Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Fort Worth Really Is Where The Jest Begins As The Funniest Big City In America

Last night Elsie Hotpepper emailed me a link with the message in the email saying "Apparently they didn't factor in our politicians...."

The link was to an article in Texas Monthly titled Where the Jest Begins.

Apparently an in depth scientific study was made by a group of some university's scientists to determine the answer to the important question everyone has always wondered about, as in, which big city in America is the funniest.

And so a Top 50 Funny City List was compiled using a complex calculation method factoring in the number of comedy clubs, comedians and how often a town's people visit funny websites.

The computer went to work and eventually figured out that Chicago is America's funniest town.

The Texas Monthly article has a paragraph about how Texas fared, funny-wise....

Texas cities, however, mostly tanked. Austin, at number 14, was the state’s only reasonably funny locale. Dallas and Houston came in at 36 and 37, respectively; Arlington was 46; and San Antonio was 47. Scroll down to the very bottom of the list and there, at number 50, you’ll find Fort Worth—the unfunniest city in America, according to science.

Well, even though I totally respect the scientific method used to determine that Fort Worth is the least funny of the Top 50 biggest towns in America, methinks, like Elsie Hotpepper thought, that the data used to determine a town's funniness was not broad enough.

Methinks things like Kay Granger being Fort Worth's Congresswoman should have been factored in.  Along with Kay's son being given a nepotistic job for which he had zero qualifications, as in running the Trinity River Vision Boondoggle, I mean Panther Island Boondoggle. (I just can not get used to the funny, goofy new name for the Boondoggle)

Which is just another funny Fort Worth factor. How many towns on this Top 50 Funny List  have anything as goofy as the Panther Island Boondoggle going on in their town? How many towns on this Top 50 Funny List are building three bridges over an imaginary flood bypass channel for which no money has been secured to dig an un-needed flood bypass channel?

How many other towns in this Top 50 Funny List have something as funny as the Rockin' the River Happy Hour Inner Tube Floats going on in a polluted river running past their downtowns?

How many other towns on this Top 50 Funny List have done something as goofy and funny as open the 21st century's first drive-in movie theater?

How many other towns on this Top 50 Funny List has done something as goofy as naming their downtown zone "Sundance Square" and then after decades of there being no square in Sundance Square, finally building a square, but then do something funny like name the new square "Sundance Square Plaza?"

How many other towns on this Top 50 Funny List have had a mayor like former Fort Worth mayor Mike Moncrief, who would do something as funny as pour grape kool-aid in their town's river thinking it would turn the river purple, and do so in some sort of odd homage to a local school's colors?

I really believe a broader funny city scientific survey would have placed Fort Worth in its proper place on a list of the Top 50 Funniest Cities in America, with that proper place being Fort Worth is clearly the #1 Funniest City in America.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fort Worth is also home to the funniest daily newspaper in Texas, the Star-Telegram.

A year ago the S-T cited a parody website as proof that high school graduation speeches should be censored.

Durango said...

Anonymous, I am appalled that I neglected to mention that among the things which make Fort Worth so funny is the fact that the town is the biggest in America without a real newspaper. That and that pseudo newspaper's "star" reporter is referred to by many as Dud, rather than Bud....

Anonymous said...

running past their downtown's?
Our river does not run... It just sits there dammed up at each end of town so it looks like a river.
If it ever rains, it runs. Oh, and it's a white water treat when the spring snow melt... No, that's a wakeboard park!
Pass the tanning butter, a snake bite kit and a tetanus shot.