A Ham Sandwich Walks Into A Bar

Wednesday is about books and/or writing. Today, a poem I wrote in 2018, in anger, and with love, maybe makes more sense as an essay or story. So here, I've had a go at starting it anew...

The old joke has it that if Karen Carpenter and Mama Cass had just shared the same ham sandwich they’d both be alive today. It’s hilarious – because one of them was rather thin, and the other wasn’t. They both died due to conditions of the heart. (I’ve no idea where the ham sandwich rumour came from, but people love to talk about Cass Elliott choking on this food-type – essentially just a comedy-prop – in bed. Why this is funny and how this came to be any sort of ‘public knowledge’ is beyond me). Look, there are parallels: They were both incredible. Huge talents. The star of the show in their respective groups. With voices that take you away, that could make your heart break.

They broke their own hearts, busted, beyond repair. Karen died of anorexia nervosa. Cass died from a heart attack. Let’s make a joke about these amazing women. Let’s sell short their legacy by having a laugh. Let’s talk of ham sandwiches, they’re always funny. Ham, bacon or pork. It all comes from a pig.

Let’s laugh at what these women did, reduce them down to an ugly, weird and frankly baffling punchline. Because to think, instead, of Dream A Little Dream and We’ve Only Just Begun and the 40 or 50 other great recordings between them – at least - is harder to do, less of an easy laugh, than making up a story about a ham sandwich in bed.

Also, how would Cass Elliott saving half of that sandwich, back in 1974, do much for a first-peak of fame Karen Carpenter, nearly a decade before she lost her battle? Jokes about ham sandwiches are a shortcut to actually thinking. I know this because I just googled: Ham Sandwich Jokes. There are 32 different ham sandwich jokes on one website. Though to call them different is awarding entirely too many points for originality.

For the most part they are variations on the same things: You can buy a ham sandwich for a fiver, get a fancier one for a bit more or get a handjob for about $200. These are the three options listed on the menu in the bar where this joke is about to take place: The guy in the bar calls out “who gives the handjobs?” The [blonde] barmaid says [with a smile] that she does the tug. Well, comes the punchline, punching up and punching down and punching all around, Wash your hands and make me a ham sandwich!

There’s another about a guy that is upset he always gets a ham sandwich for lunch. He says if his wife gives him one more, he’ll jump off the building at the construction site where this joke takes place. The next day his wife gives him more pig in bread. And he leaps to his death. His workmate had promised much the same if he got another peanut-butter. At their funeral – because they had one together, for no real known reason – their wives discussed the situation. Peanut Butter Wife reveals that her husband actually packed his own lunch every day. So that’s deeply hilarious.

The other main kind of ham sandwich joke has a ham sandwich walking into a bar and the barman [blond or not, we are never told!] points out that, hey, we don’t serve ham sandwiches here! “That’s okay”, says the sandwich. “I just want a drink”. That’ll be soggy bread almost instantly, I’ll bet!

Did these incredibly witty and wise stories of bread and ham and the combination of the two to make a meal-sized snack arrive on the back of waiting a decade to mock the deaths of two brilliant singers? Or were they doing the rounds already? I’ll never know. But I can’t say, after 600 words or so, that I don’t really care; 32 jokes about ham sandwiches. (Fuck me, that’s outrageous).

And – cue Twilight Zone music: Mama Cass was 32 when she didn’t eat any part of a ham sandwich and was in fact already asleep, dying before waking, late in the night and late in July in 1974. Just under ten years of waiting and plotting, and planning the perfect weight-mocking food-prop joke…and early in the morning, after making it through the night, a poorly Karen Carpenter cannot take another step. Her frail body, her damaged soul, her illness in control, its final ravaging creeping down the spine…

She collapses on the floor of her parents’ bedroom. She’s unable to sign the divorce papers as planned. She’s unable to breathe. To sing. To play the drums. To do anything. She dies in February. It’s 1983. And, yes, she was 32.

This was originally written as a poem - long, unweidly angry lines over many pages, back in about 2018, and it was collected in a similar form in my 2020 book of poems, The Death of Music Journalism. There’s a longer essay waiting to happen one day, I’m sure of it, but, a recent project of mine is taking the poems and turning them into short prose pieces, often without changing a word. The same piece of writing, the same thoughts, can be a poem, a short story, an essay snippet, a piece of autobiography; sometimes all of those things all at once.