In California: The Life and Death of a Good Joke

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Lightning had struck the primal soup. A collection turned up $3 for a classified ad in a newspaper called the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Dull Men's Club was on its way to becoming as fashionable as the All-Booze Diet or neoconservatism. "Write for information," said the ad. Amazingly, seven or eight people instantly did. One sufferer admitted that hot tubs made his bathing trunks pucker. Someone else cried out in the night: "Help! I'm tired of being the star of the show, the life of the party. Stop me before it's too late!" The Babar plotters bought another ad, this one offering a club membership and a lavish brochure for $5. Troise, an auto mechanic in his mid-30s, composed a mimeographed, both-sides-of-one-page exhortation titled "Lavish Brochure." At one time Glanting, 30, had a little success as a stand-up comic in clubs around San Francisco. Now he works for a coffee company. But he did the spoken interviews that were beginning to be requested by a few radio stations.

"Publicity would build for a while, then die out," Glanting recalls. But each wave was bigger than the last. At first the clamor came from small FM stations, then the Knight newspapers wire service, then a huge AM station in North Carolina, "then some station in Detroit, they called me at about 11:30 one night and I was plotzed, then local television." For a while, Troise says, the club became a monster that wouldn't die. Glanting was doing as many as six interviews a day.

He had a spiel worked up: "It's the decade of the dull. Mountains are dull, birds are dull, flowers are dull, they don't hang around in fern bars trying to impress people." The producers of To Tell the Truth flew Glanting to Manhattan, where, he says, it felt a little odd to meet "some guy from a beer-tasting club who was going through the same kind of media ride."

Dullness had struck a chord, as home truths occasionally do, but at the Café Babar they needed new material. One of the TV networks got hold of Troise, who, improvising with some desperation, said that the club was going to create a Pantheon of Dull Heroes in—here he reached into his skull at random for the name of a small town—Carroll, Iowa.

Some people in Carroll, a corn-country town of about 9,000 inhabitants, were miffed, but some weren't. Glanting took time off from work, flew to Carroll, and with the enthusiastic help of the town's Chamber of Commerce, invested the "pantheon"—a small concrete structure in a cornfield—with a rusty barbecue grill, some worn-out tires, and pictures of such dull heroes as William Bendix, Hugh Beaumont (the father in Leave It to Beaver), Alan Hale Jr. (the skipper in Gilligan 's Island) and Walter Mondale.