Well, it’s official: The Lancer has run out of jokes about Mr. Chihiro Ikezi, beloved teacher of physics and geocentrism. The deep tunnels of the Ikezi Joke Mine have nothing left to give.
For years, we at The Lancer have feasted upon the antic foibles of this delightful man. When we noticed—and how could we not!—the size of his cranium, the jokes seemed to pour forth in a torrent of good-natured japery. We wondered aloud about the size of his pillow. We contemplated the possibility that small moons could be orbiting the intense gravity of his noggin. We suggested he buy a family-sized yurt for a hat. We recommended that NASA develop a rover to parachute onto and explore the surface of his scalp. Many yuks were had.
But those weren’t the only jokes that came out of the Great Ikezi Joke Mine. On more than one occasion, we teased the great man about his unbounded love for the University of Southern California. We thought it a bit much, even for an enthusiastic alumnus. But every day in class, we’d hear the same refrain: “That’s how we did it as USC!” or “Did you see how my Trojans did in pickleball against Chapman last night?” How could we not mock such rah-rah fervor? After all, some of us might want to go to UCLA.
And then, there was Ikezi’s commitment to the idiom of the San Fernando Valley. It’s fan-tastic! Dude! It’s, like, so true. And so we, like, enjoyed ourselves by contemplating Ikezi at the International Talk Like a Valley Girl Competition, held at the Sherman Oaks Galleria every spring. Naturally, we imagined Ikezi winning, trouncing both teenage girls from Calabasas and professors of anthropology who’d made their careers observing teenage girls from Calabasas.
When, in the past, we felt like being high-brow—and, we freely admit, we frequently feel like being high-brow—we made easy sport of Ikezi’s knowledge of physics. Perhaps it was because we got the rare chance to read Ikezi’s undergraduate thesis on the mechanics of perpetual motion, which led him to boast about what he called the Ikezi Corollary to the First Law of Thermodynamics. We’ve also been endlessly amused to see Ikezi argue with Mr. Zach Herhold about where, exactly, the CIA filmed the moon landing back in 1969. Ted the Science Guy didn’t think this was funny, but we did! But the ultimate comic moment came when we discovered that Ikezi calculates time in parsecs.
Which leads us to another rich vein in the Ikezi Joke Mine: Star Wars. We wondered if Hasbro made Boba Fett helmets in a hat size of thirty. We even thought, for a short minute, about entering into a bidding war on eBay for a mint, in-box figure of Admiral Ackbar. We held back because we thought it might be a trap! But Ikezi’s fascination with Star Wars is not just comic: we at The Lancer were impressed by his use of Schrödinger’s Cat to prove that both Han and Greedo shot at the same time. An elegant solution to this long-running debate!
But now? Now, it seems as if all the deepest tunnels in the Ikezi Joke Mine have run dry. We have no more jokes to make about this pleasant and fundamentally decent young man. Unless we start strip mining. It’s not like the people at the current EPA will object.
