Gag Gifts: Borders of Intimacy in American Popular Culture

Abstract

So common that they commonly escape one's notice, joke or gag items are still big business, as they fill a niche in most gift shops, define an order of specialty store, and constitute a genre of retail merchandise. While difficult to define with scholarly precision, gag gifts are well known to all but the truly cloistered by taste or social class. The range of gag gift utterance is wide; t-shirts with pictures and slogans ranging from the innocuous to the rude, books on how to identify rednecks or seduce women, highball glasses that miraculously unclothe the pinup pictured on the glass as it is emptied, edible underwear, sunglasses that make the wearer's eyes look like those of a Hollywood film alien are among the more decorous of these goods. Much of the stuff in Prairie Home Companion's Wireless Catalog is of this kind, as is almost all of the stuff in the Funny Bone Catalog. If one lacks the inclination or the aesthetic courage for a trip to Frank's Fun Shop, punching "Gag gifts" into a Google search will surface a list with links to 37 sites-ranging from Art's Fart Mart ("Browse through their selection of dog doo, whoopie cushions, fart spray, and foul smelling lollipops") to Bachelorette Headquarters ("Sells bachelorette party goods including adult gag gifts and bridal supplies"), to Boink Mail ("Embarrassing gag gifts for birthdays, retirement, graduation, and bachelor parties"), to Fun Ideas ("Features a large selection of gag gifts and novelty items"), to Get Your Licks ("Humorous lick sticks with your favorite medication name on the front-Viagra, Prozac, Xanax, Valium, Praxil, and Zoloft"), to Wacky Weenies ("Choose from such characters as Spank the Monkey and Choke the Chicken. Each comes with a comical name tag and special care instructions"). The bestsellers at APracticalJoke.com are a Remote Control Fart Machine ($13.25), Shock Pen ($20.00), Shock Lighter ($20.00), Stink Bombs ($1.00/3 pack; order 10, get 2 free), Exploding Pen ($1.50), Squirt Lighter ($4.00), Rubber Chicken ($6.00), Pop a Putt ("When your mark putts the ball into the hole, it pops right back out," $12.00), and a selection of five different "winning" lottery tickets ($1.25 each). Among the more sophisticated are the medical gag gifts on offer at Med-Psych.net and such high-end items as the Daiquiri Whacker ($254.95) and the Bar Stool Racer ($1695.00) at Wonderfullywacky.com. Somewhat more specialized are the offerings of "Revenge Gag Gifts by the Turd Bird" and the gag gift page of MakeStuff.com, which provides directions for making one's own gag gifts. SoImmature.com so efficiently captures the range and spirit of G-rated gag gifts that if the press of business limits exploration to only one site, this is the one to visit, with a catalog of eight fart products, 33 fake doo, vomit, and spill products, nine squirting products, 25 mask and body part products, 18 Billy-Bob teeth products, 39 classic products ranging from a two headed nickel, snapping gum, itching powder, hand buzzer and the like, stuff once advertised in the backs of comic books. The line between sexual apparatus and sexually themed gag gifts, however, can be difficult to draw, especially as advertised on Internet web sites, but this category is huge; I should not be surprised to learn that it is more than fifty percent of the whole, when someone abandons him or her self to more precise measurement of this phenomenon. These artifacts -whatever else may be said of them as individual thematic elements of material popular culture-herd themselves under the commonly recognized, if disparate, category: gag gifts. Gag gifts are things that one does not ordinarily buy for one's self, for one's private enjoyment. While there is, of course, no accounting for some collectors or for some died-in-the-wool practical jokers who maintain an inventory of tricks something after the practice of magicians, this stuff is in the main purchased to give to another person, either by way of giving a person the experience of a particular effect, as for example, with the Pop a Putt, or, as is increasingly common practice, by way of giving a person something, so to create a particular effect in the giving of what is ordinarily recognized by giver and recipient as a gag gift, as for example a rubber chicken or a propeller beanie or underwear with "Kiss me! …