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Editor's ViewpointMeditations Of A Minnesota Mossback |
Popular Culture … On A Stick
An appreciation for puns and clever wordage is a cultural thing.
(Please note that I didn’t say that an appreciation for puns is the purview of the cultured. Nope. Not at all.)
Having been immersed in the culture of language appreciation (a steady diet of A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the- Pooh” likely had something to do with it), a good play on words will generally get a laugh out of me.
Such was the headline that I read in the St. Paul Pioneer Press as part of its pre- Minnesota State Fair hype last week: “Readers have dreamed up more Fair food ideas than you can shake a stick at.”
I laughed out loud.
The Minnesota State Fair has sold practically everything on a stick, including deepfat- fried Snickers bars, corn dogs, caramel apples, buffalo kabobs, cotton candy—even hot coffee on a stick. (Some clever person had recognized the market value in touting the coffee booth’s wooden coffee stirrers.) The list goes on and on.
And it doesn’t stop with food.
During my Fair visit last Friday, someone was marketing a ruler on a stick (that strikes my funny bone every year). Moreover, while visiting St. Bernard’s Diner, I noticed that one associate’s upscale woven polo shirt had been tastefully embroidered with the small outline of a cross, accompanied by the phrase “Theology on a stick.”
But I digress. Really, what is it about food on a stick that amuses us? Perhaps it’s because for thousands of years, a stout stick had more to do with the procuring of food on the hoof than it did for eating it: for that, we just used our fingers.
Deep down inside, perhaps we instinctively appreciate the irony of it all and yes, this is the sort of stuff I think about while I’m drying my hair.
But my visit to the Minnesota State Fair last Friday made me realize that the physical juxtaposition of contradictory ideas can be funny, too…witness the batterdipped deep-fried Twinkie booth, situated immediately across the street from the Healthfair 11 building.
I’ve never yet eaten a batter-dipped deep-fried Twinkie. But I find it somewhat reassuring that if I do, and immediately require medical assistance of the coronary kind, the Healthfair building is right across the street.