Chimp Country,"" ""Hung Nun,"" ""Bong Law.""
After several visits to bandnamemaker.com, a website that throws groups of nouns and adjectives together at random to generate potential band names, I had started to keep lists of my favorites so that I could share them with increasingly exhausted friends, either sending out e-mails or, after a couple of drinks, phoning someone and reading the hastily scrawled entries off a handful of Post-it notes.
""Hello?""
""'Bean Sister,' 'Elvis Flesh,' 'Sissy Galore and the Stereo Joy.'""
""Matt?""
A few friends and roommates with a bit of leisure time eventually picked up this habit as well, and for a period of several weeks a visitor to our apartment would have found a group of fully grown adults sitting around the living room with laptops, giggling fiercely whenever someone came across a ""Koala Miscarriage"" or ""Eating Velvet."" While other 20-somethings were out enjoying their youth at nightclubs or bars, we stayed in to read long lists of non sequiturs, sorting them into ""funny"" and ""not funny"" categories.
In a way, these gatherings reminded me of the 1960s movie ""Fantastic Voyage,"" where a team of doctors and scientists in a microscopic submarine go on a journey to the cellular level of the human body. This felt, similarly, like a scientific journey to the very atoms of humor. Devoid of real meaning, human input or even the context necessary for the simplest of jokes, it was hard to explain how two words like ""Bionic Daniel"" could be funny, and even harder to justify spending a solid hour reading through somehow-less-funny combinations just to find a real gem like ""Battery-Powered Leg.""
Due to these difficulties, enthusiasm was less than universal.
""You'd like me to name my string-quartet recital what?"" a friend asked.
""Orbiting Birth,"" I repeated. ""Why not?""
Some of them were funny only when forced to imagine the group of recording artists who would gladly represent themselves as ""The Glorious Hopeless,"" ""Prince Grunge"" or ""Never-Ending Sabbath."" Most of those that ended up being e-mailed around, though, succeeded simply because of the bizarre or disturbing associations they conjured up (""Crotch Hobbit"" or ""Boy Burger"") or the chance of fate that arranged them into a semi-coherent thought (""Potential Revenge,"" ""Party Poet"" or ""Conduct of the Diabolical Government"").
Whatever the explanation, it was certain that this was a very simple form of entertainment, located on the scale somewhere between browsing through the phonebook for people whose names sounded like humorous body parts and the awkwardly translated English slogans used by foreign companies to advertise their products to Americans. The common factor among all of these seems to be the joy of finding humor where it was never intended, whether in botched newspaper headlines or a person whose name happens to resemble the description of a penis.
Wondering how much of this cultural paraphernalia I might be missing out on in daily life, I eventually bought a small notebook for recording these odds and ends and, after getting bored with writing down the few humorous advertising pitches I noticed, began to jot down interesting fragments of conversations that I overheard while walking around.
Just like when poring over band names, the quotations that I heard tended to lack any meaningful context, and I might end up diligently eavesdropping on a dozen conversations before hearing something that prompted me to stop and pull out a pen. But after only two days of work, I was rewarded when I overheard what sounded like a heated exchange between two men and came around the corner of a building to see one lean in close to the other and mutter, ""So I said 'Fuck It! I'm gonna put that shit on broil.'""
Currently touring the United States with Crotch Hobbit? Tell Matt all about it by e-mailing him at hunziker@wisc.edu.
