Guide to Being Wrong About Something Kind of on Purpose.

I’m not a big practical joker. To me it’s a low form of humor. Sometimes it’s great, like a hot foot. A hot foot is the funniest thing ever because it’s so unacceptable in today’s litigious world. Guess what, dude? Your foot’s on fire, and you are frantically putting it out right now! That’s comedy.

But the kind of practical joke that’s all over the place right now is the kind where you deliberately get somebody worked up because they’re Shaquille O’Neill and you’re pouring wet concrete into their new Range Rover. Still a little funny, I guess, but not really worth the effort.

My girlfriend does this to me. I didn’t know it until she told me, but when she’s kind of bugging me with her girlishness, sometimes she ramps up the girlishness to bug me even more. She thinks it’s funny. Maybe she’s right. I was relieved to hear she was doing it as a joke instead of for real. It’s hard to look a potential lifetime of “stop talking to your brother on the phone and agree with me about whether or not this thing you don’t care about is cute” in the face and not flinch. A sense of humor is requisite.

But in general, making people uncomfortable is not all that funny. It just adds tension to the world. Maybe there’s a catharsis afterwards where everybody laughs, and that’s good. Maybe you take the right person down a notch and they know it and that’s good. You know what, screw it. It is funny. I think I’m just kind of uptight and I take myself too seriously.

That’s why I advocate self-pranks. Self-pranks are the funniest.

One of the best self-pranks is being wrong about something and then loudly declaring yourself to be right about it, and then having your wrongness shoved in your face by somebody who knows the facts. It’s humbling. And funny.

I remember, shamefully, when I was like 14 I used to hang out in my town’s resident used record shop and think I was the awesomest dude ever, just for being there and for knowing how to shop for Smashing Pumpkins B-sides. Little did I know that the owners of the record store would have been more than happy to stop carrying Smashing Pumpkins B-sides forever so they wouldn't have little arrogant pricks like me walking in, asking stupid questions, and generally ruining their lofty discussions about the relative merits of various obscure Japanese noise bands. But you have to stay in business somehow, and I spent a lot of my disposable income on Smashing Pumpkins b-sides. Which in retrospect is embarrassing enough to be a self-prank in its own right. I really wanted to get Nirvana B-sides, but my buddy Brendan was a Nirvana completist, and I figured in my 14-year-old brain that enjoying Nirvana B-sides made me a poser of some kind, since Brendan was the one who told me about the record store to begin with and I figured he invented the whole idea of getting the B-sides of a band you like. Especially Nirvana. This is back when there was such a thing as a B-side that was only available on the flip side of a 7" record single and nowhere else.

I wanted desperately, and still do, to at least sound like I know what I’m talking about when it comes to rock music. It has led to me being wrong about a great many things. Particularly one day I was in there buying a used CD of “Hardcore Jollies” by Funkadelic, which is not one of their best, I don’t think. I could very well be wrong on that. I didn’t like it much when I was 14. I know that. And while I was doing this, the guys in the record store were talking about David Bowie. I said “I like his earlier stuff the best” because I knew by then that saying “I like his earlier stuff the best” was a one-way ticket to Coolsville. I was talking out of my ass. They asked me “oh yeah, like what?” And I reached back into my Mtv-generation brain for the earliest memory I could conjure of David Bowie. “Like ‘Fame,’” I said. You know, ‘Fame.’ Early Bowie. I’m certain I was thinking of “Fame ’90,” too.

I don’t know if those record store dudes actually laughed at me or not. I seem to remember they mentioned something about David Bowie’s previous 23 year music career leading up to “Fame ’90.” Even now I had to look that up on the internet. And we didn’t have the internet back then. Regardless of what happened next, I ended up burying the experience in the part of my brain that hides deep humiliation, and subsequently have distrusted the work of one Mr. David Bowie ever since. Which is fine, by the way. He’s got some great songs, but he’s also kind of intolerable. Watch the “Ziggy Stardust” movie. He’s intolerable. I’m probably wrong about that, too. I’m probably just passing off a bunch of Lester Bangs’s opinions as my own. Talking out of my ass still. It’s what I do. I’m a jackass.

So I left that record store with my used CD of “Hardcore Jollies,” and went to a nearby thrift store to misguidedly buy myself a straw fedora. It’s hard being 14. At the thrift store, the clerk noticed my Funkadelic CD and asked me, “boy, whatchu know 'bout Hardcore Jollies?” And I said, “nothing.” He was like, “oh. That'll be 4 dollars for the straw fedora.” And then I carried on with my day, somewhat relieved to have had a conversation about music in which I expressed myself honestly.

Looking back, that was a pretty decent self-prank. But when you’re 14, your whole life is a self-prank because you’re wrong about everything. Even the stuff you know for a fact you’re right about, like how to derive the quadratic formula, you’re wrong about. Because you’re operating under the assumption that deriving the quadratic formula is somehow a good skill for a grown-up to have. It’s not. Other than the fact that it’s good to be good at things, that is. I’m probably wrong about this too. I’ve never made a lot of money. Maybe it’s all quadratic formula-based.

