1900HOTDOG

Nerding Day: The National Turtle Quiz Jokebook

Added 2024-10-16 12:00:08 +0000 UTC

One Christmas when I was very young, I was delighted to open an enormous wrapped box full of loose Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys. Decades later, my mother told me that because we hadn't had a lot of money at the time, she'd spent every Saturday morning the summer of that year going to yard sales and scooping up Turtles toys for cheap. I didn't know the difference as a kid, and as an adult that knowledge only gave a pleasant memory a more meaningful luster as I realized what my mother had sacrificed to bring my sister and I happiness. And plus, it turns out that getting all those toys used spared me from reading some really terrible Ninja Turtles jokes.

See, the Turtles toys came with these little booklets called "National Turtle Quiz Jokebooks." I think we can all agree that that's an objectively crazy thing to call a piece of paper with some turtle-themed humor on it. "National Turtle Quiz" implies some sort of standardized testing system whereby citizens who fail to learn why Michelangelo wants to work in a clock factory are sent to Dimension X for re-education by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird.

For the most part, the early jokebooks go how you'd expect. Michelangelo is silly. Raphael is impulsive. Leonardo has a lot of sense.

You know, like the theme song says: "Leonardo leads and has a lot of sense / Which is a homophone for a unit of currency / Holy shit we did the inverse bit of the joke from the movie Joker."

Yeah, I always thought that was a weird line. And was it "ninja teens" or "ninja teams?" I never could tell. Donatello, though, I remember this one: he "does" broad wordplay.

Why Donatello specifically? Why not Tiananchovie Square or the Pizza Hut Personal Panne Frank House? It doesn't matter. It's 1988 and Playmates wants 200 more Turtles jokes by the end of the day. Just riff on pizza some more. It's a funny word. Pizza. Has that "z" sound in it. You ever been to Italy? Nah, me either. I'll make it there one day, though. One pizza joke at a time. Long as Kevin Eastman doesn't break my legs first.

Ok, more of a turkey joke than a pizza one, but sure. A Turtle eating pizza is a lot like a turkey. Salmonella. Weird wads of flapping skin. Gobbling. Let's keep going.

I know this punchline. They're party dudes, so a 7 course meal would be a six pack and one asshole! Wait, no, it was just several pizzas? That's like, a lot of cheese though, isn't it. Can turtles (lowercase) eat cheese? Or is that part of the whole mutation thing? Sorry, I'm getting off track. I know, I gotta focus. The last guy who didn't hit the day's joke quota got jabbed in the 7th course with a bo staff.

I mean, that's not a bad question. But the pizza they eat in the cartoon doesn't usually look like it's been squashed up and forced down a shit-caked pipe first. I think they just get Raphael to put the trench coat and hat on and sit on someone's stoop? But maybe there's an angle here. We could get off pizza and lean into the grim reality of living in a feces-rich environment.

Perfect. And beautifully illustrated. Can we get one more? Maybe something that implies the Turtles have acquired one of their key qualities from being soaked in human waste 24/7?

Incredible. What else have we got? They're Ninja Turtles, right? Like that guy Frank Dux, who they made that movie Bloodsport about. Again, it's currently 1988 and as far as I know, that movie is an accurate representation of Frank Dux's life. So what do ninjas do? They hide from people. They're stealthy. Like, they'd wear Navajo White socks in a hotel to perfectly conceal their feet, having conducted extensive research beforehand on the most common colors of hotel walls. So what's the Turtle equivalent of that?

Wait, I've got it.

We're on a roll! If we keep this up, Peter Laird won't come to the office and brandish nunchucks at us again. So, uh, ninjas, the mystical east, Zen, dada, anti-humor… ok, how about this? When is a Turtle not a Turtle?

Hi everybody. merritt here, breaking the bit for a second just to say fuck, dude.

What the fuck is that? "When he turns into a pizza restaurant?" What the hell does that mean? You could write this joke about anything. "When is your mother not your mother? When she turns into the pangs of disappointment in yourself that you feel for writing some bewildering pizza jokes." The most generous interpretation I have here is that it's a tortured piece of wordplay about how "turning into" can refer both to the physical act of transmogrification and stepping off the sidewalk into a store. That might be a little high-minded for the six to eight set.

If I'd gotten this National Turtle Quiz Jokebook as a child — and again, I'm glad I didn't — this one would have stuck with me. I would have puzzled over it, assuming as I so often did that I just didn't get it because I was a kid, rather than realize the obvious truth: that two overworked comedy writers were turning out increasingly deranged pizza-based material under tight deadlines and implied verbal threats of violence from the creators of the Ninja Turtles.

[Q: Why did the joke writer make up some bullshit? A: Because Kevin Eastman sent threatening, semi-coherent letters to his home address.]

It's not all pizza pies, though. Some of the jokebooks branch out a little, covering characters like Rocksteady. He's a rhino, right? They could have just looked up "rhino jokes" on the interne— ok, it was 1988, they could have just gone to the library and asked for their Rhino Humor section. Too much work? Fine, just go basic. He's a mutant rhino, rhinos have horns. "Why are the Foot Soldiers always finding stiff socks in the Technodrome laundry basket? Because Rocksteady is so horn-y." No? Well, you get the idea. Something with horns.

"Tusk, tusk," huh? Like elephants have? Like Bebop, his fucking goddamn warthog partner has? Couldn't save this one for Doctor El, the mutant elephant who I was absolutely sure existed but whose name I had to look up just now? Couldn't say he was "horning in" on the Turtles' territory? No? Here's a punchline for you: you're fired. Which, incidentally, is also what Raphael said to Bebop while manning the Sewer Seltzer Cannon.

