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David Cuddy ’15 narrowly avoided complete social catastrophe yesterday evening when his explanation of an ill-received pun redeemed him in the eyes of his peers.
According to Cuddy’s friend, then enemy, then friend again Walter Lang, the incident began at roughly 6 p.m. last night. “We were just sitting in the Verney-Woolley Dining Hall,” said Lang. “We were eating, because it was dinnertime. Davy had that look on his face like he was going to say something. Arms raised, mouth open. Words coming out of his mouth. You know the look.”
As Cuddy delivered his bon mot, the mood at the table grew somber. Many pretended not to have heard, or to be caught in a coughing fit. Cuddy’s longtime crush Sabrina Silverman ’15 gave a forced chuckle and resumed her conversation with her boyfriend. Walter Lang ’14 pretended to be dead.
“Another man would’ve just let it go,” said Lang. “Thrown in the towel. Gone home, kissed his wife and kids, told them that Daddy’s a sorry excuse for a man and cried himself to sleep. But I’ll be a monkey’s granddad if Davy didn’t go out there and put it all on the line.”
Explained Lang, “I am not a monkey’s granddad.”
“You guys,” said Cuddy, speaking up suddenly. “Listen. What do people do when they get dirty? Right. They take a bath. And just what was the name of Saddam Hussein’s political party that held Iraq in an iron grip for decades?”
“Hold on,” said Lang, intrigued, as Silverman’s boyfriend attempted to interrupt. “Let the man speak.”
As Cuddy’s explanation drew to a close, the table fell silent. At length, Lang lifted his hands into the air. He brought them together, then apart, then together again. He continued in this vein, with the interval between hand collisions growing shorter. Others began to join in, exponentially increasing the rate of hand collisions. As Cuddy beamed, his status as group jokester restored, sources report that Silverman noticed for the first time his strikingly brown eyes.
