Truck Nutz (Encore)

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Hi.

So today we we have an episode for you that we made back in 2019.

There's no gentle way to say exactly what it's about, so I'm just going to come right out with it.

It is about truck nuts.

Truck nuts are plastic testicles that most often show up on the back of trucks, as if to say, my truck has balls.

And actually, a whole lot of other things besides.

I remember when this topic first came up, I was like, I don't know if we can do this.

This is very icky and off-putting and blue, but that's actually why it was a great subject.

There is a lot going on when you steal yourself and look closely at the truck nut, and all of it is as relevant today as it was when we first made this episode.

So please enjoy.

Also, just a heads up before we begin: that it contains some adult language.

In In 1997, Jay was sitting in a hot tub with some buddies when he had an epiphany.

We were talking about trucks, and you know, the whole euphemism, you gotta have some balls to go through that.

I was like, oh, mine has more balls than yours.

And as soon as I said it,

I pictured it for whatever reason.

I guess I was drunk enough, and it would not go away.

What Jay was picturing was a pair of plastic testicles that could hang from the back hitch of a pickup truck.

My name is Jay Van Zant and I created truck nuts.

Jay is not the only person who came up with the idea for truck nuts at around this time, but he is the one who gave them their name, which is truck nuts with a Z at the end.

Yeah, I kicked around bumper balls and things like that, but I was like, our target market is not for anyone but, you know, basically funny rednecks, right?

So it's got to say truck.

You know, the nuts sounded great, And the whole time I didn't want to be ultra gross, right?

This was more about just pure comedy for the laugh of it.

And so that's why I threw the Z in the name as well.

Jay was only 22 at the time and had no experience in manufacturing, but he was committed to making truck nuts a reality.

I created like a clay model out of child's clay that you would buy at a hobby lobby or whatever and would sit on the back porch and you know shape them, file them down.

But I knew, I just had this feeling that everybody else would think this was as funny as I did.

He put a small ad for them in the back of a bunch of national truck magazines.

And then I also stood up an 800-number 866 Hot Nuts.

And so we put the ads in, and that phone never stopped ringing.

866 Hot Nuts is blowing up.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Truck nuts are a simple object, an injection-molded piece of plastic that comes in bright colors and chrome, but they have permeated American culture as a polarizing signifier, a dick joke with political implications, at once a provocation of the pious and uptight, and the douchey accessory of would-be macho man.

Before working on this episode, truck nuts had always struck me as being at best ickly ridiculous and at worst a painfully obvious expression of a kind of toxic, anxious masculinity.

But learning about the people who make and buy truck nuts softened me on them.

In order to explain how this happened, to explain how I came to not totally loathe the truck nut, I want you to come with me on a journey through the weird world of testicle-related novelty items in the hopes that when it's done, you too will see plastic testicles in a new light.

So, today on Dakota Ring,

what's so funny about truck nuts?

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When you hear about truck nuts, it's usually because someone is joking about them.

It is really freaking cold in the Midwest.

It is so cold, truck nuts on the back of pickups have moved up inside the truck.

And jokes are a fitting response.

I mean, they're a pair of plastic balls.

But the butt of most jokes about truck nuts isn't truck nuts themselves.

It's the people who own them.

Truck nutters have been made fun of by late-night talk show hosts.

This is Big Daddy Daddy Truck Nuts here.

Come on back.

I want every freight shaker, coal bucket, and wiggle wagon out there to roll on.

They've been parodied in song.

They're truck nuts on a bumper, red flats with playmates.

And they're the subject of countless pranks, jokes, and skits.

What's the big problem with them?

Well, I'll tell you the problem.

The problem is just because you want to make a buck, my eight-year-old granddaughter has to look at big dangling cowballs every time I drive her to the fucking Cracker Barrel.

When you search truck nuts on Twitter, most of the tweets you come across aren't making fun of people who actually have truck nuts, though there are some of those.

They're making fun of the people they imagine have truck nuts.

And that imagined person is basically always the same.