The writers of the first few jokebooks, Patricia Black and Bob Finley, don't seem to have much of a footprint online. For a franchise with fans as obsessive as TMNT, that's actually kind of shocking. You write several dozen Turtles-themed jokes that were included with the actual toys, and you'd expect a stub on a fan wiki at least. They were eventually replaced by uncredited writers at Pangea, the creative services company that helped launch the Ninja Turtles in the first place.

Evidently Playmates was sick of Black and Finley's out-there hippie shit. We're here to sell toys, aren't we? So write some fucking jokes about the goddamn toys the little bastards already bought. Like Storage Shell Michelangelo, write something about that. His shell opens up to hold all his pizzas and deadly melee weapons from the mysterious Orient.

"Why does Michelangelo smell? Because he smells!" Perfect. No notes. Next.

Here's Slap Shot Leo, which is Leonardo the Ninja Turtle only he plays hockey, because we've realized Ninja Turtles is a license to print money and we can literally make whatever variants of them we want. We're going to get so stupid with this shit. It's going to get to the point where kids are gonna have a hell of a time finding a version of Michelangelo that isn't dressed like a hip-hop firefighting astronaut.

So we're going pun-heavy. That's fine. These are kids. Saying "snot" is a guaranteed laugh. What about Storage Shell Don? Keep in mind that we already used "Storage Smell," so we need to come up with a new, entirely different word that rhymes with "shell" for this one.

It's me, merritt, again. Is Don, the Storage Shell Turtle drowning? Or is he simply alarmed because his bony outer shell just flipped open, exposing the fleshy shurikens within? I don't know, but the choice of art here is a little unsettling.

A lot of the jokes follow this sort of formula, making inoffensive pun riffs on the toys the booklets were packaged with. But like their predecessors, Pangea soon found the task of writing an infinite number of Ninja Turtles gags was more difficult than it seemed. Much like a mutagenic ooze, their task changed them. First, they started to repeat themselves.

If you don't already recognize Rock N' Roll Michelangelo because the space he might otherwise occupy in your mind has been overwritten by, say, the smiling faces of your children, allow me to explain this is technically a joke because the toy in question has a wind-up feature.

Seventeen National Turtle Quiz Jokebooks later, Pangea used the same joke for Slice 'n Dice Shredder. And I mean, who cares, right? Probably different people wrote these. It's an easy piece of wordplay to reach for. But this was merely the first sign that all was not well.

This is, as we say in the biz, a long row to hoe. The writers saw the character Wyrm, a garbage man turned mutant worm-like freak, or more likely just saw his name, and strained to consider what worms do. They skipped over "capable of asexual reproduction but still get it on with other worms" and jumped straight to "impaled on hooks for fishing," then had to work backwards to find a set-up. Why not "Why doesn't Wyrm like to set traps for the Turtles? Because Shredder always uses him as bait!" Anything is better than this untethered worm madness.

Admittedly I'm a little more relaxed than the writers at Pangea were, since Peter Laird isn't currently sending me pictures of my kids getting off the schoolbus, but still.

Things only get stranger from here. Remember the Foot Soldiers? In the movies they were teens groomed into being a part of Shredder's ninja gang. In the cartoon, though, they were mechanical automata. That opens up a whole world of robot jokes. Let's see how Pangea made use of the possibilities.

He what? This is a joke that would be a stretch if it was about zombies in a book called 101 Frankenstein Funnies. Here it just comes off as a complete non sequitur. Q: Why did Michelangelo practice his singing? A: Splinter killed and devoured a stray cat.

They did it twice? Could I be wrong here? Were the Foot Soldiers mummies all along? Let me just check the Foot Soldier action figure card back real quick…

What? What the fuck is happening? Shredder's Right Hand Mummy? Vital Mumtistics? Who decided this? How did we get here? More importantly, how do we escape from this horrible reality? Maybe some normal April O'Neil jokes?

This joke actually kind of makes sense if it's not about the friend of the Ninja Turtles who went to journalism school but the adult performer. I think I saw a video with that exact premise in my early 20s, actually. Any more April gags? By which I mean jokes, not bodily reactions to deep-throating a flashlight.

Let's pivot back to the Turtles.

Oh, I know this one: because he craves the freedom that is only to be found in a controlled state of helpless immobility, like in another video I saw one time.

Or that.

As they go on, the Pangea jokes get darker and darker. Death comes up more than you'd think for jokes about cartoon crime-fighting reptiles for children.

I want to be very clear here: there is no TMNT character named "Tattoo Man." There is, however, a character named "Tattoo."

"Hello? Mr. Tatthree? I have bad news and worse news about your brother. The bad news is he was killed by a mutant rhinoceros. The worse news? His last words were 'tusk tusk.' I know, it doesn't make any sense. Maybe I can cheer you up with a joke about Genghis Frog?"

I don't know, why did the courageous Genghis Frog jump off the thirty-story building? Frogs eat flies, right? So probably something about flies? He took PCP and thought he could fly?

Holy shit. I get the wordplay here but this is pretty goddamn dark for a Ninja Turtles joke. But hey, he's a superhero mutant frog, maybe he surviv—

Jesus Christ. I'm at a loss for words. It's a suicide joke with a picture of beloved character Gengis Frog splattered on the pavement. Were the writers at Pangea driven mad by the impossibility of their task? Was anyone reading over these before they went out into the world? Is the natural endpoint of all Ninja Turtles joketelling efforts suicide gags?

A: "When they turn into a pizza restaurant."