|
?:reviewBody
|
-
The word balls has long been used as the basis for double entendre jokes. Because it is widely recognized as a slang term for a portion of the male genitalia (the testicles) but also has some very common and innocuous meanings (e.g., spherical objects used in sports and games; formal social dance gatherings), risqué puns that play on the word can be slipped into contexts where jokes featuring more direct sexual references would be considered inappropriate and unacceptable. (A well-traveled joke-cum-urban legend involving a traffic cop keys on the dual meaning of balls, for example.) Broadcast history includes a number of legends involving broadcasters who supposedly sneaked onto the air bawdy puns utilizing the duality of the phrase kissing balls. One of the more well-known examples was commonly attributed to comic Bob Hope during his days as a radio personality: A similar legend has been attributed to a variety of baseball play-by-play announcers, most notably former Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean: The version of this gag with a punchline about kissing balls for luck has been associated with a number of professional golf and tennis stars (e.g., Jack Nicklaus, Rod Laver) and put in the mouths of the athletes themselves, their wives, or hapless sports announcers. The most pervasive form of this legend has either golfer Arnold Palmer or his wife innocently blurting out the punchline to Johnny Carson during a Tonight Show appearance in the mid-1960s, prompting a ribald response from the talk show host: Certainly Arnold Palmer's wife never proclaimed on the Tonight Show that she kissed her husband's balls for luck: the wife of a pro golfer, not herself a celebrity, simply wasn't the type of guest Johnny Carson invited to appear on his highly-rated talk show. (Indeed, Arnold Palmer's representative confirmed to us that Mrs. Palmer was never a guest on that program.) As for Arnold Palmer himself, comedian Jay Leno asked him about the legend in 1994, a few years after taking over as permanent host of the Tonight Show following Carson's retirement in 1992, and Palmer indicated to him that the story was based on nothing more than a joke deliberately told by Carson: Anecdotal evidence indicates this specific form of the legend was around well before Johnny Carson took over the Tonight Show desk in 1962, as author Ben Alba attributes it to an incident featuring the wife of golfer Sam Snead and occurring during Steve Allen's tenure as the original Tonight Show host in the mid-1950s: This version is a little more plausible in that it doesn't require the non-celebrity wife to be herself a guest on a talk show, merely a coincidental audience member. However, an excerpt from a July 1954 newspaper column by journalist Walter Winchell suggests the kiss his balls joke was a known broadcast gag even before Steve Allen's debut as a network TV talk show host: Presumably the J. Tillman mentioned here was John Tillman, then a newscaster and man of all trades affiliated with WPIX, Consolidated Edison's television station in New York, but it isn't possible to discern from this brief snippet whether Winchell himself actually witnessed the interview he described (or was merely told about it by someone else), whether it was actually aired on television (or was filmed but edited out before broadcast), or whether it even took place at all. (Plenty of reporters over the years published apocryphal broadcast stories that were relayed to them by someone else as genuine news items.) Since nearly all the kinescopes, videotapes, and films of the Tonight Show (both the Steve Allen and Johnny Carson versions) made prior to 1972 were subsequently destroyed, and much of what was broadcast live on television in the 1950s was either never recorded or similarly destroyed afterwards, whether this humorous faux pas ever played out in real life is unlikely to be definitively proved or disproved. But, as with many tales of this nature, the yarn was likely once just a colorful joke until someone once decided to spice it up by presenting it as a true story. For maximum effect and embarrassment, the set-up of the gag requires that the inadvertently-uttered punchline be witnessed by an audience, so setting the anecdote within the framework of a television interview nicely fit the bill.
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}