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Why Escalators Aren’t Just Stairs That Move
Mitch Hedberg’s famous joke about escalators turning into stairs when they break isn’t as funny as it sounds. Why? Because escalators are dangerous.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Mitch Hedberg was a funny guy, and the main reason he was funny was because his one-liners were so on-point.
Perhaps his best-known one involved the escalator. “An escalator can never break, it can only become stairs,” he famously joked. “You would never see an ‘Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order’ sign, just ‘Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience. We apologize for the fact that you can still get up there.’” But today, we’d like to argue that Hedberg’s most famous joke is misleading at best, and downright wrong at worst. (But we still think you’re funny, brah. Hope you and David Foster Wallace are rockin’ it in shaggy-guy surrealist heaven.)
Let’s talk about escalators, those moving death traps that will injure you, your family, and everyone you care about — if you let them.
