As near as I can remember, it’s been 20 years since I ate my last Chuckle. To be honest, I don’t miss them a bit.
You do remember Chuckles, don’t you? Vaguely pillow-shaped, jellylike candies, each about two inches long, covered with a crust of granulated sugar that could reduce your tooth enamel to its constituent molecules on contact. Chuckles came in the standard colors of the confectionery spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, and black. The red through green ones you ate; the black one you stuck under your movie theater seat to be chipped away--and perhaps carbon-dated--by archeologists in the twenty-third century.
As a child I had an insatiable appetite for Chuckles, but as an adult I began to cool on them. Mostly it was the name that bothered me; something about it was just too chipper. For years I had been walking up to candy counters and saying--with a straight face--Chuckles, please, and for years they had been looking at me like I was ordering a clown. Frankly, it makes me uncomfortable when my food sounds like it’s in a better mood than I am.
What finally soured me on Chuckles, however, was their flavor. My epiphany occurred the day I was eating a bowl of cherries and it suddenly occurred to me that what I was tasting did not have even a nodding acquaintance with the red--cherry--Chuckles I had been eating most of my life. For that matter, green Chuckles did not taste even remotely like limes, nor orange ones like oranges, nor yellow ones like lemons. Whoever was naming these things was pulling some serious wool over our taste buds.
