Odd Man Out 23

Good morning, ladies & gents. It's Tuesday; not only that, it's one of those Tuesdays. That means it's time to play the game that has taken America by a nasty hailstorm: Odd Man Out.

I gather that most of my long-suffering readership is satisfied concerning the amount of dumbth with which I have downed the questions. If some of you were still stumped, here and there, I can offer to list the bone question the way our basic training drill sergeants did verbally for the illiterate trainees in our company, to prep them for the military knowledge part of the course.

Sarge: You are walking along the company street, and you approach an officer, going the opposite way. Immediately, you,

a) duck behind a barracks and hope the officer never saw you
b) sing the Star Spangled Banner
↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
C) SALUTE SMARTLY AND SAY, "GOOD MORNING, SIR!"
↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑
d) ask the officer what is happening.

To further assist you in your quest for know-it-all nirvana, your narrator will, at last, provide you with a complete list of things that will or will not be factors in determining which listed item is the Odd Man Out. Take notes, there will be a quiz.

Race No
Gender No
Hairstyle No
Owns/Doesn't own parrot Yes
Living or dead No
Party affiliation No
Party hardy Yes
Shoe size Yes
Cup size Yes (For tea-drinkers only)
Karate belt degree No
Moles No
Warts Yes
Favorite Beatle No
Favorite battle Yes
Favorite bottle No
Number of noses No
Working propeller beanie Yes
Bribed narrator Yes
Specific gravity No
Somewhat vague gravity Yes

Study and memorize this list as you would study and memorize your zip code, and you will find your scores shooting up astronomically. You have my solemn promise.

And now, as we have all come to expect, it's time for the biweekly gag...oh, excuse me, not quite yet. Well, you've waited this long for the feeble joke. Surely you can hold out for the additional hour or so it will undoubtedly take you to read the ensuing copy. What I meant to say is, it's time for the shameless plug of a previous entry.

And now, for your edification and entertainment, I give you this session's groups.

Group 1

Theodore Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Lyndon B. Johnson
Ronald Reagan

Group 2

Walt Whitman
John Greenleaf Whittier
Julia Ward Howe
Jack Frost

Group 3

Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah
Whistle While You Work
The Woody Woodpecker Song
Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo

Group 4

Antigone
Oedipus Rex
Mourning Becomes Electra
↓ ↓ ↓
MEDEA

Group 5

Flakey Foont
Ruby the Dyke
Philbert Desenex
Snappy Sammy Smoot

Okay, got it all memorized? Good. As a reward, you get to read a joke, whereas, if you had failed in your mission, you would have had to put up with another of your narrator's awful gags.

It is just past ten at night when a woman asks her husband to go get her a pack of cigarettes. He goes off to the local market, only to remember, it closes at 9:30. Then he gets the bright idea of trying the vending machine in a nearby bar, just beyond the All-Nite Bowl-a-Rama.

While he is using the machine, a lovely redhead comes up to him and starts a conversation. Well, one thing leads to another, and the two of them end up at her apartment, in her bed.

After they have gotten it on...and on...and on...and on, the guy takes a moment to look at her clock. To his dismay, he sees it's three in the morning.

"Oh man!" he moans, "Look at the time, willya? My wife is gonna kill me."

"Well, no one held a gun to your head, sweetie," the girl reminds him.

"Okay, I think I know what to do about this. Do you have any talcum powder?"

"Yeah, but how is that going to get you out of a jam?"

"Just let me have some, and I think I'll be all right."

He gets dressed, sprinkles some powder on his hands, then drives home.

"Where the hell were you?" his wife demands to know.

"Well, ya see, it's like this," he explains. "I had to go to a bar to get your smokes, and, while I was there, I somehow managed to pick up this really hot redhead. We went back to her place and screwed our brains out for three or four hours, and that's where I was, all that time."

"Don't give me that, you selfish son-of-a-bitch!" she snaps at him. "I can tell from your hands, you went bowling again, didn't you?"

I guess we'll never know. The answers, I mean, unless we read on and check them out.

Group 1

Theodore Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Lyndon B. Johnson
Ronald Reagan

For the civilized country we imagine ourselves to be, we have assassinated a lot of presidents. On top of that, three out of the four in this group survived assassination attempts. And that's to say nothing of a couple of guys named Truman and Ford. Only Lyndon Johnson was considered not worth the powder to blow him away.

Group 2

Walt Whitman
John Greenleaf Whittier
Julia Ward Howe
Jack Frost

In what would seem to be a list of eminent American poets, there is one oddball. It is the last guy, but you knew that, right? Or did you have him confused with Robert Frost (no relation)? I stole that idea from Tommy Smothers, by the way.

Group 3

Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah
Whistle While You Work
The Woody Woodpecker Song
Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo

Remember, to get the right answer, you have to know the right reason, according to your narrator's twisted precepts. So, yes, the first one could be seen as odd and out because it was the only one to be sung on screen by a live person, but, no, that's not it. That first item is from the movie, Song of the South (a real disappointment, by the way, even if the song was pretty cool). The second, as I'm sure we all know, was from the movie, Snow White + the Seven Shrimps. Speaking of that particular movie and the songs therefrom, my brother once received a package of pictures he had sent out for development. The company's motto was "Someday my prints will come." The last one came from the English-language film adaptation of the German fable, Aschenputtel. All of these songs and films have in common that they were the property of Walt Disney. "The Woody Woodpecker Song," on the other hand, was not.

Oh, and that Aschenputtel dame? She went by the alias of Cinderella.

Group 4

Antigone
Oedipus Rex
Mourning Becomes Electra
↓ ↓ ↓
MEDEA

Antigone and Oedipus Rex, as all ardent followers of the Marvel comics know, were written by the eminent Greek tragedian, Sophocles. Mourning Becomes Electra was written by the eminent Greek tragedian, Eugene O'Neill. That last one, by some guy who remains, to this day, a popular part of puns, Euripides. Given that informational overload, suppose you tell me which is the OMO?

Say, wait a minute, you may pipe up. Didn't you say you were going to highlight the right answer, the way your drill sergeant did for you and the other illiterates in your company? People, people, people, did you learn nothing from watching Slumdog Millionaire?

Group 5

Flakey Foont
Ruby the Dyke
Philbert Desenex
Snappy Sammy Smoot

If these people all seem a little bit strange, it's because they stem from a strange, but fun, era in our recent culture, the underground, "comix." What Flakey Foont (Drawn by Robert Crumb), Ruby the Dyke (S. Clay Wilson) and Philbert Desenex (a/k/a Wonder Warthog, by Gilbert Shelton) have in common is that they all appeared in various issues of ZAP Comix. Snappy Sam-my favorite of the entire gang-never appeared in ZAP. His creator, Skip Williamson, worked mostly for Bijou Funnies.

The golden age of these comics began in the late 1960s, in conjunction with the alienation of our youth-of which I was one...way back then-from a heretofore smug society, fueled in no small part by the Viet Nam War. They sort of petered out over the course of years, but you younger readers may want to go poking around in your parents' attics to see if you can dig any of them up.

When my younger brother was still living with our parents, our dad found a bunch of these comics and ordered him to get that "puerile pornography out of this house." I can sort of understand his initial reaction, but, I maintain that Gilbert Shelton is every bit as skillful a storyteller, with his cartoon panels, as O. Henry was with the printed word.

And that, he said, wraps up yet another ridiculously-easy round of Odd Man Out. Howdja do?

Sources

Wikipedia

The Brothers Grimm

The Brothers Smothers

Own observation and experience