If you traveled back in time a few hundred times, you’d hear a lot of interesting stories about using the restroom on a gloomy, cloudy, moonless night. ( You provided the moon. ) There were perhaps hundreds of awesome stories:” bathroom fun” predates toilets by thousands of years. In fact, the world’s oldest joke was a ( weird? ) one-liner about diarrhea.
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So that’s how it was a few hundred years ago: You’d drive your horse to the bar, drink and spend with the kids, and people absolutely told jokes on trotting out to the dirty, filthy outhouse. ( Actually,” bathroom fun” was perhaps even more stylish back then, when meal hygiene — and thus, the following gastral “unpleasantness” — wasn’t quite up to snuff, if you know what I mean. In Cowboy Country, there isn’t much bacterial shampoo.
It’s very bad: As a nation, we’ve lost all those wonderful gags… and all we got in return was enclosed wiring. ( It’s a wash. )  ,
A couple thousand years before that, the Greeks perhaps goofed on Aesop for all his stories being generic:” Actually, Aesop? ANOTHER talking pet account? C’mon”. Assop was cranking out stories like they were hero films, and the majority of his tale curls were kind of predictable. (” Boy Who Cried Wolf”, I’m looking at you. )
In today’s culture,” Aesop’s stories” refers to very aged moral tales, often with talking pets. But they were merely used to describe “hack” perhaps a couple thousand years ago. We don’t understand.
That’s because some jokes and particular types of humour are a product of their era. And when those days are over, so is the laughter.
We’ve witnessed this trend in recent# MeToo days, particularly with “edgy” pleasure, á , la Eddie Murphy, Sam Kinison, Howard Stern, and Andrew Dice Clay in the 1980s: All four were edgy performers, and by definition, trendy performers are at the “edge” of what’s socially acceptable.
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But when society changes, so do the boundaries of permissibility. And then it suddenly becomes clear that the same comedy routine that won you standing ovations in the 1980s is putting you in hot water in the 2020s.
One obsolete, deader-than-a-doornail form of humor is the letter gag: You write a ridiculous letter to someone, they can’t tell if it’s a joke or not so they send you an honest reply, and then you publish the results. They’re amazing!
And Lazlo Toth was the letter-gag’s all-time king.
Not the Lazlo Toth who vandalized Michelangelo’s Pietà. ( That guy sucks. ) I’m talking about the pen name of the great Don Novello, a. k. a. Father Guido Sarducci of” Saturday Night Live” fame. Between 1977 and 2003, he published three books:” The Lazlo Letters”,” Citizen Lazlo! : The Lazlo Letters Vol. 2″, and” From Bush to Bush: The Lazlo Toth Letters”.
All three are phenomenal, but his earlier work is the best. Using the name Lazlo Toth, Novello wrote letters to Richard Nixon, the McDonald’s corporation, and various world leaders. ( And, oddly enough, they usually wrote back. ) These books are all wonderful snapshots in time — a callback to a much different culture.
( Go buy his books. Seriously. )
In 1977, he sent a letter to President Jimmy Carter. And it began with this phrase:
The name is the main reason why we’re having so much trouble with the Panamanians right now. It ought to have been called The American Canal rather than The Panama Canal; it’s no wonder they believe they own it!
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( In the rest of the letter, he proposed building a rival canal through Galveston, but let’s not focus on that. )
A good idea is a good idea.
An American project was involved in the Panama American Canal. Between 1904 and 1914, we dug it out and built it up. In the palindrome” A man, a plan, a canal: Panama“, the “man” was the American President Teddy Roosevelt. At the time, it was the most expensive construction project in U. S. history.
Nearly 6, 000 U. S. construction workers lost their lives. Each mile of the Panama American Canal resulted in the deaths of 500 men when combined with the French fatalities.
In light of this, Trump should look to Don Novello for PR inspiration during the current tussle between President-elect Trump and the Panamanians over the Panama American Canal.  ,
And that’s what we call the American Canal.