A particularly tacky member of the white working class.

So threatened by so-called PC culture, he has slapped a pair of brightly colored plastic balls onto his beloved truck to prove he's got real big ones while triggering the libs.

Truck nuts don't just offend personal sensibilities, though.

They've also managed to offend the authorities.

Between 2007 and 2009, legislation was proposed in Maryland, Virginia, and Florida by Republicans and Democrats to ban or fine the use of truck nuts because they were offensive to children.

In 2011, in South Carolina, where there's a law against obscene bumper stickers, a grandmother was written a ticket for having truck nuts on her truck.

It was actually her grandson's, in a case that's still slated to go before a jury.

Truck nuts then offend different kinds of people in different parts of the country for different reasons, all while communicating to all of these people that whoever owns them is a jerk.

And this sense of jerkiness, it comes from somewhere.

I mean, what do you know about a guy with truck nuts except that he doesn't care or isn't worried about what anyone else thinks about the very controversial item he has affixed to the back of his vehicle?

Here's a question.

You're driving down the road.

Ellie Mistal is the executive editor of Above the Law, a legal website.

Back in 2007, while writing about the First Amendment issues surrounding the grandmother in South Carolina who was given a ticket, he got really interested in truck nuts.

You're a bad driver.

You're an asshole driver.

You cut people off, right?

Yeah.

You find yourself behind a truck nutter.

Do you cut them off?

Definitely not.

Or do you give them a wide berth?

Wide berth.

Right?

It is a luxury.

It is part of white privilege to be able to live in a world where you don't have to care about other people's feelings.

And that's, I think, one of the reasons why you don't see, at least in my research, a lot of black truck nutters, right?

You don't see a lot of gay truck nutters.

They don't have the luxury to

pretend that the entire concept of political correctness or decency is a farce in a game.

This is part of the reason that truck nuts feel inherently provocative.

But I wanted to figure out if there were reasons other than being provocative that someone might own these things.

To answer that, I need to start by giving you a sense of the truck nuts landscape.

The very earliest homemade versions of truck nuts seem to have appeared in the 1980s, but in the late 1990s, three commercial versions all popped up around the same time.

In addition to TruckNuts, the company started by J.

Van Zant, there's Bull's Balls, which makes a product modeled on, well, Bullsballs, and also the far more veiny variation offered up by the company Your Nuts, which also makes a monster truck nut.

Here's an ad on YouTube for that very product.

The monster truck nuts are approximately 16 inches in size and weigh just over a pound.

They feature the veins on the top, which are synonymous with your nuts products.

In 2002, Jay Van Zant, the founder of Truck Nuts, who was working 60 to 80 hours a week at another job and had a growing family, decided to sell his company.

Look, it's time to grow up and, you know, do what others do, or it's, I'm going to sell nuts the rest of my life.

And

I made that tough decision.

Hey, let's get out now.

Though Jay was making money on truck nuts at the time, he didn't think it would last.

Meanwhile, a man from Florida named Wilson Kemp had just retired from his job as a college administrator, and he was looking for something to do with his free time.

I saw this.

funky little business being advertised on eBay called Truck Nuts.

We ended up up striking up a deal and I bought it from him.

Wilson has owned truck nuts for the last 17 years.

He and his wife run the whole operation themselves.

12 years ago, for three years straight, I sold in excess of $300,000 a year worth of these things.

And that's crazy.

12 years ago, around 2007, there were a number of other popular products that, like TruckNuts, seemed to knowingly tease the rural white audience.

That was also the product's target demo.

The very successful Blue Collar Comedy Tour, which featured Larry the Cable Guy and Jeff Foxworthy, famous for his You Might Be a Redneck jokes, had just wrapped up.

Country music songs like Redneck Woman, Redneck Yacht Club, and Hicktown had recently been released.

And Trucker Hats, a wild and weird cultural signifier in their own right, were enjoying a moment as the it accessory of the rich and famous.

