Joke:   Newscaster inadvertently makes sexually suggestive comment regarding an amount of snowfall.

Example:   [Collected on the Internet, 2002]

This had most of the state of Michigan laughing for 2 days and a very embarrassed female news anchor who will, in the future, likely think before she speaks. What happens when you predict snow but don't get any? This is a true story . . . There was a female news anchor who, the day after it was supposed to have snowed and didn't, turned to the weatherman and asked, "So Bob, where's that 8 inches you promised me last night?" Not only did HE have to leave the set, but half the crew did too because they were laughing so hard!

Origins:   As this category of our web site illustrates, we'll probably never run out of urban legends as long as people keep dusting off hoary jokes, prefacing them with "This is a true story!" comments, and setting them loose on the Internet. This particular humorous setup (a male weatherperson's winter forecast of several "inches" being interpreted not as a measure of snowfall but as a measure of . . . err, manhood) was popular thirty years ago, as demonstrated by this entry from the opening page of a 1973 Kermit Schafer "Bloopers" collection:

A Slip on the Ice

In a recent weather report which described the snowfall in the Northwest, the announcer on KHAR, Alaska, said: "And Helena got six inches during the night . . . Helena, Montana, that is!"

(It should be noted that Schafer, who made a career out of collecting "bloopers" from radio and television programs, frequently passed off apocryphal stories as "real-life events," even to the extent of fabricating recordings and advertising them as "actual broadcasts.")

Of course, even if the above anecdote about station KHAR in Anchorage, Alaska, were true, the implication that the announcer caught himself having made a comment with a suggestive double meaning is not necessarily the only explanation — he might, for example, have been reading off snowfall amounts for various Alaskan cities, then reported the snowfall for Helena and suddenly realized he hadn't provided his listeners with the information that he was now giving a weather report for a city outside of Alaska.

Sometimes context can make a world of difference.

Last updated:   29 March 2007

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  Sources:

    Schafer, Kermit.   Best of Bloopers.

    New York: Avenel Books, 1973   (p. 1).