink, and when you’re staggering, it’s time to take a break. Same goes for when you’re in a coma.

  Watch Out for Musical Instruments!

  “You don’t want your child to live in a bubble…but remember that the more chances you take, the more likely your child will be injured or killed by an accident,” reads the passive-aggressive Hidden Dangers to Your Child’s Safety page on about.com.

  And so it warns about the “hidden dangers” of bouncy houses and parade floats (“which can run over a child along the parade route”) and my favorite new fear, “musical instruments, such as a guitar, that can hurt a young child who is playing with the string…if one of the strings that is under high tension breaks, flying into his eye, or scratches his face.”

  Forget the terrible grammar.

  To me, that is the gold standard of warnings: a warning about an item that has been around almost forever and never been associated with any danger except to the eardrums of parents and music teachers. And now it’s a bona fide health hazard! To come up with not just one but two possible injuries from a guitar takes warning genius. My hat is off to you, basic child–safety writers. (I just hope it doesn’t accidentally hit you in the eye and scratch your cornea, possibly causing blindness.)

  Watch Out for Weather!

  Have you noticed that when a big storm is coming up, it’s no longer just a storm; it is “Winter Storm ’07!” or “Heat Wave ’10!” Jack Glass has. He’s a scientist and an expert on disaster communication, and he has been watching weather “creep” for the past five years or so. “Now everything has a year after it,” says Glass. The not-so-hidden message? This is it! The biggie! The one you’ll always remember! “So everybody is out buying their milk, bread, and eggs, and suddenly it comes and goes with absolutely no impact.”

  But at least you’ve got food in the house.

  Watch Out for Warnings That Sound as if They Were Written by Lawyers on Crack!

  T-Mobile put out a set of instructions for its customers, encouraging them to “use your phone in a safe and sensible manner.” One of these “sensible” tips? “If your device rings and you discover it’s in the backseat, do not crawl over the seat to answer it while driving.”

  That’s verbatim. And it pretty much illustrates the whole problem. We get so many warnings flying at us that real dangers (drunk driving) and the almost hallucinatory ones (backseat-climbing driving) get jumbled together. What’s really going to kill us? A kamikaze float? Winter Storm ’11? Or sitting in the La-Z-Boy watching the news and overdosing on Doritos?

  The fact is, the more strange and striking the warning, the less likely it is to be true, says David Freedman, author of Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them. We viewers tune in to the shocking studies because for some strange reason, we like to be scared. As kids, we had ghost stories. As adults, we have health stories. Either way, we listen up because something that seemed so innocent is about to kill us! But shouldn’t it have killed us already? If the world is full of such horrible ills, why are we living longer than ever?

  Turns out, we live in very safe times. Not perfectly safe; nothing is. But safe enough that instead of worrying about diphtheria, we’re worrying about dip.

  Pay attention to your health—and a little less to the health scare of the day—and you’ll be fine. Provided, that is, you watch out for that onion dip, and the shopping carts, and your kid’s Polly Pockets, and Fall Foliage Color-palooza ’10, and the top button on your shirt, and…

  Humorist Jimmy Tingle Proposes an Alternative to the Alternative to the Alternative Energy Plan

  BY JIMMY TINGLE

  There are more than two million people in this country currently serving time. For exercise, they lift weights all day. They get angrier and more frustrated, angrier and more frustrated, angrier and more frustrated. And when they’re released, they are angrier and more frustrated…and bigger. We don’t want them just getting bigger; we als
o want them to give back to society.

  As part of my comprehensive alternative-energy package, I am suggesting that every prison cell in the United States be equipped with an exercise bike, hooked up to a generator, generating electricity, with a very long cord going to the home of the prisoner’s victim to help him out with his electric bill.

  We could have another long cord going to the local public school, hooked up to a video screen showing the guy in his prison cell on an exercise bike, as a deterrent, like a modern Scared Straight!, only this would be called Bored Straight.

  If pedaling is good for prisoners, I say it’s good enough for us, too, especially if it’ll improve the environment. Here’s my idea: Forget hybrids and electrics. Why can’t Detroit build cars that we pedal? Like the Flintstones?

  I would pedal, my wife would pedal—even my thirteen-year-old son could pedal.

  “But, Dad, I’m tired.”

  “Quiet. I’m taking you to soccer. The least you can do is pedal.”

  Cars that we pedal would help combat obesity, get us in shape, tighten up our abs, tighten up our butts, and bring back something that has been missing from American culture for at least thirty years: hitchhiking. No one picks up hitchhikers anymore. On your way home from work this week, if you see some big biker-looking dude with long hair and a leather jacket by the side of the road hitchhiking, you’re probably not going to pick him up. However, if you needed someone to help you pedal…

  “Excuse me. Are you a Hells Angel?”