Bring Out the Olives!
Some years ago, I was watching the evening news and the top story that night was that someone started shooting a gun on a crowded city street. No one was shot, thankfully. The news reporter interviewed an eye witness, a young man from the neighborhood who was at the scene at the time the shots were fired. It went something like this:
Can you describe what happened?
I was walking down the street minding my own business. Then we heard the shots: Pop! Pop! Pop! And I started running.
You were running because you were afraid of the gunshots?
Nah, man, I was running because I was afraid of the bullets.
People are afraid of lots of things, sometimes rationally and sometimes irrationally. We usually refer to these irrational fears as something called “phobias,” from the Greek phóbos, which describes a feeling of terror. The notion that such fears are irrational is baked into the diagnosis, and we even use compound words to catalogue these irrational fears. Of course, there is a built-in contradiction there. If so many people are afraid of a particular thing that they go to the all the trouble of making up a word for it, maybe the fear isn’t irrational at all.
For example: acrophobia—the fear of heights. A phobia. An irrational fear of heights. Irrational, you say? I myself hate it when I’m up on a high balcony. Maybe I too have acrophobia. Or maybe it’s not the height that I’m afraid of. Maybe it’s the fear of hitting the ground from such a height. What’s the Greek word for landing on Mother Earth?
Some people are afraid of flying. Crazy, right? Just sitting there being afraid of soaring through the skies in a metal machine going hundreds of miles per hour. Perhaps those who suffer from fear of flying actually suffer from a cruel, all-too-close personal relationship with reality. These people are not afraid of flying. They’re afraid of the flying machine flying into something hard, like the ground, or a mountain. Irrational indeed.
Agoraphobia—fear of being in a crowded place. Because everyone knows nothing bad ever happened when you were in the middle of a crowd of people. Similarly, they call some people germaphobes. You know, the irrational fear of the thing that has killed more human beings than anything else since the dawn of civilization.
Even if there might be a hidden logic behind certain phobias, there is one place where you could reliably find people with fears so crazy that they bear no sane relationship to anything of this world: The Maury Povich Show.
(Or, as my wife’s friend actually referred to it: The Maury Paury Show [as in, “Mory Pory”]. She literally went to a taping of the show, came back, and despite no doubt seeing multiple signs showing the name of the show, and hearing it stated correctly multiple times, kept referring to it repeatedly in polite society as “The Maury Paury Show.” To my knowledge, no one ever corrected her.)
One recurring segment on that show happened to be one of the funniest things ever aired in the history of television. It was called Crazy Phobias, and featured poor souls who had crippling fears of various seemingly harmless things. Birds, for example. Kittens. Frogs. Even inanimate things. Cotton Balls. Peaches. Aluminum foil. The one I remember most vividly from when it aired some 25 years ago was about a woman who was terrified of balloons.
The structure of each episode was always the same. Maury would sit down with the person and start to unpack what it was that they were afraid of, why they were afraid of the thing, and how it negatively affected their life. The audience at first was sympathetic. Then the guest would catch a glimpse of the monitor behind them, which showed the thing that terrified them, and they would start to panic. The audience would start to chuckle. The tension would build.
Maury would then lie to their face and say something like, “it’s okay, there are no balloons here,” knowing full well what lurked off-set. Everyone was in on it. Then, at the point when Maury decided the time for talking was over, he would give the order, like Caligula in the Colosseum: “Bring out the Balloons!”
A stage hand would appear with the balloons and the “guest” would run screaming. Some host. The terrified guest would go out of their mind, crying, howling, and best of all they would usually run full speed off stage. The cameraman would run to follow. The guest usually ended up in a fetal position somewhere in the dark recesses of the studio. The previously respectful audience by this time had erupted into laughter. As did I, the viewer.
Mr. Paury knew he had a winner. He kept rolling out that format for years until it seems he figured out that paternity test results made for even more compelling TV, if that’s even possible. “You are NOT the father!”
In fairness, I don’t not get the fear of balloons. The ominous floating. The squeaking. The anticipation of a pop. Give a toddler a balloon to play with, and just sit back and watch. Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t devise something so naturally packed with suspense.
Last year, one of my kids sent me a You Tube video they thought was funny. It was from an old show called The Maury Povich Show. Its topic was Crazy Phobias. The woman: Sally. The fear: olives. How did they know I was an aficionado of this type of television long before they were born?
Sally was a classic because she was crying hysterically even during the introductory conversation. Imagine how she was going to handle the money shot.
Some people have openly wondered whether the people who claimed to have these phobias were just acting. I’m skeptical whether even Meryl Streep could generate the terror necessary to pull off what these people have done. Plus, if you were pretending to be abjectly terrified of olives, what acting technique would you use to elicit the requisite fear? Pretending the olives were balloons?
Maury: Why olives?
Sally: Because they remind me of dead people.
Maury: Why do they remind you of dead people?
Sally [crying]: My grandfather stood up in his coffin and looked at me when he died.
Maury: And so he looked up at you when he died?
Sally: [nodding and crying] With green eyes.
Maury: How old were you when this happened?
Sally: Seven.
Maury: And you really believe that your grandfather came right up out of his coffin, and he had green eyes, and ever since then you’ve been scared of olives?
Sally: [nodding and crying]
…
Maury: Bring out the olives!
Mayhem ensues. Sally runs off set. For some reason, they try to stop her. She is unstoppable.
Yes, Sally’s reaction might seem insane, but in fairness to Sally, I might go as far as to say that Sally wasn’t actually afraid of olives at all. Weren’t you listening, Maury? Was nobody listening?
What Sally was actually afraid of—deathly afraid of, in fact—is dead people getting up out of their coffins and walking around.
Call me crazy, but personally I think that’s something that should instill terror in all of us.
To me, clowns aren’t funny. In fact, they’re kinda scary. I’ve wondered where this started, and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus and a clown killed my dad.
Jack Handey