Smile! You’re on Candid Camera

      A poster board about a foot square has the word “oil” on one side and the word “all” on the other side.  A man is showing first one side and then the other side of the card to another person.  A first grader learning to read?  No, a Candid Camera victim.

  

  The Florist Friar joke set me to thinking about the television show from the olden days—Allen Funt’s Candid Camera.  The “all—oil” stunt was a regional joke.  Allen (or one of his crew) found some southerners who were willing to explain the difference between the two words.  It was funny because in the South, the two words are homonyms—“awl”.

     It seems the crew tried that in New England where they got the “duh” reaction—“ohl” and “erl”?  Any “joik” knows the difference.

       The secret of Candid Camera must have been the actors’ ability to engage folks on the street.  I imagine if I stopped someone and asked them to explain the two words on this big oversize card, that person would whip out his cellphone and punch 911 and have the guys in white jackets on their way. 

     Some of the Candid Camera stunts were quite complex, such as the one where the Volkswagen sitting on the street pulled apart and the front half went off leaving the rear half parked at curbside.   But the ones I remember best were quite simple once you got the victims to go along.

      They were a version of the old “gossip” game we sometimes played in the classroom.  We would form a circle.  The first person would whisper a story or something to a second person who would whisper it to the person next in the circle.  On it went until it got around the circle.  The last person in the circle would repeat what she heard out loud.  Rarely did the last person’s version have any semblance to what the first person said.

    In the Candid Camera version, it was joke-telling.  The willing victim would sit in a booth and listen to one of the Candid Camera actors tell a joke.  The actor would be replaced by another victim who listened to the initial participant repeat the joke. The first victim would be replaced by a third participant who became the listener, and so on.  Eventually, someone would not get the joke.  Then that poor person had to try to tell a joke he didn’t understand.

      Here are the two jokes I remember.  A knight on a quest wanders through the forest searching.  He is gone for days when he nears his goal.  The sun drops in the west, the rain and fog moves in, and his poor horse succumbs to exhaustion and exposure.  The knight shoulders his luggage and wanders on in the dark and the storm.  He sees a light ahead and heads for it.  It is a castle.  He knocks at the gates and seeks aid.  Could they sell or lend him a horse so that he might complete his quest?   The gate keeper replies that due to famine, plague and wars, the horse population is zero.  Just then this huge dog walks up to the gate to see what is going on.

    The knight asks, “What about that dog?  I could ride him.”

    The gate keeper looks first at the dog, then  out through the dark at the mud and rain and says, “I wouldn’t send a knight out on a dog like this.”

    Warning!  If you don’t get it, don’t try to tell it!

     The second one, the story of the Ambitious Baker:  The young baker found that if he sliced his bread loaves, they sold much better.  The problem was that slicing each loaf added to production time and labor costs.  So he thought if he could invent a way to slice two loaves at the same time, it would speed things up, lowering costs while improving sales.  So he invented the way to slice two loaves at once.  Well, if you could slice two loaves at once, why not three?  And he brought that thought to reality.

      Three loaves at a time?  Why not four?  But this time there was a problem.  He could not find a knife with a long enough blade to do four loaves at once, though he looked far and wide.

One day, he and his wife were vacationing in a town in a faraway land.  They had wandered through museums and shops when they came upon a little shop with a knife display, and there it was!  The perfect knife, the blade just the right size to slice through four loaves of bread.

       The baker turned excitedly to his wife and said, “Look Dear!  A four-loaf cleaver!”

     You can imagine how those two jokes could be butchered by someone who didn’t get the punch line.  Candid Camera viewers found the butchery humorous.

      A good friend, who shall here be mercifully nameless, once tried to tell a joke at a Lions meeting.  It was about a guy named Opporknockity.  He had a fine ear and could tune any stringed instrument perfectly without the use of the oscilloscope. He specialized in pianos.

     Once a famed pianist, a perfectionist, scheduled a concert in town.  He specified that the piano must be tuned just prior to the concert, and Mr. Opporknockity should do the tuning.  It was arranged and on the day of the concert, Opporknockity finished tuning the piano and decided to stay on to listen to the concert, being already on the premises and having paid no admission.

     In the middle of the concert in the middle of a piece, the pianist suddenly stopped and punched a key two or three times as he turned his head in dissatisfaction.  Then he saw Opporknockity in the audience.

     “Mr. Opporknockity, please come tune this F key.  It has gone out of tune, I’m afraid,” the pianist said.

    Now the punch line as my friend said it:

      “I’m sorry, I don’t tune the same piano twice.”  A pause.  Weak applause.  No laughter, except for me.

     The real punch line:  Opporknockity rose from his seat and announced proudly, “Sorry, but Opporknockity tunes but once.”

     I don’t know if my friend ever realized he missed the punch line.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him.   

   Sometimes the punch line is right.  It’s the joke that didn’t get set up properly.  This happened at school once.  The joke has to be cleaned up to be politically correct.  It refers to an Eastern European ethnicity supposed to suffer from less than normal intelligence.    

      The teachers who partook of the school lunch (best deal in town) sat at a table next to the doorway. One teacher took tickets from each student and teacher who came through the lunch line.  A student asked the ticket-taker,

       “Hey Mr. Finn, what did the (Eastern European ethnic) do with his first half dollar?”

      “I don’t know, Steve.  What did he do with his first half dollar?”

      “Married her!  Ha, ha, ha!”

      Suppressed laughter at the teacher table soon burst forth in to full-blown guffaws. Many of us had heard the joke.  The punch line was correct.  It was the joke that wasn’t told right.  

       What did the (Eastern European ethnic) do with his first fifty-cent piece?

     

     Isaac Asimov wrote a book of jokes and how to tell them.  Maybe I should write one on how not to tell them.  Meanwhile, don’t forget to smile.  You may be on Candid Camera.