PK: Poor little snake.
DB: It happens all the time. In popular culture snakes are frequently misunderstood and suffer an unjust reputation as being malicious, as being specifically out to get people. This reputation flies in the face of the actual behavior of most snakes, which are gentle creatures just trying to get by from meal to meal.
PK: I see. I had no idea. I've never harmed a snake, Doug. Really. I've even held a few, and I liked them....
DB: Also, I would certainly hope nobody believes the officers of Rockwall's police force are so profoundly stupid that they discharge their firearms at harmless snakes inside people's homes.
PK: Well, that's something we can be pretty sure about.
DB: You think?
PK: I highly suspect so, yes. As we've noted, it's a wacky story.
DB: True. So now it's your turn. Tell me what you know about it.
PK: Okay. Some elements of this story have been around for decades if not even longer. For instance, the dropped stretcher bit has shown up numerous times in similar stories of accidental hilarity, one good example being "The Exploding Toilet."
A variant of the very tale we're discussing appeared in Jan Harold Brunvand's 1986 book, The Mexican Pet (W.W. Norton):
A large bushy potted palm is delivered to a private home. The lady of the house signs for it, and the deliverman departs. As she takes it into the kitchen the woman screams when she sees a snake slither out from among the leaves. Her cry brings her husband running out of the bathroom, where he has been showering. He has only a towel draped around him.
"There! There! Under the sink!" the woman screams. Her husband drops the towel as he gets down on his hands and knees for a better view under the sink. Then the family dog — excited by all the commotion — comes into the room to investigate. Seeing its naked master in this odd position, the dog curiously puts its cold nose against the man's rear end. The man starts up abruptly, banging his head on a pipe and knocking himself out cold.
His frantic wife is unable to revive him. Thinking that he may have had a heart attack or have been bitten by the snake, she calls an ambulance. As the paramedics load the unconscious nude man with the bumped head onto the stretcher, they ask her what happened, and when she explains the whole thing they laugh so hard that one man loses hold of a corner of the stretcher. Her husband is dropped to the floor and breaks his leg [arm, neck, collarbone, etc.]
These stories and anecdotes are often made up strings of accidents and mishaps and foolish maneuvers by the persons involved, which render them quite entertaining, not to mention improbable. The butt of the situation is almost always a man, a hapless journeyman or family man who has bumbled into a ridiculous situation from which his best efforts fail, sometimes hilariously, to extricate him. We certainly saw a lot of this type of storytelling in the films of Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, the Little Rascals, and more contemporaneously in the very successful TV sitcoms I Love Lucy and Home Improvement.
These are all situation stories, and while hopefully the innocent little Opheodrys aestivus will not often become the vehicle that sets the mishaps and fun in motion, this type of story is sure to be with us on into even the next millennium.
DB: I still say it's wacky.
PK: So do I.
