This Is Probably Something

If you are old enough to remember Cheech and Chong’s record albums, you probably remember the sketch where Cheech is looking for a late night TV show, and while channel surfing comes across a late night movie where the bad guy is telling an old man to “sign the papers.” The old man protests that he can’t sign the papers. They go back and forth a few times, until the bad guy, in a worse German accent, demands: “And why cannot you sign the papers?!” To which comes the punchline: “Because you have broken both of my hands!”🙌 

And in those innocent, pre-Google days, we all thought they made that up.

But tonight, ironically, I was watching an old movie on TV, a movie called “Invisible Agent.” The hero is an invisible American, tasked with spying on the Nazis. In the third act, one of his associates is captured and questioned by the Nazis and, at last, told to sign the papers. He says he can’t, and this goes back and forth a few times, until he explains: “Because you have broken all of my fingers!”

Truth is always stranger than fiction.