These products, like truck nuts, could be seen as a funny, self-deprecating way to celebrate an off-maligned cultural identity.

But TruckNuts' popularity didn't last.

Oh, I'm not selling but a few hundred dollars a month's worth of these things now.

Those sales are largely coming through Wilson's website, trucknuts.com, which has a joking but also a jingoistic and lascivious tone.

In addition to selling truck nuts and biker balls, which are truck nuts for your motorcycle, the site sells a t-shirt with a picture on it of a squirrel that has giant low-hanging testicles.

It sells bumper stickers with slogans like these colors don't run and hey bin Laden, lick my nuts.

On another page, they say they're running a contest, quote, looking for 12 hot ladies to model for the truck nuts calendar.

But it turns out Wilson's not exactly the type of guy his website is marketed towards.

When you first saw the truck nuts, like on, what did you think of them?

I thought it was humorous.

And that's the way we look at it.

And we intended just some tongue-in-cheek humor.

Could you tell, like, what's funny about it?

I assume it's like a macho thing.

I think it's humorous that guys do that, just like people flouting their tattoos or whatever it is.

They think that there's a sign of macho or that's the reason people would put them on their trucks and parade them around.

So Wilson Kemp, the owner of Truck Nuts, thinks truck nuts are funny because anyone who would buy them to demonstrate how manly they are is hilarious.

He's laughing at the sincere truck nutter.

Do you have a truck nut on your car?

Like, would you put them on on your car?

No, I don't.

Would you ever put them on your car?

Probably not.

I'm not ashamed of it or anything.

I'm 85 years old.

Wilson's attitudes towards truck nuts is easier to understand when you consider that most of his customers are not exactly sincere about truck nuts either.

Don't get me wrong, some of them are insincere in a toxic way.

Wilson was recently asked to send a pair of truck nuts to Senator Jeff Flake after Flake insisted there be an FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh, the message unmistakably being that Flake should grow a pair.

But most of his orders come from people who either think truck nuts are a bit of tongue-in-cheek self-lampooning so funny they have to have them on their car, or so ridiculous they absolutely do not want them on their car.

A lot of my sales are from, let's say, somebody in an office somewhere said, we want to give a gag gift.

Wilson's assessment of his audience is borne out by reviews of truck nuts on Amazon and Facebook, of which this is a representative example.

The look, feel, and motion of these nuts hanging from my friend's truck made it look as though his wussy truck had a real set of nuts dangling from it.

The only downside was that my prank ended up making him look more manly driving down the road.

Would buy these nuts for a prank again.

That sarcastic review was left by a real estate agent in Michigan named Matt Zahn.

I'm involved in the prank war with a neighbor across the lake, and we've been kind of going back and forth doing pranks.

Matt's prank war has involved among other things wiring a frig shot and drawing a giant penis on a lawn in the middle of the night.

You know I think it would be pretty funny if I were to get some truck nuts and put them on his truck and see if he, you know, see how many days he would drive around town with them, hang in there.

He's a loan officer.

So he had to actually go to a client's house and do a loan application that day.

So he like pulled in their driveway.

They were like out there talking and I'm sure that the client saw them on the back of his truck.

So what's supposed to be funny about this prank is that if you saw Matt's friend driving down the street, you would think he was sincere about his truck nuts.

You would assume that he was the type of guy who had truck nuts on his car because he wanted them there, even though he's not.

Typically when you see somebody that has truck nuts, you're like, oh, that guy's, I guess, probably a douchebag.

What about it communicates that someone who would really have it is a douchebag.

I just think that if you have a pair of nuts on your truck, I mean, it's just a certain personality type that would have that and not have it as a joke.

Matt is not alone in thinking that the way he's using truck nuts, poking fun at douchey rednecks, basically, is different from how they're meant to be used, an off-brand usage of the product.

But Matt and his friend are not outlier truck nuts consumers.

Pranksters and jokers and people sending up the people who they think the product is supposed to be for are part of the product's core constituency.

I was not expecting that.

