Yesterday, while waiting for Straight Dope to finish its maintenance, I visited a site that examines Urban Legends. Warning: the cited site is littered with annoying web-effects and overdone graphics, and has crashed my Explorer several times, forcing me to reboot. But I thought it worth enduring the sporadic bugginess because the site is so rich in content, so I went back again and again between crashes to read delightful stories about how urban legends started and spread.
Until I got to this one. This is not an urban legend, and I know it is not because I saw the episode myself.
Let me recap for you briefly with the facts as I recall them: Some years back, on a certain episode of either the Newlywed Game (or else the New Newlywed Game), the question was asked, “Where is the strangest place you and your wife have made whoopie?” (I think, but don’t recall for certain, that it was the final bonus question.) One of the contestants (I think it was the first one asked) responded with almost no hesitation, “I guess that’d have to be up the butt, Bob.”
Immediately, a sustained roar of hysterical laughter welled up from the audience as the show’s director switched from camera to camera, capturing the friendly and innocent smile of the caught-off-guard guest, the expression of stunned amazement on Bob Eubanks’ face, and the knee slapping, side grabbing chortles, chuckles, and screams from the delighted audience.
I myself went into one of those rare laughing fits where you aren’t sure whether you’re going to live or die because you can hardly catch a breath and your diaphragm begins to feel like you were punched in the solar plexis by one of Glitch’s students. My roommate at the time, who was watching it with me, bent over double, slid out of his chair, and finally threw himself prostrate onto the floor, experiencing an uncontrolable laughing session of his own.
I know this happened except possibly for irrelevant details. When I saw the article at Snopes yesterday, I asked my fiancee about it, and she too recalled seeing the episode on the Game Show network just recently. Snopes declared it an urban legend and categorized it as false. I’ll summarize their reasoning here, paraphrasing them to avoid copyright infringement:
(1) There is a dearth of contemporary print reference.
What? Whom did they expect to publish this? The New York Times? Newsweek? TV Guide? Who is going to print a story that basically says, “Oh wow, something funny happened on a game show yesterday.”? And if not the popular press, have the nay-sayers conducted an exhaustive search of seedier publications? Probably not. Yet they make the sweeping statement that there are no contemporary references in print.
(2) Nobody can pin down when this happened.
Well, duh. As I recall, when I was wedged between the couch and coffee table clinging to my life with what little breath I could grab, it never occurred to me, “Oh, I’d better document this date and time because some moron ten years from now might not believe me when I say I saw this.” But what I did do was inform everybody whom I knew about it for the next several days.
(3) Nobody has produced a tape of the show.
Oh, please. When has anybody ever taped the Newlywed Game? It is nothing but an alpha wave generator, intended to entertain briefly and then disappear into the bowels of forgotten thoughts. Who would ever have anticipated a chance to preserve a dream moment like this?
(4) Bob Eubanks doesn’t recall it, and is offering a $10,000 reward for anyone who can prove it happened.
Admittedly, it is remarkable if indeed Eubanks cannot recall the episode. But there are plausible reasons why he might not: he might have been jaded by his years of exposure to the many silly answers he got to his inane questions; he might have a neural anomoly that causes him not to distinguish the outrageous from the ordinary remarkable; he might just have forgotten, all in a day’s work. Besides, until I read the Snopes account, I never knew about any reward. Snopes asks why no one has claimed the “easy ten grand”. Well, what the hell is easy about it? Who (having heard of the reward) has access to all the tapings and outtakes of both incarnations of the Newlywed Show?
(5) Network censors would have caught it.
Nonsense. There is not a dirty word to be found anywhere in “up the butt”. I have seen racier stuff on the Simpsons cartoon, for heaven’s sake. Censors are a funny bunch of squirrels, and might easily have decided that this was just too precious to dedact. Anyway, why wouldn’t they censor the whole idea of “making whoopie”? Is “on the ironing board” or “on the washing machine” any cleaner?
Now, the reason this is a great debate, rather than pointless mundane stuff is that it brings into question the whole purpose, method, and motivation of the hyperskeptics who don’t believe anything exists that they do not witness themselves. Naturally, after seeing this at Scopes, I did not read another thing there because, in my mind, their credibility was already ruined.
This is a point Tris raised in the Atheist Religion Part II thread, and in this context, deserves a discussion of its own. Is it possible to be too skeptical? Whereas people who are blindly faithful miss lies, do those who are blindly skeptical miss truth? Is skepticism itself a sort of “anti-faith”? Simply a mirror concept of faith? Faith that things aren’t possible?
Is skepticism necessarily a trait of the atheist? I don’t think so. Most of the atheists I’ve encountered here are not so much skeptical of God’s existence as they are uninterested. They aren’t anti-God; they just don’t care.
There is little use in debating whether the episode in question actually aired. If you saw it you know it did, and if you didn’t you can hardly make any claim about it. But does hyperskepticism in general lead to a jaded and dull intellect the same as hyperfaith? I think it does. And I think I will take all claims that popular stories are urban legends with a grain of salt from now on.
Your thoughts?
I have done the same thing – putting together two different memories and thinking they were one. But when the evidence arose to show that it couldn’t have been that way, I realized that my memory had been wrong.