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Collected on the internet, 1997: Variations: Analysis: Where do good stories begin? We know this one has been around at least since 1964, for that was the year Herb Caen told a version of it in his San Francisco Chronicle column. In that telling a woman spotted a leak under the kitchen sink and called her husband out of the shower, as she thought there might be some connection between the two water lines. The unsuspecting man got down on his hands and knees to attend to the leak, and, spotting something interesting to play with, the family cat gave whatever was dangling a good swat, causing the man to knock himself out on the pipes under the sink. By 1974 the tale was well enough known to be included in a Los Angeles Times roundup of urban legends: That this one has legs is demonstrated by its inclusion in a collection of true emergency room stories in 1998: The dropped stretcher motif shows up in another legend, this one about an exploding toilet. It's not unusual for legends to share certain common aspects. In late 2000, this embellished version began circulating on the Internet: Fast-forwarding to 2009, we find the legend reenacted in a YouTube video: Even in our own homes, we are not safe from societal disapproval. As in all caught in the nude legends, nudity is punished, and the underlying message of such tales is that society will catch us and laugh at us, even if we have all the blinds drawn and are acting as any reasonable person would. This legend also employs the stereotypes of the typical man (can fix or put the run on anything) and the typical woman (terrified of small harmless animals and wouldn't know a crescent wrench from a crescent roll). The wife's inability to deal with domestic emergencies sets the sequence of events in motion. For the legend to work, it has to appear reasonable that the average woman would panic upon seeing a mouse or garter snake or would not know how to monkey about with a leaky pipe. She summons her husband to deal with such matters, and he comes running. Sightings: The cat takes a swipe at something dangling tale shows up in the 1972 classic comic The Collected Adventures of Harold Hedd and in the 1976 Jan de Wetering novel Tumbleweed. Also, the dropped stretcher motif shows up in an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, entitled My Mother Can Beat Up My Father (original air date 23 September 1964), in which Rob is injured while trying to demonstrate a judo throw using a stuffed monkey; when the ambulance crew learns he lost a fight with a toy, they laugh so hard they drop their patient into the rose bushes.
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