Going into this story, I was under the impression that truck nuts were still a thing because of people who were sincerely into truck nuts.

But it was starting to look like truck nuts might still be a thing because of people who were insincerely into truck nuts.

Was the unironic motto truck nutter real, or was he a kind of figment of the imagination?

The answer to that, it turns out, is is a little bit of both.

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As we were investigating TruckNuts, we kept coming across other testicle-based accessories.

I was so flummicked at this point about who TruckNuts' customer base was that I thought it might be clarifying to speak with some of these other companies in the hopes they could shed some light on this particular question.

One product in particular stood out.

It's been mocked almost as much as Trucknut's.

It's called Nudicles.

Nudicles are testicular implants for dogs, cats, horses, bulls, any animal that is altered.

Greg Miller is the owner and inventor of nudicles, of which over 500,000 have been sold.

Nudicles were thought of in 1993 with the trauma that I went through neutering my bloodhound named Buck.

Buck was a 187-pound bloodhound.

It was a dominant feature of his, you know,

Bing, and I was opposed to neutering because Buck would no longer be Buck.

I mean, nudicles, it seems like it's really, it's for the owners.

It's not really for the pets because they don't care, right?

You bet they care.

Pets do know that they've been neutered.

But it's, you know, basically pet owners wanting their male dog to maintain its God-given look.

And what's wrong with that?

I mean, if you don't like it, don't buy it.

Whether or not the animals actually know or care about their testicles is not something I'm going to get into.

But the question, what's wrong with that, is at the heart not just of nudicles, but of truck nuts too.

And my most easygoing, open-minded self thinks, sure, that's right.

If you don't like them, just don't buy them.

But my instinctual reaction is just like, can we not be so hung up on balls?

Masculinity really has pride of place in our culture.

Can we leave the dog balls out of it?

But Greg doesn't just make replacement testicles.

He also makes some other cosmetic products, including replacement ears and eyes.

Ear implants are eyes.

Not a word in the world has ever been said.

But nudicles will just bring out the craziness in people.

It's encouraging people to neuter that would not neuter before, thus reducing pet overpopulation.

This made me wonder, am I being super uptight about testicles?

I wouldn't begrudge someone replacing their dog's mangled ear or eye, even if it wasn't medically necessary.

So what's my issue with this particular body part?

I like to think my feelings about nudicles are a reflection of my values, but maybe they're also just a reflection of my taste.

Humphrey, my bulldog.

You know, he's got nudicles.

And I mean, you know, nothing is cuter than seeing him, you know, waddle up the street with his little thingies in between.

And the idea of neutering him and eliminating that is just, you know,

it's unthinkable.

Well, that's essentially so funny, guys, because what I was going to say is, like, instead of thinking it's cute, like, every time I see a dog with, like, just like waddling along with their testicles, I'm always like, that looks so

nasty.

Yeah, like, they're just really in your face.

Like, but you obviously feel

it depends on your attitude toward the product.

And I mean, I'll admit, nudicles are as controversial as religion and politics.

Nudicles are just acknowledging a reality that some people really care about balls.

And that's true across the political spectrum.

As a second product on our tour of testicle-related accessories, bike balls demonstrates.

Bike balls are Kickstarter-funded bicycle lights in the shape of testicles.

They give off a pink light and hang low from just underneath the bike seat, right below where a male cyclist's genitals would rest.

The whole idea is like it takes wit, grit, and balls to ride on the roads.

Heather Lamb is an industrial designer based in Toronto who is one of the co-creators of bike balls.

It reminds other drivers that you are human too, because

a part of your flesh is, I guess, out there.

Cyclists and pickup truck drivers are imagined to be a very different demographic, politically speaking.

But apparently, some members of both groups would like to trick out their ride with a pair of nuts.

Though bike balls are not gilding the lily the way that truck nuts are, they're not trying to make the most powerful vehicle on the road seem even more macho.

They are evidence, if you needed it, that ball jokes and ball appreciation more generally cross the aisle.

I've heard people tend to yell nice balls.

