Spring Snakes
I my last post I mentioned my semi-famous Spring Snake story, which it seems I’ve never actually told. This disappoints me as I’ve always been fairly proud of that joke, mostly because it shouldn’t have worked.
Maybe you’ve seen cans of spring snakes before, or as I see they are called on the internet, Snake Nut Cans. They are simply springs in a metal can with a covering to simulate a snake. Not terribly funny and not much of a surprise since the cans always say something generic like “Fancy Mixed Nuts” or some other such phrase. It’s the generic quality that usually causes people to realize it’s a gag right away. Nothing good comes out of a can that has no company information on it.
A friend of mine in high school came up with a solution though. In Michigan there is a company called The Morley Candy Makers. Morley was the candy you sold during school fund raisers, and as a result was always sort of around. One of their products was called Almond Pecandy Crunch, and if you click the link you’ll find it comes in a paper tube sort of canister. Well, once upon a time, it same in a metal can with a metal lid. This friend of mine took one of those cans, and the spring snake idea, and put them together. His thought was that he could catch more people that way and he was right. Even though the metal cans had long since been discontinued by that point, people still fell for it because well all knew Morley Candy and everyone knew the logo and people stop thinking after they hit recognition.
My only problem with his gag was that I thought he was too active in his approach. Brian wasn’t the sort to actively hand out candy, and he was a little to aggressive in trying to get other people to open the tin. I said that I could get better results telling people exactly what was in the can and getting them to open it that way. He said that was bollocks and so we tried the experiment.
I walk in with the can and set it down on a table with a few people. I then sit down as if I hadn’t just set a ticking time bomb on the table and start drawing on a sketch pad. One girl asks, quite foolishly I still feel “Is that Morley popcorn?” which is silly because it says so right on the tin.
“No,” I replied looking up from my sketch pad, looking as if I’ve only told her an absolute truth, “It’s a can of spring snakes.”
“It is not.” She says, smiling in that way some people do when they think they’re being put on. “Spring snakes come in those fake cans, my brother has one.”
“Oh.” I said going back to my pad. “Well, if you want some go ahead.”
I feel this phrasing was very important. All I told her was that she could open the can if she wanted some. I never said some what and I never instructed her to open it. Everything that happened to her in the next ten seconds was entirely her own fault.
She gives me a funny look, and then grips the top of the can in her right hand. With her left hand holding the can and her right on the lid she twists and pulls at the lid. Two spring snakes come flying out (the Pecandy can is bigger than a normal spring snake can) and she shrieks like she’s just seen a rat on the table but would realize it was just a math teacher’s toupee in a moment. The can goes flying one way, the lid sails off in the distance and bounces off a wall, and she throws up her hands to her face as if she expects these springs to go for her eyes.
“I told you it was spring snakes.” I said as she looks angrily at me.
I still maintain that this joke shouldn’t have worked, even though it did and I’m informed that it has worked later by other people. I men I told her exactly what was in the can! I followed the basic tenet of showmanship. I told her what I was going to do, then I did it, and then I told her what I just did. Okay, I made her and unwilling participant in what I was doing, but I did tell her the complete truth about what was in the can.
Those are the kind of jokes I like best, when I tell the truth and have people not believe me. Well, actually partly it’s my fault. People get annoyed with my deadpan demeanor sometimes because I can tell a joke while seeming like I’m telling them something about bridge building. I can do things without a flicker of humor or joviality. It’s a bad habit that actually can (and does) get me into trouble if people aren’t sure that I’m joking. I developed the habit as a form of protest against everything in the world being said sarcastically as if that were still new and unusual. I treat everything as serious and tend to tell my jokes that way too. It puts people off when I act like sarcasm isn’t a joke at all and that everything said is a true reflection of how things are.
Still, I don’t have much sympathy for the people who get caught out by it. It serves them right for treating me like I’m a liar or something.
April Fool’s Day
April Fool’s Day
I’m not actually all that fond of April Fool’s Day on the Internet. I’m not seriously opposed to it or anything, I just don’t love it. The problem is two fold and I’ll explain both here. The first is that there isn’t much originality going on. As my own deliberately straight faced and not funny gag exposed, rickrolling was the official APD prank for April 2008. This is sad because it’s at least a month or two since I first saw it and it wasn’t all that funny the first time. I suppose it’s nice and harmless that way, but not all that funny. At least I didn’t spend any time on my lame non-joke though. I got the link from someone else.
You can only hope to trick someone by being the first joke they see, or by being so clever that you can bend spoons with your fingers and trick people into thinking you did it with your mind. I like funny gags, but the same gag over and over doesn’t do anything for me. I couldn’t think of anything beyond a retread of my famous* spring-snakes gag so I went with that. It wasn’t funny, and that was the point.
The second problem is a bit more difficult to explain why it’s a problem. News sites tend not to delete their old April Fool’s Day articles when the day is done. So you’ve still got gags like this one from Cinematical floating around years later. The problem then becomes when someone, looking for information about something, stumbles upon one of these jokes later. Granted this example can be easily refuted, by simply clicking the last link, but they’re not always so easily decoded.
Hol once found an article about some new fabric or other that was supposed to go into production sometime. Now, it was January when she read this story, but the article was dated April 1st, so she couldn’t tell if it was meant as a joke or if it was just a piece of vaporware or what. It makes anything posted with an April 1st date suspect the rest of the year.
I think I prefer pranks that are more dependent on the person actually being there and coning you. It’s like a magic trick in a way. I don’t want a description of a magic trick, even watching a video is somewhat underwhelming. What I really want is to be right there while the trick is being done, preferably while looking the practitioner in the eye. For me, a lot depends on the veracity of the person pulling the gag, and how they handle the joke.
Anyway, if you want to read about some famous jokes, there is a list of the Top 100 APD Hoaxes at the Museum of Hoaxes you can read.
*It will be famous after I write it. It seems I’ve never told this story before.
My April Fool’s Joke
Please click here to be rickrolled.
More Movies…
I bought Ladron Que Roba A Ladron more or less on a whim. I got it because I saw an advertisement on 3:10 to Yuma and decided to pick it up.
It’s pretty good, but not great. Scale back Ocean’s Eleven so that it’s one guy being robbed, drop the number of participants for 11 to 7 or 8, give it the budget that O11 had for Brad Pitt’s hairdresser, and cast a Spanish speaking cast and you’ll start to get the idea of what to expect. The hook is that this that they intend to rob the guy by posing as immigrant workers because no one ever pays any attention to them. The movie actually hammers this point a lot less than you’d think, because there isn’t much time. The movie is only 100 minutes and they keep the pace moving at a pretty good clip.
What really cemented the Ocean’s Eleven thing though is that the guy the heroes are robbing is played by a guy called Saúl Lisazo, who looks like a Latin George Cloney. I mean it’s right down to the same hair cut.
As a comedy, as this is primarily a comedy, it works pretty well. I have the basic 5 words of Spanish that most Americans can manage so I had to read the subtitles, which probably means I missed a lot of the humor, but I still managed.
Also I watched most of The Public Enemy, but I was very tired and had to switch it off to go to bed. I’ll finish it later today.
