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STUPID GUM TRICKS!
(Updated 12/2007)
Warning for the humor-challenged: This page is meant to be humorous. That means funny. As in ha-ha. A lot of you out there hate gum, so you won't think this page is funny. A lot of you out there hate humor, so you also won't think it's funny. But unless you hate both, you'll agree with me that gum is the most hilarious substance ever invented. It is funny because it is.
It's even a funny word: gum. Maybe not as funny as ruin or mayhem, but funny nonetheless.
I don't chew the stuff myself nowadays, but we all know that chewing gum is among the most laughter-inducing substances ever invented. There is so much mischief you can do with a gooey wad of gum that the mind boggles in a horizontal direction.
But not all of this page is meant to be humorous. Some of it is downright tragic. People die daily from misuse of the zesty viand. But I bring these stories to you because knowledge is power.
Let the gum begin...
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The kind of bubble gum that we're accustomed to was invented by Walter Diemer in Lancaster, PA, in 1928. But back in 1869, William Semple, a dentist from Mount Vernon, OH, obtained a patent for what he called "improved bubble gum". I guess it was considered "improved" because bubble gum previously didn't exist at all! (Imagine a world without bubble gum.)
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When I was about 5 years old, I had a piece of bubble gum that I didn't want because it had been on the sidewalk. So I fed it to my dog. The dog chewed the gum just as a human would, except that with each chomp, he opened his mouth as wide as it would possibly go. He chewed it for about 15 minutes before spitting it out on the living room carpet.
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One of the most creative series of commercials ever to appear on American TV was for Hubba Bubba bubble gum and featured the Gum Fighter. Hubba Bubba was introduced in 1979, and its most distinctive characteristic was that it wasn't supposed to stick to your face when you blew bubbles. To underscore this point, each commersh was set in the Wild West and involved a big, tough cowboy known as the Gum Fighter, played by Don Collier. To demonstrate Hubba Bubba's capabilities, the Gum Fighter usually stood before an angry mob and blew a bubble, which popped all over his face. The mob gasped as if he just said a bad word in church. Then, in the words of the ad's narrator in one of the ads, "He peels off the Hubba Bubba."
At the end of the commersh, the Gum Fighter was shown dancing side-to-side, declaring, "Giant bubbles, no troubles!"
A few years later, there was a Hubba Bubba soft drink that supposedly tasted like the gum, but after that, the wildly unpopular brand of gum was rarely spotted in the U.S. for another 20 years.
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There really was a Bubble Yum commercial in the late '70s that featured a monkey puppet. YouTube confirmed to the world 30 years later that this series of ads really did exist. It's hard to tell if the puppet - known as the Flavor Fiend - was intended to be a monkey. He actually looked more like an orange Cookie Monster. Somehow, the puppet bubbled in the commercial. How's that for special effects?
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Was there not a gum commersh in the early '90s characterized by the voice-over guy inexplicably saying "saliva" as if the word was a separate sentence?
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In late 1998, I saw a commersh advertising a new movie that showed a real monkey blowing a bubble. Not a puppet, not a cartoon, not a person in a monkey suit, but an honest-to-goodness live monkey!
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A few years ago, somebody regaled me with their dislike of Hubba Bubba, recalling the fact that morsels of Hubba Bubba seemed to get bigger as you chewed them, making this brand difficult to chew. They said the reason Hubba Bubba didn't stick to your face was that you couldn't even get it out of your mouth to blow a bubble!
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I was playing in the street with my toy water pistol one day when I was about 7. Then, I got the brilliant idea that if I stuck a piece of green bubble gum - mixed with fresh tar that had just been poured on the street - down inside my squirt gun, it would blow a bubble if I pulled the trigger. But it didn't work. That was the end of that squirt gun!
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A very obscure segment on Sesame Street in the 1970s was a sketchy cartoon of a man in a candy store approaching the clerk, asking for "5 pounds of bubble gum, please." The shopkeeper handed the gum to the customer, who promptly crammed all 5 pounds of gumballs into his mouth and bubbled a huge pink bubble and floated into the air. I wonder how many kids thought they could fly if they blew a bubble that was big enough?
