Althouse: "[A] man is being tried for stealing 40,000 hotel coat hangers..."

October 1, 2010

"[A] man is being tried for stealing 40,000 hotel coat hangers..."

"... and Joseph Heller could not have written a more entertaining transcript!"

15 comments:

Triangle Man said...: It is funny fiction.; 10/1/10, 10:58 AM
MadisonMan said...: Was being tried. That's from 2002.; 10/1/10, 10:59 AM
The Drill SGT said...: Heller isn't the best example.

Abbott and Costello did it better and earlier with:

"Who's on First"; 10/1/10, 11:04 AM
The Dude said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 10/1/10, 11:07 AM
Unknown said...: Somewhere, Henny Youngman is smiling.; 10/1/10, 11:11 AM
Clyde said...: What's the story's hook?; 10/1/10, 11:16 AM
Richard Dolan said...: British humour, worthy of Monty Python. The oddity is that someone would connect it to Heller, whose humorous word-play usually had a much darker tinge to it.; 10/1/10, 11:31 AM
traditionalguy said...: Thanks for a little court room reality...even if it was only written. As CBS said, it may have been fake, but it was accurate.; 10/1/10, 11:33 AM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: I should hang out at the Anchoress more.; 10/1/10, 11:36 AM
Scott M said...: The last time a person told me that I knocked her socks off, I married her.

Speaking of socks and marriage, when we were up at the alter and got to the exchanging of the rings, my blushing betrothed slid on a grossly over-sized silver number on me instead of the snuggly fitting gold band we had picked up.

Turns out they lost my band in the lady's dressing room and, after a frantic ten minutes, opted for a replacement band from my new brother in law.

My band turned up the next morning. It rode the ceremony, the reception, and God knows what else afterward inside the pantyhose of the maid of honor.; 10/1/10, 11:56 AM
The Dude said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 10/1/10, 12:12 PM
Chip Ahoy said...: Clyde, at length the hook in the story by Miles Kington is that Chrysler was selling cabinets that took only hotel hangers.; 10/1/10, 2:41 PM
Methadras said...: Why is the [A] in brackets like this on the headline?; 10/1/10, 7:36 PM
jaed said...: Because the original quote has the "a" lowercased (because it's not the start of the sentence). Althouse has elided the start of the sentence and is being precise so as not to incorrectly indicate that the quote starts with "A".

(Although shouldn't the ellipsis be in brackets too?); 10/1/10, 9:22 PM
Steve said...: The funniest trial transcript of all is from the criminal trial of W. C. Fields, the comedian, for the torture of a canary during one of his on-stage acts. The trial was on 9/14/1928 in the City Magistrate's Court of N Y, Manhatten, and can be found in the book "W. C. Fields By Himself", by Ronald Fields. Read it to find if he was convicted. Read it for the sad, ironic revelation as to why the canary died.; 10/2/10, 7:07 AM