The Shell Game: You Can’t Satirize This

The shell game violates the contract between a satirist and the world. According to that agreement, the satirist takes something real—something stupid, broken, magnificently daft—and makes it worse. Sharper. Funnier. More absurd. The point lands. The reader nods. A small, quiet justice is served.

This contract is occasionally voided, however, not by the satirist, but reality. Every now and then, an event arrives so thoroughly complete in its own absurdity that to satirize it would be an act of vandalism. You do not edit a masterpiece. You do not improve upon a sunset.

This is one of those times.

On the night of January 31, a twenty-four-year-old man presented himself at the emergency room of Rangueil Hospital in Toulouse, France. He informed staff that he had inserted a large object into his rectum and was unable to remove it. He did not say what the object was. This, it will emerge, was a masterclass in understatement.

Emergency surgery was performed. The object was extracted. It was an eight-inch, live artillery shell from 1918. Inside a man. In a hospital. In an area full of other people who had done nothing to deserve this.

The hospital was evacuated. Staff and the patients who could fled the building. The bomb squad was called. The fire brigade stood by. A security perimeter was established around the facility. All because one man in Toulouse had, for reasons that may never be explained satisfactorily, inserted a century-old weapon into his body and then gone to see a doctor about it.

Experts believe it was the result of a party stunt gone wrong. This raises a further question: what would a party stunt gone right have looked like?

Here is where satire would normally pick up, but it cannot because the facts have already done the work.

Consider the information asymmetry. The man told the doctors he had inserted “a large object.” He did not elaborate. The surgeons did not know they were operating on a potential explosive until they were already inside the situation. The bomb squad did not know they were needed until a surgeon, mid-extraction, looked at what was in his hands and—one assumes—went very, very still. The entire rear echelon of French emergency medicine was caught off guard by one man and one shell game.

The doctors and nurses at Rangueil are, according to the French newspaper La Dépêche, “accustomed to treating victims injured during sexual games.” They have seen apples, mangoes, shampoo bottles, turkey basters, a baseball,  a thermos. These are, in the grand taxonomy of rectal foreign objects, the common species, but a live artillery shell?

The rocket man will be interviewed by police this week. State prosecutors are considering charges under Article L2353-13 of the French Defence Code, which prohibits the possession and handling of explosive products.

The unnamed and now disarmed man is expected to make a full physical recovery soon. The hospital staff will, one suspects, require somewhat longer to recover from their shell shock.

The Pug Bus has attempted to satirize this story. It  failed. The material arrived already assembled, already funnier than anything a satirist could construct in his local Starbucks. It is, in the truest sense of the phrase, bomb-proof.

If the unhinged, unconventional ramblings of our fearless editor in briefs fancy your tickle, wander over to our Satirical Commentary page and try a line or two.