Comedian Jimmy Carr, one of many that share their funny stylings online or on streaming platforms like Netflix, posted recently that the joke that will get him canceled has already been told. In other words, he tells jokes that are edgy and the way that society evolves means that a joke he told already will someday be deemed too offensive and get him into serious trouble.
While I’m nothing like the comedians of the world, I once upon a time created a character that, if I were as high of profile, would have gotten me into serious trouble. And, it was a character seen by thousands of spectators that lined the streets of Traverse City watching the Cherry Festival parade.
Long before I began writing newspaper columns, a small group of friends of my wife included me in their fun little tradition of making spoof entries for the Cherry Royale Parade. If you are old enough to remember parade “entries” placed in the 1980s and ‘90s like a certain Hoover vacuum cleaner that fit over the top of a small car, the Hay Fever Queen, the Weber Grill team, the Speed Queen, the Michigan Bell choir, and a bunch of other lampoonish entries, then you know the ancestral grounds of my writing roots.
While the parade was held the closing Saturday of each year’s festival, the planning, building, and writing began weeks and months before. In a time before modern communication, we actually called each other or gathered together to discuss queen names, their hometowns, and what they’d feature. For instance, the Hay Fever Queen was Anna Hystemine, from Gezund Heights, Indiana. The Weber Grill team was led by the Wiener Queen, Fran Kafurter from Weberville and so on. The vast majority of the ideas we created were good clean fun. For another throwback reference, the names were like the last minute of “Car Talk” the NPR show that featured staff members with made up names and such.
Every now and then though, we got sideways with our ideas.
Although they seemed funny at the time, the modern world would not be nearly as happy with us as we were at the time. A particular float sponsored by a major Michigan dairy had such dairy themed queens including Miss Half and Half and Miss Gallon Jugs. Again, once funny, but I’d hate to see what the reaction to them might be today.
Worse though, was the character I alluded to at the beginning of this column. This dairy-themed parade entry also featured a large “portable” pasture of parade volunteers that would drop pieces of Astro-turf and begin mooing at the bequest of their leader; The Holy Cow, Bishop Desmond Moo Moo.
The Holy Cow was a man with a set of steer horns wrapped turban style to his head, and wearing a pair of loose pajama pants. It sounded and looked funny at the time, but if the character were to be recreated … well, let’s just agree that that character will never be recreated.
The irony of this is that during this crazy, creative time of our lives, never a year went by that some reference was made to an era that directly preceded ours; a Cherry Festival featured event called “the Mummers Parade.” That parade included famously bawdier behavior.
It’s 2024 now and, hopefully, history continues to be learned from. This year’s parade, sponsored by the DTE Energy Foundation, will be great. (Am I wrong to hope that Natural Gas Queen, Lotta Flatulence, from Sulphur Springs, Texas will be there?)