The Great Ketchup Deception

[Alpo]

The Great Ketchup Deception

 

by Lee Echols

 

Excerpt from the book Dead Aim

 

 

Big pistol tournaments draw the practical jokers like straddle bugs to a fertilizer plant, and I don’t recall ever attending one when somebody didn’t get the treatment in one form or another. I have always been a blind worshipper of the throne of persiflage and light raillery and, like most practical jokers, I am a dead cold setup for any one who might try to run one at me.

 

For humor is a strange possession. It is as variegated as a petunia blossom and any form of it may make one man laugh until he bloats with the green sickness, while another, seeing and hearing the same piece of foolery will raise himself angrily to his full height, dust off his posterior, adjust his truss and stride purposefully away making clucking sounds between his tongue and his upper plate.

 

Take me for example. There are brands of humor which certainly must be funny to millions of people but which go over me like a home run over a right fielder. Jack Benny’s program is one of them. I simply can’t see anything humorous about the pronunciation of the words “Azuza” or “Cucamonga” and, in fact, have found them both to be fine little California towns.

 

It seems to put studio audiences into deep rumbling laughter to hear every Sunday night that Phil Harris likes to belt the bottle occasionally, but this in itself isn’t at all funny to me. My list of acquaintances boasts any number of brisk lads who could be classed in that category, and although some of their antics after they have belted it have almost made me laugh myself into the hospital, the mere fact that they do drink has never struck me as being such a whooping joke.

 

I have never heard very many Irish dialect jokes that racked me with laughter, nor do I get the call from the odd tricks of speech and spelling of such famous humorists as Artemus Ward and Josh Billings. For I am a man who likes his funny stuff sudden and startling – like the frightful squawl of a goosy man when he has been prodded by a determined prankster, or the astounded look of disbelief on a shooter’s face when he sits down on a fresh hen-egg which some light fingered competitor has slipped in his hip pocket.

 

I like my nonsense strictly for nonsense’ sake, and with nothing but this in mind Aaron Quick and I set up what became famous as “The Great Ketchup Deception” at the National Mid-Winter at Tampa in 1939.

 

In wandering through a New York City trick store earlier in the year, I had come onto a little mouse trap device which looked like a tea coaster. It was so arranged that when a weighty object which had been placed on it was suddenly lifted off it would release this small mouse trap which would in turn explode a cap which sounded like a battery of Jubal Early’s artillery going off at Spotsylvania.

 

Our plan was quite elaborate and we set it up between the clubhouse and the lunch stand with the utmost care and precision. First, we obtained two benches and put them about ten yards apart. Then we set the mouse trap arrangement on one of the benches and placed a .22 High Standard on it.Then Quick put his gun box on the other bench and laid several of his guns out as though cleaning them. I took my stand about twenty feet away from the first bench directly in front of the barrel of the High Standard. We then relaxed and waited our first victim.

 

He turned out to be a Cuban Navy officer who had come over to the matches from Havana and who knew only three words of English, one of these being “alibi” and the other two “not ready.”

 

He was walking slowly toward the clubhouse, probably reflecting on an ill-spent night in Ybor City and laying his poor showing at the day’s matches on this, when Aaron Quick, timing his play perfectly, asked him in Spanish to please hand him the gun from the bench. The Cuban, apparently surprised and pleased to hear his native tongue spoken in this foreign land, hastened to comply and when he raised the High Standard off the coaster the cap went off with a black powder roar and I went into my part of the great drama.

 

I don’t believe that Barrymore himself during his best days as Hamlet ever executed a death scene with the histrionics that I put on for the quaking Cuban who was standing there with Quick’s pistol in his hand and guilt showing all over him. I clutched my chest, bugged my eyes out, like a tree lizard with Riggs disease and, for the piece de resistance, as I slowly sunk to the ground, let a mouthful of ketchup (which I had got from the lunch stand) run slowly out of my mouth over my chin.

 

Thisclinched it. If there was ever any doubt in his mind that he had fired a lethal bullet through me, the sight of this red coagulated liquid drooling over my chin convinced him, and he ran to Quick babbling in Spanish that he was in a strange land…didn’t even know the language…had no money for lawyers…

 

It took us about ten minutes to get him quieted down after I had risen from the dead, like the blessed Savior, and convinced him I was as good as new.

 

The Cuban’s reactions were so satisfactory that we decided we’d try it again and by this time we had quite an audience. Harlon Carter of the U.S. Immigration Border Patrol came whistling down the path and our audience became engaged in other pursuits so he wouldn’t get suspicious.

 

As he passed the first bench, Aaron quietly asked him to hand him the High Standard and the big explosion took place when he lifted it up. Now Harlin had recently killed a Mexican in a gun fight on the Rio Grande and the subsequent drawn-out court procedure was still mighty fresh in his mind.

 

When I went into my act with death rattles, walling of eyes and slobbering of ketchup, I could see that his mind was as active as that of a Supreme Court Justice.

 

Quick told him, “You’ve shot him, Harlon.”

 

Carter looked quickly behind him and replied, “It wasn’t me, Aaron. I heard it come right by me!”

 

“The Great Ketchup Deception” finally backfired, however, as most practical jokes have a way of doing with me.

 

The first two men of our four-man team had fired the Centerfire Camp Perry Police Course with a 295’12 average.

 

Pete Chapman and I were firing in the clean up holes that day and were to go on the line immediately after lunch. I saw Chapman ambling toward the lunch room and hastened to get Aaron Quick and our paraphernalia together.

 

I barely got in position when Chapman arrived at the first bench. Quick asked for the gun; Chapman picked it up; the cap went off and I went into my act.

 

Chapman grinned in disbelief when Quick told him he’d shot me, but when the ketchup started bubbling out of my mouth he staggered toward me like a delirious man with the breakbone fever. He shouted hoarsely from a dry throat, “My God! He is shot!”

 

We thought it was quite humorous that he was still in a high state of excitement when they called us to the firing line a short time later, but it didn’t seem quite so funny to us when he jerked us a measly 256 for a team score over the Police Course. If he’d even shot us a 292, which was much below his average, we’d have broken the record.

 

I learned something at the tournament. I learned that if you’re going to scare somebody half to death, you’d better do it to somebody who isn’t on your own team.

[Cat Brules]

Nope.

   
CB

[Utah Bob #35998]

Nothing funnier with hi-jinks involving firearms ay?  Wink wink. Nudge nudge. Why, that's plumb Hilarious!

NOT!

[J-BAR #18287]

IMO, anyone who is the butt of such a prank can kill the perpetrator as justifiable homicide.

[Forty Rod SASS 3935]

16 minutes ago, J-BAR #18287 said:

IMO, anyone who is the butt of such a prank can kill the perpetrator as justifiable homicide.

Yeah, but don't shoot him.  It gives gunners a bad name.  I prefer a pair of pliers and a soldering iron.....or of I'm in  a hurry a pool cue will work.