So a friend mentioned a mutual friend being really into "cone-ing," which is an activity I had never heard of before. Naturally my first instinct was to think it involved taking traffic cones and leaving them on someone's lawn, somewhat like Flocking (where you take a hundred pink flamingos and leave them in someone's lawn until they donate money to your fundraiser, at which point you remove said flamingos and put them in someone else's lawn, usually chosen by the person who just paid to have you remove them from yours).
Apparently that was completely wrong. Upon being informed of what this cone-ing activity actually is, I immediately refused to believe it, why on earth would ANYONE waste their time, money, and edible substances like that? Upon getting home yesterday I decided to google the shit out of it. My results were disturbing on many levels.
Cone-ing is real, and it is in fact the act of ordering a soft serve ice cream cone from a drive-through, and then proceeding to grab it from the top. Yes grabbing it from the ice cream part. Clearly this is a prank of sorts that was created by a group of socially aware and yet awkward youths, probably in their late high school to early college years being incredibly bored and looking to have some fun at someone else's expense. Now in this instance the expense isn't an actual cost per se, but more of a loss of social cohesion. After thinking about it for awhile, the basic premise of cone-ing stems from the idea that we all know how to hold an ice cream cone (ostensibly from the cone part of the dessert), that is in fact what the cone is for. Arguably in some of the better ice cream joints out there the cone is actually just as tasty a part of the dessert as the actual frozen goodness found on top, but as we all know, the kind you get from fast food joints are rather bland, mostly air, and have a consistency and texture that is suspiciously similar to that of Styrofoam, in other words the point of a cone in a fast food place is really just to hold the soft serve, even if it is theoretically edible. Cone-ing operates on the principle that even though we all know how to properly take hold of, and hold a cone, it isn't really a law or a requirement of any sort, but rather just a social convention. By grabbing the ice cream off of the cone, or grabbing the cone through the ice cream (the two accepted methods of cone-ing), one is essentially flouting convention. People are just simply not prepared to handle that kind of social interaction, thus the humor of the situation, for those who find it humorous, derives from the feeling of awkwardness that the employee feels when someone inexplicably grabs the ice cream end of the cone, and then drives away.
Not exactly highly cerebral humor, but it does provide an interesting window into just how socially ingrained simple things can be, and how hard it is for us to think "outside" of the box so to speak when confronted with someone or some thing that doesn't follow the social conventions we live by.
Food for thought for anyone who actually reads this.
Seth
