HUMOR: Salt Trick
This is the third column in an ongoing series about poorly edited YouTube advertisements on erectile dysfunction that continue to make unwanted appearances in the humorist’s YouTube playlists.
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
I thought I had finally outpaced my YouTube algorithm since none of my music selections had been recently interrupted by Sylvester Stallone checking on me and my little buddy while I showered. Of course, the Italian Stallion has been quite busy helping President Trump restore cinema to the glory days when movies were made about the evil Joe Biden-led governments and militaries that did not understand the hell that John Rambo and Donald Trump endured in Nam.
Most of my YouTube music had been interrupted of late by flightless Australian birds starring in insurance commercials and other such inanity not worried about my performance in the bedroom. For this, I think my editors were quite relieved. But then an AI-generated woman, with a propensity for swatting imaginary bugs around her face and having sex with her stepson, appeared in a short commercial to let me know about a little secret that would help make my shake spear rise.
The woman’s backstory has some obvious narrative holes because she visits a doctor in Boston and is skeptical that this major discovery is not well known in medical circles. Not even Robert Kennedy Jr. knows about it. However, she never elaborates on why she was visiting a doctor in Boston to discuss erectile dysfunction unless this just happened to come up at the end of the visit when the doctor asked if there were any prescriptions they could fill, and she said she did not want to be embarrassed by taking pills. (In the YouTube video she does mention that no one should have to take embarrassing pills. She seems very aware of the mockery that pharmacists and delivery personnel are capable of.)
The woman returns home, steeped in skepticism, until she remembers that her stepson was spying on her while she showered, so she demands that her stepson try the little salt trick from the doctor in Boston and then have sex with her. Apparently, the stepson was so convincing in his performance that she decided to post a YouTube commercial to share this gift with that segment of the world that is too cheap to subscribe to YouTube without commercials.
(I sense that readers might have some skepticism at this point in the column. First off, the commercial did appear on YouTube and not YouPorn. The music video I was playing at the time of the commercial interruption was the band Supertramp live in London in 1977—part of my personal tribute to Rick Davies of Supertramp who passed away recently. So, it does not appear that the algorithmic formula for ED aids is based upon musical taste. It’s not like I was watching the “Saved By The Bell” movie where they go to Hawaii and skinny Screech overcomes body shaming by Mario Lopez and dons a Speedo by movie’s end because he found a salt trick on the internet.)
My father was a newspaper man, so I grew up in a household where Scotch and waters were prevalent alongside an overriding conviction that all stories must be properly sourced and confirmed. I reached out to Dr. Lilian Jalil who is a physician in Philadelphia. Dr. Jalil studied at Yale which, to my mind, made her an expert on all internet medical advances as well as capable of providing a five-letter answer to “Yale graduate” for a crossword puzzle.
Dr. Jalil is also morally obligated to respond to all of my medical inquiries and not because of the Socratic oath. When we were on the Quiz Bowl team together in high school, she was concerned that if we lost to Conrad Weiser High School, a team especially slow to buzz in, she might not get into an Ivy League school and property values might be affected in our community. Recognizing that she was presenting me with an opportunity to pester her for the rest of her life with questions about assorted internet remedies, I buzzed in on: “What geographic feature do Oklahoma and Florida share?”
When I answered, “Panhandle,” and the standing ovation subsided, and the Conrad Weiser smart kids left the stage in shame and with a dawning awareness that they would now have to go to Penn State Berks campus, I looked at Lilian with a knowing nod of the Faustian bargain she had just entered. Forty years later, her soul came due.
My question to Dr. Jalil was, essentially: Would you, as a licensed physician of nearly 30 years, recommend to male patients that they apply a salt and water mix to their euphemism for 13 seconds every day to increase their virility?
“One hundred percent, absolutely NOT,” she responded. “It seems to be a dangerous internet trend. There is no evidence to suggest that it will help an erection and probably could cause harm, inflammation of the skin, and possibly infection.”
My AI model with the jazz hands had not mentioned such possible side effects, but she did warn me that if I clicked on the blue button to watch the full video that the medical world wanted to keep secret, she would show me, explicitly, how to apply the salt solution and also, for the “clever” ones (by which I assume she meant award-winning humorists) give me a secret about African gorillas that would make either me or the gorillas lose their underpants. She was not clear on who was losing their underpants.
For further clarity and to once again bask in my Quiz Bowl victory from high school just as Bruce Springsteen predicted in song, I asked Dr. Jalil if she was aware of any African gorilla tricks that doctors have not shared with the public.
“Are you on LSD?” she asked. “We studied humans in med school, not gorillas.”
I assured her I was not on any drugs, because I now knew that taking pills was embarrassing. I did wonder though if, in her storied Ivy League career, she had stumbled across any Jane Goodall research on African gorillas and if they ever wore underpants.
“She studied chimpanzees. Not gorillas,” said my dear friend who likely wished she had missed the field trip where we met at the United States Botanic Gardens in 6th grade.
I, however, am eternally grateful for her friendship and medical knowledge because I could go back to listening to Supertramp sing: “Hide in your shell, cos the world is out to bleed you for a ride;” knowing that no AI-generated model was bleeding me for a ride because I once was the first to buzz in and knew Florida and Oklahoma had panhandles.
(In memory of Dr. Jane Goodall and Rick Davies. I’m sure this is how they would both like to be remembered.)
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