For quite a while now I've felt a certain disdain for news anchors, radio "personalities," and sportscasters. These people are paid to run their mouth constantly so as to alleviate the typical American's fear of silence (which apparently is called sedatephobia, I've just learned), so naturally, since there's really not that much interesting to say on any subject for hours on end, they can become quite annoying in a short amount of time. Radio personalities are just useless, especially the ones who come in twos and go by their first names (bonus points if their names make them sound like dumb rednecks); these guys tend to sing songs about flatulence and the like and usually clog up your local record store's comedy section with albums named after female genitalia. News anchors probably bother me the least, but they definitely annoy me when they break character and start straying from the teleprompter; nothing's worse than seeing a news anchor try to tell a lame joke about a green puppy, then segue into a story about suicide bombers. Or so I thought. Tonight while football was on my TV (I hesitate to say I was watching it, since I had been reading a book during the game), a sportscaster made the same fatal mistake of telling a joke. Unlike the news anchor, however, the problem wasn't that the joke was unfunny, but rather this sportscaster's overestimation of the intellect of his fellow sportscasters who then attempted to expound on that joke with an even funnier one. Here's how it went down:
Sportscaster 1: "I'm going to make a guess here. You could count on less than one hand the number of balls the Steelers are going to throw..."
giggling ensues
Sportscaster 2: "You could probably count them on less than one finger!"
Now there's no better way to kill a joke than by trying to explain it, but I figured this one's already rigor mortis by now anyway so no harm done. You see, the first sportscaster was trying to say that the number of balls the Steelers would throw was zero, hence the ability to count them on less than one hand, or no hands if you will. However, apparently the second sportscaster was thinking of the type of no hand that has at least one finger, so he felt it best to correct the first sportscaster by saying one could count on less than one finger the number of balls thrown, which would eliminate all doubt that the number was zero. And the comedic genius that is the sportscaster strikes again. |