I hardly know how to break this to you, but we are all grown-ups here, and we can get through it together. (Would anyone who is not grown up…no, skip it. I can’t afford to lose that much of my audience.)
Once upon a time, a man named Kermit Shafer published a line of Bloopers books, listing things said on the radio or television which might have been worded better or timed better. These were wildly popular and sold plenty of copies. You can start a collection now quite reasonably, as these are slightly out of fashion: please be aware that the hardcover and paperback editions of the same book will be slightly different, as the hardcover editions were censored to make them more acceptable to sensitive readers. This was in the days when sensitive people didn’t buy paperbacks.
But there were suspicious folk who questioned the authenticity of some items in his collections. So he issued a companion series of LPs, with recordings of the actual bloopers. (The suspicious people are still at it, though, and insist some of his recordings are actually re-enactments. You can’t win.)
In any case, while doing research into a set of three postcards I recently purchased for resale, I found that this series was, um, not unique. In fact, I found there were several sets, apparently from assorted publishers, which not only used the same jokes but numbered them exactly the same way, despite other changes in border and illustration. This set of six church bulletin bloopers has been running around together for over a century, therefore, unattributed, untraceable, and probably made up by some postcard gag writer to begin with. (Or before: I hate to suggest this about postcard companies, but swiping jokes from jokebooks or newspaper columns was NOT unknown.)
There are some mild variations of wording, and sometimes numbers 1 and 3 have their numeration switched, but this is the most usual numbering, beginning with the classic we have discussed in this space heretofore.
Number 2, as far as I can tell, always includes Miss McGinniss, a young lady whose performances I have been unable to confirm online. Groucho Marx, by the way, uses a variation of this joke in the movie Animal Crackers.
The problem with these announcements is that they all SOUND so authentic. The Little Mothers Club sounds exactly like something some congregation would decide to establish.
A Protracted Meeting is a religious service which continues over a period of several days. I have also been unable to trace Hezekiah “Peter” Inskip, though there are plenty of people named Inskip in the United States. This adds to the seeming authenticity of the announcement, because who could make a name like this?
We have discussed “Little Drops of Water, Little Grains of Sand” in this space before. Church bulletins being economic when it comes to space, the title has been abbreviated (it also would have spoiled the joke to use the whole title.) The text of this announcement has been altered in some online joke columns. Some iconoclast changed the last line to “If some young lady will start ‘Little Drops of Water’, the congregation will join her.” Some people cannot help tampering with the classics.
This is the rarest of the six, as it seems to have wandered in from a university bulletin board instead of a church announcement. Though, it is true, churches have held Philosophy classes, and the sciences WERE once included under that heading. Also, our language has changed a little, and the joke needs footnoting. Unless you have done a lot of reading in the pages of elderly books, you may not know that “Physic” was a word used for “Laxative”. So bringing paper…okay, you figured that one out.
Now, the fact that postcard companies seized on these gags and perpetuated them does not mean the original blooper never happened. If I have shown disrespect to Miss McGinnis or the Rev. Inskip by assuming they never existed, I apologize. If I have added to their infamy by repeating really old bloopers, well, that’s just the way it goes.
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