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THE SURPRISING ORIGINS OF UNDERWEAR

by Stan Fletcher

A little known fact that I’ve been researching today: Underwear has been around since cave man times.A cave man named Gonad came up with the concept somewhere around 12,000 BC.

Gonad was out on a mammoth hunt when he rounded a corner and was surprised by an angry mammoth that had been shot with an arrow by another caveman who looked an awful lot like Gonad. As the mammoth charged, Gonad lost control of his bowels and soiled his favorite loincloth.

His wife, Danglyboobs, was incensed when Gonad came back to the cave that night. How would she ever get Gonad’s loin cloth clean? There wasn’t a Rockmart close by and they were almost out of detergent. Gonad knew that his hunting days were numbered if he continually came home with a soiled loincloth, which was a common occurrence. Danglyboobs wasn’t going to put up with Gonad’s crap forever.

Even though Gonad’s brain rolled around in his head like a BB in a boxcar, he came up with an idea. He needed something to wear between his loincloth and his nether regions that would shield his loincloth from any adverse effects of a charging mammoth or saber-toothed tiger. Underwear was born at that moment.

The first thing Gonad tried was a large banana leaf. This was a great shield but wasn’t very absorbent.

His caveman friends laughed at him, too. “Is that a banana leaf in your pants, or are you just glad to see me, Gonad?” was followed by raucous laughter.

The laughter stopped when the group was assaulted by an angry saber-tooth and Gonad was the only one in the group with a clean loincloth.

That’s when Gonad began to see the marketability of his new invention. But he had to use something besides a banana leaf. No more banana jokes. So he began to sew the first real pair of underwear that ever existed. They were made from the hides of the fluffiest hamsters he could find.

His son, Numbnuts, was shocked when he came home from school to discover that Gonad had killed five of his pet hamsters and sewn their hides together.

“Numbnuts, someday, when you’re on your first mammoth hunt, you will understand. Now help me clean up this mess before Danglyboobs gets home.”

Gonad’s new hamster undies worked wonderfully. Occasionally the stitching would come loose in the back, and the thread, or string, that Gonad used to sew them together would hang down behind his thigh. Gonad would pull on it until it came loose.

“Gonad, looks like you’ve pulled another hamster string,” his hunting buddies would say. Hamster string was eventually shortened to hamstring, which explains the origins of the name of that particular thigh muscle.As long as there was a good supply of hamsters in the caves where Gonad and his tribe lived, there was no shortage of underwear.

Gonad and Numbnuts began to farm hamsters for this purpose. Through some genetic engineering, their hamsters began to become more and more soil repellent. They realized one day that their Hamsters Are Not Easily Soiled.

An acronym was born from this phrase – HANES – and they began marketing Hanes underwear to the other male cave dwellers. Shortly thereafter the wheel was invented and they were able to ship significant quantities of Hanes to Rockmart. This is one of the earliest instances of commerce on record. No one is sure what other products Rockmart was carrying at the time, but apparently much of it was being shipped over from China.

Cavemen from all over began to swear by their Hanes, and their wives would not let them leave the cave on a hunt without them. Numbnuts finally went on his first mammoth hunt, and was successful, even though he soiled three pairs of Hanes in the process. Gonad and Danglyboobs were never prouder of Numbnuts.

So next time you slip on a pair of Hanes, say a silent thank you to Gonad and Numbnuts. After all, there is a great moral in their story, which is this: “Sometimes great things happen, and much progress is made, when you’re so scared that you crap your pants.”

The End.

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