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If you stretch out a wad of bubble gum and stick it over your nostrils, you can blow bubbles with your nose. In 2001, the Guinness World Records Primetime television series featured a 55-year-old woman from Kentucky doing this very thing!
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I had many classmates in high school who habitually chewed wads of gum that were already chewed. In fact, I coined the term ABC gum ("Already Been Chewed", get it?) to describe this phenomenon.
One student had a wad of bubble gum the size of a golf ball, which he kept taking out of his mouth and displaying for the whole wide world to see. My homeroom teacher made him discard the gum in the garbage can, but a few minutes later, I saw the student rummaging through the trash can to retrieve his gum. When he found the gum again, he crammed it back into his mouth.
A more notorious sociopath who attended my school was constantly picking chewed morsels of gum off bottoms of desks and chewing them. He would occasionally store the gum in his pocket - collecting fuzzes all the while - between chews. Whenever he found more gum - some of which had probably been stuck under the desk for at least 20 years and was as hard as a rock - he would add it to the gum he already had.
I once found a stick of Extra sugarless bubble gum - still in its wrapper - behind a radiator in a classroom. I pointed it out to the crazed classmate, and he promptly snatched up the dirty gum and chewed it.
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On the Walk-a-Thons in high school, people would always gallop down the road, chompin' and blowin' BG (when they weren't drinking whiskey and chewing tobacco, that is). One year, one of my classmates blew a bubble and lit it with a cigarette lighter. The bubble just melted when the flame touched the pink sphere.
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At my other high school, one of my classmates got skeeped at by the teacher for chewing gum. So when the teacher was out of the room, the student approached the teacher's desk and spit his gum out in her coffee mug. When the teacher returned and tried to take a sip from her mug, she was taken aback to find gum floating in her coffee. She had lifted the cup all the way up to her mouth before she saw the gum, and then she winced in disgust and asked, "Who threw gum in my mug?"
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The only time I have ever seen gray bubble gum was in an episode of The Dukes Of Hazzard that begins with Cletus driving around aimlessly in his patrol car blowing gray bubbles.
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Gum can be tragic. A 58-year-old Australian chap died because he blew a huge bubble that burst and covered the lenses of his glasses while he was driving, impairing his vision and causing him to lose control of his car. His widow said, "Now he's gone to the great Hubba Bubba in the sky."
And in 1944, a Pennsylvania man lost a few of his teeth when a piece of bubble gum he was chewing mysteriously exploded inside his mouth.
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One snowy day in college, I found an object on the walkway that appeared to be a green Easter egg. But I soon discovered that it was a wad of green gum that had been blown into a bubble and discarded.
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Several years later, at the same university, I noticed that someone had stuck a big wad of gum on a small photo of singer Jewel's face on a poster.
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A neat thing to do when you're at a restaurant with your friends is stick your gum on the end of your drinking straw, put it in your Coke, and blow a bubble into the beverage.
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U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) must be obsessed with bubble gum. He bawled, "We spent less in the 1994 election than consumers spent on bubble gum that year. We're not spending too much on campaigns in this country; we're probably not spending enough." He made a similar whine after each election for many years after.
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According to a book, senior White House adviser George Stephanopoulos was such a pinnacle of maturity that during a presidential news conference, he blew a bubble the size of his head right in front of President Clinton that popped all over his face. He then spent the next 15 minutes standing there and picking gum off of his skin. It's unknown however if this was a scholarly book or not.
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Singapore gained international derision when it became the only country in the world to make gum illegal. (A popular joke at the time was that the punishment was probably worse if it was bubble gum - since technically, the difference between gum and bubble gum is that bubble gum is designed for bubbling.) But in 1999 a Republican member of the Oklahoma legislature tried to ban bubble gum cigars in his state, which was seen as a foot in the door for outlawing gum completely.
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Although Singapore is halfway around the world, its prohibition of gum is so ridiculed and reviled that when I was in college, a running joke was for my followers to carry gum around in a small crushproof container labeled "CONTRABAND."
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Here are some web pages maintained by other folks that actually talk about bubble gum: