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  • 2003-04-21 (xsd:date)
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  • Hooray for Heywood (en)
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  • There are certain gags you expect to be old hat to everyone past puberty, such as the standard suite of knock knock jokes, time-worn setups for prank calls, and funny book title/author combinations. A familiar amalgam of the latter two japes is the giving out of names that appear innocuous in written form or sound plausible when pronounced slowly but produce racy or embarrassing combinations when uttered out loud at a normal speaking pace (e.g., Hugh Jass, Anita Bath, Mike Rotch), a joke usually enjoyed by duping a switchboard operator into paging someone using one of those names. (This is a running gag that Bart Simpson repeatedly pulls on Moe the bartender in the animated TV series The Simpsons.) As I said, I'd expect everyone past junior high school to recognize these old routines from miles away, but I've been proved wrong before — a few years we found ourselves at a downtown Las Vegas casino on Christmas Eve, and we distinctly heard the switchboard operator issue several pages over the casino's P.A. system for a Mike Hunt. And now we have more apparent confirmation that these gags haven't quite been killed by familiarity, this one courtesy of a 20 April 2016 Baltimore Sun article that quoted the ubiquitous Jack Mehoff in an article about attendees at a Donald Trump campaign appearance: (The article was eventually amended to quote Jack Morris rather than Jack Mehoff.) Back on 13 April 2003, in an article about a controversial demonstration led by Martha Burk during the Masters golf tournament at the Augusta National Golf Club to protest the club's exclusion of women from membership, the Charleston Post and Courier reported that one of the protesters taken into police custody had a rather unusual name: The reporter responsible for this story acknowledged his embarrassment in a follow-up piece a week later: At Christmas 2009, the ever-present Heywood surfaced again, this time in an article published by the Davenport, Iowa, Quad-City Times about Christmas dinners served to the needy at Father's Conroy's Vineyard of Hope. The original on-line version of the article opened with the following paragraphs: Additionally, the 27 December 2009 edition of a Fargo, North Dakota, newspaper featured a photograph of one Haywood Jablome digging out a snowdrift: (en)
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