Inktober 29: #Massive
I knew some of America's Funniest People
When I was at Furman University, some of my friends worked up a gag whereby the Paladin mascot could surf down the court at halftime. (The Paladin, in case you didn't know, is a kind of knight.) They rounded up a surfboard and removed the bottom fin. Four or five students lay on the floor with the surfboard lying on top of them. The Paladin stood on top of the surfboard. Then the students rolled over in unison, propelling the surfboard forward by the same principle by which caterpillar tracks operate on a tank or a bulldozer. As the surfboard moved forward, it left behind the student at the stern of the board. That student would then jump up, run to the front of the board, lie down again, and rejoin the rotation. They cycled through that way while the PA played “Wipeout” and the Paladin gesticulated in a surfer-ish manner.
A producer from the show “America’s Funniest People” saw a video of the Surfing Paladin and was so #massive-ly impressed that he wanted to feature him in a segment. His crew came down to Greenville, SC, and filmed the gag, and soon my friends were enjoying their fifteen seconds of fame (possibly less).
A few years later my friend Marvin, one of the participants in the surfing gag, was a resident working at an emergency room in Birmingham. (You may remember Marvin from the Oct 19 episode of Inktober, in which he tried to take his wife Carla to the Dwarf House for a very special date night.) Anyway, he was setting a child’s broken femur* and the child was howling, and her parents were gnashing their teeth.** It was 2 in the morning, and the TV in the ER was playing reruns of “America’s Funniest People.”
Amidst the chaos of the ER, Marvin glanced up at the television and recognized the episode (I think maybe he watched it pretty often on a VHS tape he had made.)*** He stopped what he was doing and said, “Shhh…watch.”
Seeing their doctor transfixed, the child and her parents all went silent and gazed at the television, where a college student in a knight costume was surfing along a gym floor. And the patient’s dad said, “Wait…that’s you.”****
Sometimes when Marv pulls a dad joke, his kids tell him he’s not funny. Marv says, “Not true. I’m one of America’s Funniest People.”
*Marv doesn’t remember the child’s actual ailment, so I plugged in the broken femur to ratchet up the drama. It’s an old storytelling trick.
**Also, there was no howling or gnashing of teeth. Folks in the business call this literary license.
***More literary license.
****NOT literary license. Marv tells this for the truth.
#inktober2023