Mea Culpa

Confession is good for the soul.  In the December 11, 2012 Humor Me titled “Comfort and Joy”, I said this about doctors:

I’ve always been interested in how physicians decide on what to specialize in. I mean, what makes a person go into proctology, considering it is such a narrow field?  Does a proctologist ever wake up at night realizing his profession isn’t what it’s cracked up to be?  By the way, doesn’t the phrase, “getting a little behind in your work” take on a whole meaning in a proctology clinic?

Imagine my surprise when I read Bob Newhart’s interview in the February 11, 2013 Huffington Post when he said this:

“I don't know how doctors pick one specialty over another. Some you can understand. Pediatricians. Or gynecologists delivering babies, bringing a new life into the world, but how does someone want to be a proctologist? How can you fall in love with proctology? It's like you talk to a pediatrician who says he can't wait to get in the office on Monday and look at those little faces, but a proctologist -- what does he have to look forward to? There are no smiling little faces.”

I know the moment when I became an adult. It was the day I found Bob Newhart funny. When I was a kid, I thought Newhart was okay but I never remember actually laughing at anything he said or did. Then I grew to be a man and I thought everything he said was hilarious. He was an "adult" comic in the finest sense of the word.  He wasn’t crude, lewd or scatological. He was a grown up.

So, after witnessing the Twitter War against Sammy Rhodes, I thought I could get into trouble with one of my humor heroes.

Sammy Rhodes is a campus minister for the Presbyterian Church of America at The University of South Carolina and  has a Twitter following of almost twelve thousand. That's pretty good for anybody on Twitter, much less a Presbyterian. He has been favorably reviewed in The Huffington Post. Here are some of his tweets:

“One fun way to describe Facebook is “imagine you are a mind reader in Walmart.”

“There are only two kinds of hotels: incredible and someone was probably murdered there.”

“Poured my cat some almond milk today and now she has bangs and drives a Prius.”

In my Twitter feed, I always looked forward to a Sammy Rhodes tweet simply because it meets the one criteria I have in comedy: make me laugh.  However, it seems Rhodes has been using other peoples'
tweets-there’s a blog called “Borrowing Sam” which shows Rhodes Tweets along side some other tweets and it looks like they have been “reframed”. One blogger said Rhodes was a “scum-sucking piece of (feces) who should die of a lingering disease.”  That is kind of a harsh wish for someone that didn’t footnote a joke. I thought it was Twitter, not a term paper.

So before I get into trouble, let me advise that I had no idea that Bob Newhart felt the same way about Proctologists as I did.  But, I want to make it clear that I was not reframing a joke from Bob Newhart. (Although, if you were reframing a joke, a Bob Newhart joke wouldn’t be a bad one, but it would be wrong)

I did, however, steal the joke. I stole it from my wife. She told it to me one time when telling me what her funny friend, Kim the Nurse said about proctologists. She also told me this one: a Jamaican proctologist is a “Pokemon”.  She’ll be here all week, be sure to try the veal.