That means that they've seen you, so the bike light is keeping you safe.

And you're getting a compliment, I guess.

The bipartisan nature of testicle-related accessories was further underscored to me by the conversation I had about the most provocative accessory of all: gunsticles, plastic testicles that clip onto the barrel of a gun.

I reached out to gunsticles via the company's Facebook page.

I was pretty sure no one was going to respond to me.

Slate has written a lot about the need for gun control, and a reputation as a liberal site made me assume they would be very reticent to speak with us.

And to my surprise, the owner, Anthony Mellis, wrote back saying, no worries on political orientation.

LOL, Gunsticles have a wacky audience.

My initial vision for the product was this is something that gun owners will buy kind of as a goof to make their friends laugh at the range.

And so the packaging and most of the marketing is geared towards mimics of a gun accessory, like a serious gun accessory.

The gunsticles marketing features an animated sporty woman who smiles while holding a gun, and it has the tagline, the pants down leader in tactical testicles.

The product was officially released in 2017.

It did get some play in the gun, you know, blogosphere, and I had some immediately success that I thought, oh, wow, this is incredible.

You know, so like, you know, you wake up to like 50 orders for them, and you're like, oh, I can retire now.

But after that first burst, sales slowed down.

Anthony found it was hard to market the product.

Magazine advertising was too expensive.

Sporting goods stores were turned off by the whole testicle thing.

And it wasn't getting much traction on Amazon.

He was getting ready to abandon the whole thing.

And then this past Christmas happened.

Sold a lot of gunsticles.

It's because it found its audience.

And its audience is not gun owners.

It is people mocking gun owners.

It's for the person that knows a gun-owning person that wants to make fun of them.

You know, I tell people also that like 5% of gunsticles will ever be on a gun.

You know, maybe 10% of gunsticles will ever leave the box.

You know, so

it has found its audience as a novelty gift.

So despite appearing to be a company that appeals to people who love guns, Gunsticles is still in business because of people who want to tease people who love guns.

Its customers are not the people that it's marketed towards.

It's the people ribbing the people it's marketed towards.

But unless you talk with Anthony, there's no way to know this.

The Gunsticles website is completely, convincingly serious.

And looking this way, it actually helps them sell.

Gunsticles and truck nuts are not exactly the same.

For one thing, truck owners, unlike gun owners, already have a long history of affixing provocative, feisty, rude, crude, joking items like bumper stickers and mud flaps onto their trucks.

And unlike gunsticles, when truck nuts were first on the market, they were a big hit with our target demo, the quote, funny rednecks that truck nuts were originally conceived for.

But gunsticles still feel like a kind of Rosetta Stone for truck nuts to me, an object that makes sense of what our reporting about truck nuts had already told us.

The truck nuts are at this point largely a novelty item, and that the people keeping truck nuts in business are just as likely to be buying them as a gag gift than they are to be putting them on the back of their truck.

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Okay, so now that we have all of this context for truck nuts, I want to talk about another kind of truck nutter, the kind who actually puts truck nuts on his truck by choice.

I got them as a gift years ago, so they've been battled by Veagol for eight years now.

Tyler Sherman is a 28-year-old from Maine.

He's got a green pickup truck named Helga, and her truck nuts are green to match.

I always just get a good chuckle out of them.

I mean, back when I was in high school, I used to see them a lot, and I always got a good laugh out of them when I saw him.

I kind of revel in the trashiness of it.

I think that's part of the humor of it.

But like, I'll come to a stop at a stoplight, and I'll just hear something clanging around in the back, and then I'll remember they're there, and I'll get a little chuckle to myself about it.

Is it only a joke for you?

Or do you think there's something macho about it, kind of?

No,

I think it's purely a joke for my part.

Um, I feel like if your truck's macho, you probably don't need to put a pair of nuts on the back of it.

I mean, I guess some people might think they're impressive, uh,

but I feel that I yeah, I ain't see hand anybody could be intimidated by a pair of plastic bowls.

