I’ve been lucky. I’ve always had great dentists. They’ve always taken care of me, and they and their army of hygienists have always been patient with me. This is a sharp contrast to growing up, because all of my dental hygienists were Navajo moms. For those who don’t know, the only way to survive an encounter with a Navajo mom is to obey.

My dentist in Bloomington was a great guy. I hadn’t been to the dentist for years, not since my wisdom teeth were hacked out of my head. He found some cavities, and I returned to get them drilled and filled.

One of the amenities of this dentist is that he had a TV strapped to the ceiling above the dental chair. Keep in mind, this was 2005. All TVs were CRT and had roughly the mass of a granite boulder the same size. If that thing broke free of its mooring, I’m not exaggerating when I say I would have died.

If I was going to lose my life to this TV, I may as well watch it. I picked up the remote and scrolled it to Comedy Central, where the dumbest show was on. The dumbest show next to Jackass. This was called Trigger Happy TV, and it’s a hidden camera prank show, but with actual wit. I knew, as I selected the show, that I might laugh and get a drill in my cheek, but it would be worth it.

Here’s an example of one of their pranks. The marks, a cute family of four, sits down at a picnic table in the woods. A man sits down at a neighboring table and eats his sandwiches. A trio of grown men in squirrel costumes burst out and drag the man into the woods, kicking and punching him.

However, it was the one where the nun got into a fistfight with a penguin that made my dentist, the drill running, laugh his ass off.

I turned off the TV.