Mushrooms

There's a joke about mushrooms...

My first wife died after eating mushrooms.  My second wife died after eating mushrooms.  My third wife died after eating mushrooms.  My fourth wife died of a fractured skull.... She wouldn't eat the mushrooms. (BA-DUMP!) Can't beat those wife-killer jokes.

I saw a goofy Japanese movie once titled Attack of the Mushroom People.  It's about these people who land on a desert island and eat these strange mushrooms, and the result is that they all turn into big mushrooms themselves!  All except this one guy who's telling the story from a hospital bed.  But at the end of the movie he says "I ate them too!" and starts turning into one as well...

I've heard you can get LSD from mushrooms.  The thing about LSD is that a bad trip can be worse than you imagine--worse than you can imagine! You have to be really bored to try it. There was an episode of Mad Men where a character tried it and had this vision, and after he came to he ended up leaving his wife...

The Disney movie Fantasia has a funny scene, though not PC, with animated Chinese mushrooms.  That was from a time when all East Asians seemed funny. (I can remember when all East Indians seemed funny...) Because of scenes like that, Fantasia has a big following among practitioners of drug-using "head" culture.  But that culture isn't really in good taste.  Roger Ebert was reviewing a Cheech and Chong movie (one advertised with the line "Just what we need... a really good hit!") and cited a drug-using acquaintance of his, who'd told him, "Laughing at stoners isn't nice if you aren't one, and it isn't funny if you are."