From: twcaps@tennyson.lbl.gov (Terry Chan)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: Anyone heard this one? New UL?
Date: 23 Jul 92 03:12:26 GMT
Reply-To: TWChan@lbl.gov (Terry Chan)
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, California
NNTP-Posting-Host: 128.3.12.117

kja2192@tamsun.tamu.edu (Kevin Alexander) writes:
  
   [Story of a man and a woman doing It doggie style.  The family 
    cat swats at the fellow's balls and he then puts his wife's 
    head through the headboard deleted.]

  +>I though this to be funny and plausable, I guess, but I heard the
  +>same thing from a friend of mine who worked at a Sam's here at
  +>college.  This time it was a friend of his (I doubt the same guy).
  +
Then gfowler@javelin.sim.es.com (Gary Fowler) writes:
  +
  +I read a similar but not identical story that appeared in some
  +obscure publication called the Worland Senior Center Newsletter.
  +Actually I only have a photocopy of the article.  It is titled
  +"Irons, zippers, and broken arms".  See if you think it's the
  +same genre of UL:
  +
  +     That's the public version.  In private he confesses
  +   that it happened when his wife brought some potted
  +   plants inside that had been out on the patio all day.
  +   A garter snake had hidden in one of the pots and later
  +   slithered out across the floor where his wife had
  +   spotted it.
  +     "I was in the bathtub when I heard her scream" he
  +   related.  "I thought she was being murdered, so I
  +   jumped out to go help her and didn't even grab a towel.
  +     "When I ran into the living room, she yelled that a
  +   snake was under the couch.  I got down on my hands and
  +   knees to look for it, and my dog came up behind me and
  +   cold-nosed me.  I guess I though it was the snake, and
  +   I fainted.
  +     "My wife thought I'd had a heart attack and called for
  +   an ambulance.  I was still groggy when it arrived, so
  +   the medics lifted me onto a stretcher.
  +     "When they were carrying me out, the snake came out
  +   from under the couch and frightened one of the medics.
  +   He dropped his end of the stretcher, and that's when I
  +   broke my arm."
  +
  +The pet surprising a naked man from behind seems to be the
  +common thread between the two stories.  That's why I think
  +they are of the same genre.  By the way, the other two
  +stories in the article (the one about the iron and the one
  +about the zipper) were classic documented UL's.  The one
  +I quoted, I hadn't heard before but I figured it was a UL
  +also.  Guilt by association you might say.

Gary,

As pointed out by Bill Nelson, your story is a classic urban 
legend.  Jan Harold Brunvand uses the term "Hilarious Accident"
stories (other terms include "Red Wagon stories" and "Mack 
Sennets").  From the stories I have seen I think a likely link
between your story and Kevin Alexander's is the amusing accident
that leads to the injury (although Kevin's is somewhat less
amusing, perhaps because it strikes closer to home?).

A common motif (as Bill also points out) is the ending of the
story with some injury caused by the relaying of the story to
someone carrying the fellow's stretcher and thus dropping him.

In _The Vanishing Hitchhiker_, JHB relays 4 treatments of the
story:

1.  Where a fellow incurs this injury because he flipped his
    cigarette into the toilet, not realizing his wife had
    sprayed it heavily with hair spray to kill a spider
    (also known as "The Exploding Toilet").

2.  A guy was using a rope tied around his waist which was tossed 
    over the roof and tied to the car's bumper to allow him to
    either fix the antenna or clean the snow off the roof.  His
    wife, not knowing what he was up to gets into the car and drives
    off to the beauty parlor.

3.  The bottomless female skier in a story better read in the original.

4.  A story where a would-be gasoline thief is found sick to his stomach
    outside an RV with a siphon hose sticking outside the owner's spare
    gas tank which was converted to an auxillary toilet tank (can that
    sentenced be parsed?  Probably not.).

Others are described in _The Mexican Pet_ and _The Choking Doberman_.
A story very similar to Gary's is entitled "A Snake Story" in TMP.
My favorite was a variation on the Exploding Toilet one which was faxed
to me by someone who's name is buried in my files.  It and the story
of the man on the roof were both circulated as articles by Reuters
(JHB mentions a Reuters story for the man on the roof from Cape Town,
South Africa in 1978/79).

JHB does note that "Hilarious Accidents" stories that include nudity
often include animals such as cats and snakes.  Herb Caen of the
_San Francisco Chronicle_ has a story similar to Gary's involving 
a cat rather than a snake that was published in 1964.

The appendix of _The Choking Doberman_ relays a cat story that
JHB got off USElessNET in 1983.


Terry "No pets in MY home" Chan
--
Internet:  TWChan@lbl.gov                           I disclaim all disclaimers.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban,rec.arts.books,rec.arts.sf.misc,rec.humor