HOOK: For those delicious morsels of wisdom, you’re welcome

When President Brown first asked me to write a humor column for The Daily Free Press, I was reluctant. Did I really want the responsibility of writing a weekly column for the 11th largest newspaper in Boston? It was flattering, for sure, but my other obligations were calling me. The Tall Persons Not Really Anonymous club would struggle without my undivided attention. And even if my columns could just use a simple formula of self-deprecating humor and less-than-clever wordplay, it would still take at least 20 to 30 minutes of my time. Per week! I could do it, but I’d have to make sacrifices. My pen-pal in Nigeria would have to wait. All he ever did was ask me to send him more money, anyway. If I wanted to waste my writing on someone hopelessly desperate for money, I’d write for The Daily Free Press. Or my parents.

Ultimately, the hypnotic trance of Bobby Brown’s beautiful soup-strainer won me over. But I was concerned about exposing myself every week. Nine hundred words a week for 13 weeks. That’s nearly 12,000 words — enough for a short book. So I decided what I write should be primarily fiction. Fortunately, I had already begun thinking about possible subjects for a book. I’d call it Hook, Line and Sinker: How America Got “Hooked” on the Most Lovable Bigot Since Archie Bunker. I also considered writing a romance novel and titling it You and the Cap’n Make It Happen. Or maybe I could write a sci-fi: JustIn Time: Justin Hook’s Adventures In Time Travel — Based on a True Story.

In writing as a character, rather than myself, I feel as though I misled my female audience. Girls met me expecting the immature, possibly homosexual, man-child of their dreams, but were instead confronted with a debonair, uber-straight gentlemen who clearly gets a family discount at Old Navy. Frankly, I think I’m a trade up from my columnist persona — why have hamburger when you can have steak? A steak that will make you truly appreciate the meaning of “well done,” if you know what I mean. But I guess some women are just vegetarians. Or, more likely, lesbians.

Being a columnist for a sparsely read Boston newspaper isn’t nearly as glamorous as they make it look on television. In real life, there are way more fat people, way fewer black people and you have to say “bye” at the end of phone calls. It’s lamer than a meeting of the Betty Boop Fan Club. But, being the valiant warrior that I am, I pressed on. I tried to liven things up in the ol’ FreeP, but unfortunately, the editors, too, were unable to separate the fact from the fiction in my anecdotes, leading to a couple unfortunate mishaps. Like last week’s front page story: “‘Circus fire destroys Government Center; onlookers say it was ‘intense.'”

Seeing as this is my last column, I feel the time is right to finally separate the fiction from the fact.

First, I said the circus fire was “in tents.” Check your facts, FreeP.

You may also remember that I ran a column a few weeks ago about my trip to the Ben ‘ Jerry’s factory in Vermont, where I discovered the ice cream may contain dead bodies. (“I scream, you scream, banshees scream for ice cream,” Apr. 19, p. 18.) My statements were based on observations which may or may not have been erroneous. For example, while it is true that some exhaust is produced in the production of dairy cream, this doesn’t necessarily make the factory a “crematorium,” at least according to my lawyers.

I backed up my findings with the observation that the ice cream actually contains Soylent Green, based on an unfortunate miscomprehension of a label reading “soy pigment green.” Maybe the ice cream doesn’t really contain Soylent Green — maybe — but it’s always important for consumers to read between the lines on statements like these. Otherwise, people might think something silly, like that Country Time Lemonade actually contains a drop of lemons, or that Charleston Chew contains one bit of tobacco.

But you know, it’s not really important what is or is not true in my columns. As a humor columnist, my primary goal is not to inform, but to entertain. Just like TV news. If I can make a point along the way, all the better. I really do think the plight of the tall man deserves more attention, that ethanol is a very bad idea and that airships are due for a comeback. But if those points get lost in a sea of laughter, I’m plenty happy to go down with the metaphorical ship. (One of the many benefits of airships over normal ships: when they go down, the captain doesn’t have to die alone.)

Given the choice, I would not associate myself with the captain of the Titanic, but another famous captain. The Cap’n. Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch. His cereal may not always go down smoothly — it may sometimes cut up the roof of our mouths or give us juvenile diabetes — but we love to eat it anyway. It takes us back to a simpler time, when we’d let the Cap’n “crunchatize” us as we watched Pepper Ann and waited for our cousins to pick us up for the prom.

My goal with this column was always to similarly help fuel your day and remind you of the joys of childishness, even if it cut up your sensibilities from time to time, or made you a little nauseous on those days when it somehow ended up being “Oops! All Berries.” But I hope this final column is even half as satisfying as the delicious cereal dust at the bottom, because for me, it’s the sad reminder that it’s time to find another box. Bon voyage, my crunch maties.

Justin Hook, a junior in the College of Communication and College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at jbhook@bu.edu.