Cracked Columnists

The Top 5 Nooners #3: Local TV News Is Hard Work

This week, while Ross is in the mountains of Mexico training for his new role as a Cracked columnist, we're counting down our favorite Nooners from five to one. Coming in at number three is a stone cold classic that need only be introduced with the four oddly pronounced syllables: WIE-ner POO-pie. Wiener Poopie

It must be hard to be a local TV reporter. You probably have to go to school for a long time, taking tons of classes on journalism and ethics and diction and all that stuff. Then you have to get an internship, hoping they'll keep you on after the summer's over. Maybe if you're lucky you'll get an entry-level job at some TV station in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You'll work there for a couple of years, barely making ends meet, working late nights editing copy while your spiteful wife sits at home, stirring watered-down Kool-Aid and operating a phone sex line from your living room.

This will be your life.

Then one day you'll get your big break. Your boss will call you into his office and hand you a script. "You won't be on camera," your boss will tell you, "but it's a great human interest story. We need you to do narration." You'll give him a little self-satisfied nod, thinking to yourself, "No problem. I've got this."

But then later on that night when you're at home, staring at yourself in the mirror and practicing your lines, you'll realize that nothing in your career could have prepared you for this. Most of it will be fine, the vast majority of it, really, but there will be those two words that you just can't seem to get right.

"WIE-ner poopie," you'll say. "Wiener POO-pie. WIE-ner POO-pie." You'll inflect it differently each time, your voice rising and falling on each syllable in endless permutations. "Wie-NER poo-PIE."

Your wife will sigh impatiently in bed. "Come to bed, honey," she'll say.

"I'll be there in a minute," you'll say, then you'll turn back to the mirror and furrow your brow. "WIE-ner poopie. Wiener POO-pie. WIE-ner POO-pie."

Nobody ever said it was gonna be easy.