Uh, I don't know how you could take that seriously.

Tyler is saying the things that I think most truck nutters do.

That he doesn't take them that seriously.

That he doesn't think it makes him that macho.

That they are super trashy, and that's part of what's funny about them.

In fact, Tyler sounds pretty similar to that prankster we spoke with earlier, Matt Zahn.

They're both guys who think truck nuts are kind of douchey and trashy.

Tyler, like Matt, makes his truck nuts sound kind of like a private joke that he laughs about when he's by himself, giggling in the cab of his truck.

But the thing about truck nuts is they're not a private joke.

They're not a pair of plastic balls you have like in a room in your house where only your friends can see them, friends with whom you share a sense of humor and sensibility.

They're a public joke, something that you take out into the world.

Does anybody ever have a strong negative reaction to them?

No, no one's ever said anything to me about it, but I'm a pretty big guy too, so maybe they wouldn't.

When you see a pair of truck nuts on the road, you can't tell exactly what the driver is trying to say with them.

I think that if I saw Tyler's car without ever having talked to Tyler, if I saw a green pickup with truck nuts driven by a big white guy with some stickers on the back for extreme sports and the NRA, which Tyler's truck has, I would, as suggested earlier in this episode, give the truck a wide berth.

As far as car accessories go, truck nuts are just one signifier among many.

And these signifiers, bumper stickers, flags, mud flaps, to say nothing of the make and model of the car itself, can amplify and reinforce each other to convey convey a clear political message.

But it's worth keeping in mind that compared to many other such signifiers, truck nuts in and of themselves are relatively ambiguous.

Here's Ellie Mistal, the executive editor of Above the Law again.

I don't want to get too philosophical with it, but.

Let's get philosophical with it.

The truck nutter,

when you see them, are driving away from you, right?

They're moving.

It's the kind of opposite of coming at you, right?

You don't see them when they're coming at you.

You only see the nuts when the vehicle is moving past you, right?

A benutted truck

is not kind of aggressively messing with your life.

It's a symbol,

but that's what I'm saying.

It's more symbolic of a person trying to have some fun with you

at your expense

as opposed to really kind of aggressively getting in your face and like ruining your life.

It's also worth keeping in mind something I touched on earlier in this episode about how whatever else they are, truck nuts are also a way for rural white Americans to send up what other people already think about them.

I want to go back to something Tyler said.

I kind of revel in the trashiness of it.

I think that's part of the humor of it.

There's a kind of self-ironization going on here.

The way someone might put truck nuts on their car to embody a stereotype, to revel in it, to be the trashy person everyone already assumes that you you are.

You can see this type of self-satire in lots of other contexts.

The things that I actually think about when phenomena like this arise are things like camp, think kitsch, that come out of stuff like gay and lesbian culture.

Colin Johnson is an associate professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University.

Part of it is like when I think of like gay men like fetishizing Judith Garland and people

putting testicles on their cars, they're very different things on somebody on the surface.

But they are kind of our stories about

cosmic unfairness or sort of the predictable unfairness of

the underdog position.

Like leaning into Judy Garland is like leaning into.

Truck nuts.

Like if everybody already thinks you're kind of vulgar and trassy and tasteless, then why not just go whole hog and kind of like

be a kind of campy send-up of

that yourself, like kind of take control of it.

Colin's not saying rural white guys with truck nuts are discriminated against minority, but he is saying that they too are self-aware.

Self-awareness is a big part of the most delightful and genuinely funny use of truck nuts that I came across while reporting this story.

It was a pair of pink truck nuts dangling from the rear of a black matte pickup, which had written on the back in bright green lettering, austinvasectomy.com.

I hope nobody in Austin is offended by it, but we thought it was funny and it also grabbed attention.

Donna McBride drives the truck and works for NAU Urology Specialists, an Austin-based medical practice devoted to men's health.

I think a lot of the misconception about vasectomies is that the balls are cut off.

And I've heard that on reality shows and it drives me crazy.

