Front Porch: When words are funny for all the wrong reasons

There was a story in The Spokesman-Review’s food section last month in which a local restaurateur remarked that most people in this region don’t know what hush puppies are.

I had an immediate flashback to my favorite funny food story, one in which the deep-fat fried balls of mostly cornmeal (known throughout the South as hush puppies) are a popular side dish. I still smile when I think of it.

A good number of decades ago, a friend, who hails from Wisconsin, married a man from the South, where the two of them worked before moving north, eventually arriving in Spokane. They were visiting with her family in Sheboygan and went out to eat, when he asked the server if hush puppies came with the meal.

The server, a woman of a good number of years and who’d likely seen all sorts of bizarre restaurant behavior, paused and looked at him for many seconds, until, finally she asked, “You mean the shoes?”

I’ve also lived in the South, where back in my younger days, all carbonated beverages were referred to as coke. You could ask for Dr Pepper by name or maybe a soda, but coke was a generic term. I had my own comeuppance when moving to Spokane and was asked at a restaurant if I wanted a pop. I had left my own pop back in Florida with my mom, so it took me a second to realize I was being offered a beverage and not a new parent.

I still maintain that the use and misuse of words makes for the best humor.

To wit – I worked for several years with a woman who was an unintentional Norm Crosby. Crosby was a stand-up comedian from Massachusetts who was known as the Boston Mangler because of his deliberate mispronunciation of words. He was also known as the King of Malaprop. I especially love that in his obituary in 2020, it was written that he often got a standing ovulation when he performed and noting how he spoke from his diagram.

Yes, groan if you must, but it was funny.

My co-worker’s malapropisms, however, were also funny … but not intentional. Once she sent a memo out to the entire organization in which she corrected a previous memo which had listed the incorrect time and date of an event. She concluded the correction with this sentence: “I am sorry if this has caused you any incontinence.”

Boy, me, too.

When I was a full-time staff reporter at The Spokesman-Review, back when I still had pigment in my hair and a spring in my step, we had a news editor, Roger Conley, who kept a scrapbook of headlines that had evaded the eyes of proofreaders and were so wrongly printed. And funny, of course.

Some of them cannot be reprinted here because they are varying degrees of naughty. I’m not sure why it turns out that way, but it does. Of the few I can mention, there are these from Roger’s scrapbook –

A small story announced that a physical therapy association was holding a large meeting in Spokane. The headline was supposed to read “Therapists arrive Thursday,” but instead, an em space was mistakenly placed in the first word, so the headline read “The rapists arrive Thursday.”

Back in the day when engagements and weddings were covered with small or sometimes larger stories in the paper, especially if they involved people of note in the community, often including a photo. One story about the engagement of the daughter from a prominent family was supposed to be topped with a headline reading “Susie So-and-So’s betrothal announced.”

But, alas, the headline writer had a Norm Crosby moment, so what appeared in print was “Susie So-and-So’s brothel announced.”

I’m pretty sure Susie’s parents were not amused, but if those of you reading this aren’t smiling, I suggest your senses of humor are being held hostile by therapists.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net.