Friday, October 22, 2010

That Third Bear Trap Today Was Fake

The one where the punchline was "you can use what's between your legs to buy beer."  Never happened. 

At least it didn't win.



5 comments:

  1. I think I'm becoming very jaded when it comes to the bear trap of the week as I think 1 out of 3 stories are either grossly exaggerated or just all out fabrications.

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  2. Chris, I've written at least two or three other articles about bear traps that did not ring at all true -- in fact, I thought they were pretty obvious fakes.

    Gordon isn't a gullible guy, but I'm guessing he gets a ton of these, and most of them are pretty lame. He has to pick entertaining ones. Some (not all) of those are made up, and the bit isn't worthwile enough to spend any time checking authenticity, not that it would even be possible in some cases.

    I sorta tune out the Bear Trap on Fridays -- but it's not bad enough to qualify as an NPR Moment.

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  3. I actually had a very good one that was never read on the air to my knowledge, and has been passed over for these fake ones. This one, I assure you is real.

    I was waiting on this older couple that were regular customers. I hadn't seen them in a couple of weeks since the Christmas Holiday(I want to say it was the start of 2007), so I greeted them and they said hi, seemed to be in their usual happy spirits. So I asked them if they had a great Christmas. They proceed to tell me that their daughter was killed by a drunk driver on Christmas Eve(2006).

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  4. Yeah, but Hollywood -- was that really a bear trap? They were being jolly, and you were being conventionally polite. Doesn't a bear trap require some element of the trapee trying to be creative or amusing or something like that? Anyway, thanks for the holler.

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  5. I wouldn't think that cracking jokes would be a requirement. I would think that a trap would basically be either cracking a joke or saying anything as conversation piece that brings the room down. Maybe we should go to the originator of the segment for a proper definition. lol!

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