Afternoon Delights: “The Doomed Cleveland Balloonfest of '86”

Let’s be honest with ourselves: despite Ian Hunter’s claims to the contrary, does Cleveland, in fact, rock? Today I will humbly posit that “yes" Cleveland does, in fact rock. But not in the cool, flashy way of fun cities. It’s more of the awkward dork that just can’t stop fucking up…and yet it owns that fact and defiantly stares back to say “are you really any better?”

Fans of Laverne & Shirley may be familiar with the terms schlemiel and schlimazel. Yiddish words used to describe two different types of unfortunate folks. The best explanation I’ve heard is that “a schlemiel often spills his soup and a schlimazel often gets soup spilled on him.” Cleveland is a schlimazel. It tries but man, things just don’t always work out. But it remains a great word, a recurring element of the original Howard The Duck comic book, and again there’s a sense of “yeah, things aren’t great—but why put on airs like they are?” Which I respect.

But perhaps nothing distills this curse of WTF-ery like the great balloon debacle of 1986. The video below uses archival footage with commentary to show how this attempt to break the Guinness World Record (which are always weirdly janky things anyways; especially that one Brady Bunch episode) for most balloons ever released went so awry on so many different, and frankly dark, levels. It’s not a chipper sort of comedy, but it is a mesmerizing calamity that simply worsens.