What Would Elmer Fudd Do?

In the entertaining but wildly absurd "X-Men" movie series there is an academy for gifted young mutants, all of whom display bizarre one-trick talents of questionable value, such as bearing a forked tongue or walking through walls. All right, maybe the forked-tongued kid can grow up to be a Republican Cabinet Secretary, but I hadn't credited the walking-through-walls skill much utility until last weekend.

I was attending an informal meeting held in an immaculate law office when I wandered out of the meeting room for a break. When I decided to reenter I found myself running smack (and I mean "SMACK") into a very transparent and sturdy glass partition. I was stunned, of course, and instantly felt the bridge of my nose for signs of breakage (of which there was none, though it hurt a lot). Gratefully the others in attendance showed concern for my well-being, rather than laughing at me, which I felt was my deserved fate after doing something so dumb.

My head vibrated for about an hour, and while my nose showed no clear bruising, I could not tell if any misshaping had occurred. (Frankly, any reworking of my Maldenesque nose at this point would be an improvement). Five days later the area is still tender and I can feel some vaguely loose cartilage, so the medical side of this story may not be done yet. But beyond the discomfort my major emotion has been one of embarrassment. How could anybody walk into a glass wall? Wasn't that an act consigned solely to slapstick comedies and Warner Brothers cartoons?

But when I started, sheepishly, to relate the incident to some acquaintances, I found an interesting phenomenon--practically everyone attested to having a similar experience. "Oh, I've done that a lot," confessed one friend. A lot? Another told an even more harrowing story of having gone through a glass door as a child, leaving both bodily and psychic scars. I guess I am a johnny-come-lately to this event. How could I know that innocent phrases like "running into a brick wall" and "walking though a door" could have literal antecedents?

This all makes me wonder if other staples of physical slapstick comedy are occurring in real life more often than we know. For instance, do people really slip on banana peels? Or do they have to be Capitalists in big top hats or rich dowagers in gaudy furs to qualify for that kind of trip? That event has not yet befallen me; not a lot of careless pedestrians eat bananas in my neighborhood. (I have slipped on ice and trod onto dog shit, but those acts are too common to qualify as comic calamities). Nor have I been hit in the face with a cream pie, or been flattened by a giant safe falling on top of me from the eighth floor of a downtown office building. But I do live in Earthquake territory, so who knows what's going to eventually plop down on my head.