41-04-01 The Growing Hat

STARRING: ART VAN HARVEY AND BERNADINE FLYNN

Vic buys a new hat with a narrow brim, but each day, before he comes home, he stops off at Kleeburger's and exchanges his hat for another hat of the same style and color except the brim in imperceptibly wider.  He hopes to do this for several weeks, finally arriving at the size brim he prefers.  The ruse doesn't work.  Sade confronts Vic:

Sade: Gonna tell you about a certain fella that's bound and determined to wear a broad-brimmed hat.  He looks rotten in a broad-brimmed hat.  He's been told ten million times he looks rotten in a broad-brimmed hat.  But he still works away like a beaver figuring up ways of getting a hold of a broad-brimmed hat.  When you came home that first day, that hat was nice and becoming and was a well-fit in a hat.  That second day you came home, I saw your hat - I was just a tiny bit perplexed.  Brim was even broader the third day. When the brim still seemed even broader, I smelt a mouse.  I smelt it strong.  The fourth day, I knew.  Then the fifth and sixth days, I just watched with curiosity.  The hat you brought home today wasn't any broader in the brim than the one yesterday.  I saw that at last, you had reached the climax.

- The above is from COMEDY MAGAZINE, SUMMER 1980.  Sade's lines are from the script, by Paul Rhymer.

____________________

I gave this episode a title because I do not know the correct one.  I simply gave the title for identification purposes only.  We do, at least, have the date of the episode.

Vic again tries to get a cowboy hat; this trick a bit more ingenious than any other wide-brimmed tricks we have seen from him.  Writer Paul Rhymer shows us just how clever Vic can be - and it's still not clever enough to fool Sade (on April Fool's Day no less!)

It took Vic a whole week and six hats to pull off his ploy.  Imagine the work involved in doing this: he'd have to buy a small hat and take it back to the store and get a larger hat the next day - this would happen everyday for six days.  That's just  ridiculous.  Imagine what the salesmen at the haberdashery must think of Vic!  (In an earlier episode, we know they think he must not be "right" in the head.)  This would surely prove that!

No matter what he tries, he can't fool Sade.