"The Comedy Examiner's Guide to The State Fair of Texas" is a multi-part series seeking to provide an ultimate guide to the sights, sounds, and smells of the yearly event in Fair Park. The first part in this series focuses on the wonderful (read: hideous) food you can find while visiting the Fair. Read on, gentle Examiner readers...
First, a note: There's apparently something wrong with the publishing tool that we use to run articles through the Examiner, so I apologize for the slightly wonky looking appearance. The choice is: no articles, wonky-looking articles. I've chosen the former, and I trust you'll be able to handle it.
The idea to write a guide to the State Fair of Texas is one that I've had for awhile, and the Comedy Examiner's Office is very proud to be presenting it to you. There are many areas to cover in this guide, including: The Food, The People, The Sights, and The Rides and Midway. Clearly, this will have to be done in parts; otherwise, you and I'd be here all day, working with a busted-ass publishing tool. And that ain't happening: you have a trip to plan!
The first part of this guide is, of course, "The Food". More than anything else, the State Fair of Texas is known for the heart-stoppingly horrendous "foods" that you can purchase while wandering around the Fairgrounds and avoiding other Fair-goers' B.O. Let me reiterate that: you do not want to wander into the path of some wafting B.O., particularly if the person involved is wearing overalls, and particularly not if you're eating something. You will-- I promise-- vomit so hard your lungs will flee through your rectum.
Every year, each of the local news channels covers the various "foods" that some creative, backwoods-type has cooked up in his trailer park. These foods are invented not to entertain the palate, but rather to quite literally poison all the people eating them. See, the carny folk (and, oh yes, there are many, many carnies at the State Fair; it's like entering a country named "Carnia" when you pass through those gates) do not like the "city folk" that come from as far away as Plano to gaze upon their rusty rides and tremendously boring boat show displays. They want to eliminate us, so that they might claim Plano, Addison, Carrollton, and the like as their own-- I've seen their blueprints. If they get their way, Willow Bend is going to be the biggest K-Mart you've ever seen.
What sorts of food are these carnies inventing? Oh, let me tell you.
The foods basically fall into, well, one category: Fried. If it's a food, and if it should not be ingested as it is because it has a high caloric content, and if it should certainly not be fried, then that's how you're going to discover it at the Fair. This includes Snickers bars, wads of butter, and-- I swear I'm making none of this up-- Coke. Not coke-coke (carnies cannot afford cocaine, but I hear they're perfecting their "Fried Crank" recipe as we speak in a bathtub out in Mesquite), but Coca-Cola. How do they do this? Again, these people run meth labs; why should they have a problem figuring out how to fry a soda?
These foods are, of course, terrible, and exist only to one-up one another in terms of outrageousness. Back in the "olden days"-- as "Fair People" might say-- the most outrageous foodstuff available at the Fair was probably a corn-dog. Not content to ruin the arteries of its visitors with fried pork-parts, the mad chefs of the State Fair of Texas decided to take it a step further: they started selling wads of fried...batter. Toss some powdered sugar on that b-tch, you got a "funnel cake". Once this occurred, the gauntlet was thrown.
Funnel Cake begat fried cheese, and fried cheese begat fried bacon, and fried bacon begat fried Twinkies, and so on and so forth until, just recently, I swear I saw a news report on some jerk-off who'd figured out how to provide "Fried Butter" for anyone brave enough to visit his food stand. This man should be arrested.
While you eat this food and wallow in your own shame and humiliation, you can wander around the Fairgrounds at your leisure, and that's when the real fun starts. Eventually, your body will reject what you have put into it (this takes approximately 4 minutes) and you will be forced to find a bathroom, which at the State Fair of Texas is basically an enlongated trough overseen by men in Nascar shirts and the ever-present and aforementioned bib overalls. This is a cruel trick, to be sure, but you will have no one to blame but yourself: Clem didn't hold a gun to your head to make you buy that "Fried Butterfinger", did he? I didn't see Jessiciah forcing that "Fried Lard Blossom" into your gaping maw. No, this is a gastrointestinal terrorist attack that you have instigated, and good luck ridding yourself of the problem in the Fair's facilities.
Perhaps next time you'll just stick with one of those massive drumsticks. At least those only give you a mild case of salmonella poisoning, which modern medicine (note: not available at the State Fair of Texas) can cure right quick once you get back to your "city house".
Next time, we'll be taking a closer look at some of the people you'll encounter at the State Fair. You know that's gonna be a good one, so be sure to check back with the Comedy Examiner frequently. We'll be running parts of our "Guide to The State Fair of Texas" all week. And when I say "Guide", please read that as "Official Warning".
In the meantime, check out some of these other recent articles from the Comedy Examiner:
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