NAU urology specialists know all the jokes and anxieties that people have about vasectomies.

And they're using truck nuts to counter them.

They're using balls to make people worry less about their balls.

And we have had a lot of people call and say, I'm sitting behind this truck.

It says austinvasectomy.com.

call now.

So I'm calling now because I want a vasectomy.

So

it's surprisingly good marketing.

So here we are at the end of our journey through the testicular accessory landscape.

And I want to be clear.

I'm not saying there aren't men out there who are completely serious about their truck nuts.

Men who hew to the stereotype, who have regressive politics and want to intimidate and provoke people who aren't like them.

Here's Jay Van Zant, the original owner of truck nuts again.

The whole fuck you guy, he did exist.

I met him, right?

Met him several times through owning it.

But I think we could stand to expand our understanding of truck nutters to admit a wider range of motivations for owning them.

Motivations that include novelty and gag gifting, jokes and pranks, self-satire, and a thoughtlessness that's not quite the same as malice.

And doing this isn't just for the truck nutter.

It's for everyone else, too, who should take some comfort in the fact that in this specific instance anyway, we aren't actually sharing the country with a bunch of horrifying, crass stereotypes, just other people.

When we started working on this story, I thought it was going to be a story about a culture war object, something that people on different sides of America's political divide saw completely differently.

And it is a story about a culture war object.

But the object in question is not truck nuts.

The object is humor itself.

Truck nuts make some people laugh, but the people who find them gross or crass or stupid or the bleeding edge of all sorts of odious ideological positions don't quite believe that anyone could be buying truck nuts as just a joke.

We imagine that they are on some level sincere and this makes us laugh.

Meanwhile, truck nutters think people who don't find truck nuts funny, who don't get why they're funny, who don't see the irony in them, are uptight and they in turn get a kick out of that.

What people actually find funny about truck nuts then has very little to do with them being a pair of balls and everything to do with them being apparent evidence that other Americans have a bad sense of humor.

What you're seeing happen with truck nuts is like what happens to an unhappy couple that ends up fighting about the same thing, no matter what the cause.

In this case, the cause is a pair of plastic testicles, but the fight devolves into what it always does: everyone talking past each other and projecting the worst things onto the other side, including the idea that the other side isn't funny at all.

A shared sense of humor, of course, is a really important thing to a functioning relationship.

Without one, there's no pressure release.

There's just endless conflict.

And that's pretty much where we are right now, about things way more important than trucknuts.

What's crazy about this fight in particular is that Americans of every political persuasion find balls funny.

Instead of being something that divides us, I can imagine a world in which trucknuts united us or united those people who are really tickled by extremely basic dick jokes.

Because that's the world we're actually living in.

A world in which Trucknut's customer base is surprisingly bipartisan.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

And you can also call us now at our new Decodering phone number.

That is 347-460-7281.

And we're actually still getting calls and messages about our episode on the 90s swing craze and the Gap khakis commercial that helped break it onto the charts.

So I want to recommend the two-part I'd like to teach the world to buy edition of Slate's podcast hit parade that goes deep into the history of commercials like the Gap ad that have turned jingles into pop hits.

This episode was written by me and produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch.

The codering is produced by me, Katie Shepard, and Max Friedman.

Evan Chung is our supervising producer.

Merrick Jacob is our technical director.

Thanks to Zachary Blair, Tony Assenda, Dan Peralt, Barbara Ching, Scott Biscoff, Franco Fuda, Selena Yala, Phil Edwards, Mac Lamouau, Christina Kautarucci, Forrest Wickman, Jennifer Esperanza, Cleo Levin, June Thomas, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback.

If you aren't already a Slate Plus member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking try free at the top of the decodering show page, or visit slate.com/slash decoder plus to get access wherever you listen.

Slate Plus members get to listen to our show and every other Slate podcast without any ads, and you'll get unlimited access to Slate's website.

Again, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts by clicking try free or visit slate.com/slash decoder plus to sign up.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you in two weeks.

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