I think my point, now that I’ve dug myself, spiral-like, into a hole of unshakeable self-doubt, is that sometimes for comedic and just regular life purposes, it’s good to be wrong about things. And it’s even better to have it shoved in your face by a bearded 50-something record store owner whose life is probably not so hot, but at least he knows about rock music, and he’ll be damned if he’ll let some 14 year old punk try and tell him that “Fame ’90” is early Bowie. Actually, looking back on it, I’m sure I could have admitted to my complete lack of Bowie knowledge, and then the dude would have let me hang out there and talk some more and we would have listened to Bowie records and he would have got a kick out of seeing my face as I listened to “Hunky Dory” for the first time. What a great album. But the shame of being caught talking out of my ass and then fighting tears and I hastily left the premesis was good too. And "Hunky Dory" was still a good first listen nine years later.

I’m veering dangerously into musicnerd territory. Sorry.

Parroting. That’s what got me into trouble. I became that which I was most looking to avoid becoming, a poser, through parroting the catchphrase of “I like his earlier stuff best.” And when you think about the people in your life who are most often wrong about things, it’s likely because they’re not inquisitive enough to find out for themselves whether or not they’re full of shit. They just yell the same things Bill O’Reilly yells. And it’s as fun to tell them they’re wrong as it is fun for them to be wrong. Pranks all around.

I don’t have a lot of beliefs these days that are patently wrong. I’m fine with my ignorance, and I admit to being wrong, or at the very least uninformed, about almost everything. But, there are a couple of stubborn, pigheaded, and wrong beliefs I could articulate here, and you can parrot them later and either get somebody all worked up about how wrong you are (funny) or get all worked up yourself over how wrong you are (helpful and funny).

I can think of two wrong beliefs that I cling to.

1. Modern dentistry is a crock of shit.

I’ve been to two kinds of dentist in my life. There’s the kind that are expensive as hell but they have clean offices and DVDs you can watch while you’re in the chair, and they caution you about flossing in caring tones while pointing some expensive sonic cavity-finding gizmo into your mouth that tells them about phantom cavities that you don’t even have yet and have to pay a shitload of money to fix right away, and they also think you should see their friend the orthodontist because you have to spend as much money as possible until your teeth are perfect so you’ll have perfect teeth until the day you die. Then there’s the kind of dentist who doesn’t give a shit about anything but paying rent.

They’re both crocks of shit.

Type one dentists are crocks of shit because your teeth don’t have to be perfect. They just have to work. If they stop working or you start getting tooth pain, you should be able to go to a dentist without a lecture on flossing or scheduling a billion other unnecessary “while we’re at it” procedures. Just fix my teeth so they don’t hurt anymore, thanks. I get that it’s a tragedy that dental health is considered a luxury item in the United States. I get it. Health care is all messed up. Preventative medicine is the best medicine. I get it. And I’m not going to get all in your face about your not being a real doctor. You’re a real doctor. You made it. But you’re also a specialist. You only deal with teeth. And if you knew about the rest of me and what it’s up to most of the time, you’d know that irregular flossing is like the twelfth most unhealthy habit I have. If you want to be helpful, you should lecture me about how dangerous it is to get in fights with strangers on the train. Or better yet, just shut the fuck up for a while and fix my teeth so that they work again without hurting. As far as you’re concerned, my teeth are a used car and you’re a mechanic. I just want them to last long enough. I’ll flush the engine every once in a while and get it looked at, but I’m not interested in advanced fuel filter upgrades. It’s just a Corolla.

Type two dentists are crocks of shit because they only know how to keep your mouth from dying. I had one of these growing up. She once said “you have a cavity, but that’s fine.” I mean, I guess I agree, but let’s maybe do something about that cavity so I don’t have to come back for a root canal in six months. You don’t have to go looking for pseudo-cavities with some kind of sonar device, but let’s get on top of the real ones. Please. I’m here already. And while you’re at it, there are a couple of beans missing from your framed folk art rooster made of beans. It’s kind of freaking me out.

2. Delaware sucks.

This is the result of personal prejudice, growing up in Maryland. But name one good thing to come out of Delaware. And don’t say Joe Biden. Joe Biden is basically George Michael of “Sports Machine” fame. Compare them side-by side.




Clearly, they were separated at birth.

Do you really want a 60 year-old guy in an overdesigned suit with bleached teeth who spray-tans and does color commentary for the rodeo to decide all senate ties? Yeah. Well, yeah. You got me on that one, Delaware. Good one. Fuck you, Delaware.

Actually this might just be me piggybacking off of the dentistry thing, because these two guys are prime examples of the kind of asshole who'll pay anything to have perfect teeth.

See? Having totally uninformed, arbitrary opinions about things you know nothing about can be fun. One day I’ll have a dental hygienist from Delaware throw a drink at my face. Just for being the loudmouthed, irrational idiot I am. Maybe I’ll even suffer a traumatic amount of humiliation and as a result I’ll learn once again the value of shutting up and listening instead of going off half-cocked about billion-dollar industries and states of the union that I'm almost competely ignorant about. That’ll be really funny both to me and to the people around me.

Being wrong has its merits. You probably know at least one person in your life who'd rather be right than happy. Being wrong corrects that impulse. Sometimes you need a reminder in the form of a dental hygenist's appletini running down your back.

It’s also just a good self-prank. The holy highest of all possible humor.

Try it.