The Pun Also Rises

"Nuts To You"

    I've always believed that a good humor column covers everything from soup to nuts. I'll get to the soup some other week, but given how crazy things have been recently, we've got to deal with the nuts today.

    Yes, nuts -- the word we give to the wackos and the lunatics whose actions and motivations we can't understand. If they are only deviating mildly from what we consider normal, such as wearing a different color sock on each foot, we call them strange. If they deviate a large extent from what we consider normal, such as wearing a different color sock on each ear, we call them nuts. If they deviate a very large extent from normal, such as wearing nothing but a sock, then you'd call them the Williams College Springstreakers.

    But what if I told you that there was a man whose whole life was nuts, totally nuts, to the point that whenever you heard his name, you thought about someone chopping up our first president into little pieces? What would you call him, this man who changed our world forever? Well, you'd call him George Washington Carver. And this man's life was really to a large extent about nuts.

    His research developed well over 300 products from peanuts, from soap to ... well, nuts. Peanut-based shampoo, peanut-based paper, peanut-based fuel, peanut-based coffee, and my personal favorite, peanut-based peanut butter.

    I love peanut butter. I eat it on celery and carrots when I'm being healthy, and in a bowl with chocolate syrup when I'm being unhealthy. Today at work, I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. For dinner, I had a peanut butter smore sandwich, which is made by toasting bread, spreading it with peanut butter, adding marshmallows and Hershey's kisses, and microwaving the whole thing in the microwave. (Ask me about my diet plan!) And once I got home, a friend had brought peanut butter and chocolate candy for dessert.

    Nuts? You bet I am. You are what you eat, after all. But as I often tell people, there's good nuts and bad nuts. My friend ate some bad nuts, and then he got sick. Would he have been safer if they were peanut butter? Maybe. But what really gets me is all the effort he went through to eat these poison peanuts. He had to crack each individual shell before eating them -- almost as much effort as saying Peter Piper picked a pack of poison peanuts.

    And what really surprises me is that two days later, he did it again. Cracked open another few handfuls of poison peanuts, ate them, and became ill again. It's a shame -- I could have poisoned him much more efficiently. What a waste of effort, especially without a nutcracker.

    Now, nutcracker has always been a word that scared me, because it implies a device that cracks nuts. And though I hasten to point out that up until this point, I have only been referring to the food, there is another meaning for the word. I have always been rather protective in that regard, so when I learned that there was an entire ballet called the Nutcracker -- filled with people doing lots of kicking -- my only desire was to stay the heck away from it. This strikes me as only reasonable.

    The whole subject of nuts, frankly, filled me with fear. I didn't want nuts cracked, I didn't want to be surrounded by nuts, and I certainly didn't want people to think that I was nuts. I wanted to drown my sorrows, and I wanted to drown them in a big bowl of peanut butter and chocolate sauce. And that's when it hit me: People probably did think I was nuts.

    Peanut butter holds an allure for me that I cannot ignore. And while I avoid the poison peanuts, I have a prodigious penchant for peanut butter, one that I will not give up in spite of the strange looks I get when I create and consume my peanut butter smore sandwiches. Some people are cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, I'm nuts for peanut butter. I eat it all the time, and it's not something I'll ever be able to give up. I think that's perfectly normal, but if that means the world wants to call me nuts, then so be it.

    I know I'm not nuts, because the socks on my ears match perfectly.

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    Seth Brown is a freelance humor writer who works for peanuts. He appears frequently in the Washington Post's Style Invitational, infrequently in various other publications, and once in book form -- in his first book 'Think You're The Only One?', published by Barnes & Noble. His Web site is www.RisingPun.com

All work on this page is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first.