The Shmoo Terrorizes Bar Patrons

The Shmoo Cartoon: Watch this!Have you ever heard of the Shmoo? I hadn't either until one fateful night. It was fall 2008 and I had been living in Colorado working as a bar-tender and spending, as you can imagine, an unruly amount of my time drinking and staying up very, very late. The word was one I had heard before, in many different contexts. Like "shmoo your face" or as a response to a question like...
-"Hey, are you going out tonight?"
-"Shmoo!"

To anyone else, I assume this seems retarded and extremely unfunny, but if you lived your life using this word uncannily and inventing variations of it like a number: Shmooillion. Or the noun version of shmoo: Shmoner. you would think twice when you finally discovered, like my friend and I did, that not only is Shmoo a word, but an actual character created by comic strip author Al Capp in 1948. The following is the Wikipedia entry describing this lovable character and the strange and utterly hilarious attributes it supposedly has...

A shmoo is shaped like a plump bowling pin with legs. It has smooth skin, eyebrows and sparse whiskers - but no arms, nose or ears. Its feet are short and round but dexterous, as the shmoo's comic book adventures make clear. It has a rich gamut of facial expressions, and expresses love (often) by exuding hearts over its head.



Cartoonist Al Capp ascribed to the shmoo the following curious characteristics. His satirical intent should be evident:
They reproduce asexually and are very prolific. They require no sustenance other than air.
Naturally gentle, they require minimal care, and are ideal playmates for young children.
Shmoos are delicious to eat, and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself, either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or into a broiling pan, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. (Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.)
They also produce eggs (neatly packaged), milk (bottled grade-A), and butter — no churning required. Their pelts make perfect bootleather or house timber, depending on how thick you slice it.
They have no bones, so there's absolutely no waste. Their eyes make the best suspender buttons, and their whiskers make perfect toothpicks. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal.
The frolicking of shmoon is so entertaining (such as their staged "shmoosical comedies") that people no longer feel the need to watch television or go to the movies.
Some of the more tasty varieties of shmoo are more difficult to catch. Usually shmoo hunters, now a sport in some parts of the country, utilize a paper bag, flashlight and stick to capture their shmoos. At night the light stuns them, then they can be whacked in the head with the stick and put in the bag for frying up later on.

...Now, please. After reading this, tell me this is not something that would have shocked you and flipped your worldview upside down! especially at 3:30am after a long night of drinking.