The Last Of The High Kings Puns

Picture it. June, 1971. London.

Keith Emerson, Greg Lake and Carl Palmer are celebrating the release of their album Tarkus at the Seven Stars Pub.

Very quickly, both ELP and their BACs are riding high.

Nothing can spoil this evening.

Enter King Crimson, their bitter rivals in experimental jazz-fusion symphonic rock.

A chill hits the air, but they manage some level of civility.

Fripp even manages to put aside his seething anger at Lake for defecting to Emerson's new project and stands a round for all.

It's unclear exactly when Hawkwind arrives, but the strained emotions soon give way to genuine cheer and good will.

Lemmy, their basist at the time, could have that effect on people.

Unfortunately, he also later looks directly at Lake, points at Fripp and company and asks, "Waren't you wiv his lot?"

The police report explains that the ensuing fracas lasted for about 30 minutes at caused at least £4,500 (£56,604.93 in 2021, or $78,480.75) in damages, several broken bones and uncounted stiches.

The scrum finally calms down after Peter Gabriel, who was [throwing darts](https://darthelp.com/articles/the-history-of-darts/#:~:text=M

Back in the before times, when sit-down restaurants existed, I used to order boneless cheese sticks and would just throw the word "boneless" in front of any appetizer with 100% corniness. The purpose of this isn't to make a good joke. It's not a good joke. The purpose is to make my dining companions catch some cringe splash damage and want to crawl into a hole and die out of embarrassment for my being horribly corny.

But there is a real, deeper purpose that I've discovered entirely by accident. People, especially young people, are so self-conscious and worried about saying or doing something embarrassing that it taints a lot of social gatherings. They go to a restaurant and are afraid to speak up even when their order is blatantly wrong. They'll tip well even when the food took an hour to arrive and the server has disappeared into the corn stalks behind a baseball field. It takes 2 hours of hanging out together before some friends finally stop nitpicking themselves, uncomfortable in their own bodies and brains, feeling perpetually judged, and begin to relax. These are the kinds of people who go to sleep every night replaying cringey moments from high school. Their last thought of the day is when the Burger King girl said, "Enjoy your meal!" and they said, "Thanks, you too."

It takes 2 hours and/or a lot of booze before they're comfortable enough to take conversational risks and truly reveal themselves. But if I come right out of the gate with a really dumb joke, then we can cut to the chase. There's less danger because someone in the group already shot themselves in the foot, right off the bat. They pulled a pin on the cringe grenade and then jumped on it.

You cringe at my dumb joke and then we're over the hump. Someone has already done something pretty stupid, so go ahead and order the hubcap of nachos and a massive chocolate shake because nobody is going to judge you poorly while they're all judging me.

In terms of price negotiations (haggling), there is a psychological concept called "anchoring". You throw out the first number and all subsequent numbers are compared to that number. This is the same idea. We've already set the humor standard pretty low at "boneless cheese sticks", so you can say the dumbest shit you want and, as long as it's not worse than my cheesy joke, it won't matter.

This is why, when you were a teenager and your dad took you and some friends out, your dad made corny jokes. He knew they were corny jokes. You and your friends un