Four days after I got nabbed for speeding, I finally studied the citation served to me by Trooper Alverez.  The clock was ticking on the 30 days allowed to graduate from traffic school in order to get the points wiped from my record so I had to get going. A website took me to a list of state-approved on-line drivers’ schools. I scrolled through dozens of options. All the schools sounded the same.

Except for one that caught my eye: Comedy Driving Traffic School

As with many poorly worded titles, it was unclear whether the word comedy was describing driving or the school. But it didn’t matter, it was a few bucks, and the state said it was an official school that would rid me of four points on my driving record. It was advertised as a course developed by professional comedians. The trailer showed a stick figure stopping his car on railroad tracks just as a train was bearing down on it. The question you had to answer was which way the stick figure should run to survive.

A minute later, I was enrolled in a class I would not soon forget. An early animation showed Judge Dredd behind a bench talking about how it was a bad thing to violate traffic laws. Just his mouth was moving in a poor lip-sync attempt to match the audio. Leaning on the judge’s bench was the bailiff with a porn-star moustache looking bored as hell as he shifted from his left foot to his right foot then back again. He actually left the scene at one point and returned with a cup of coffee. Two rats, or maybe mice, were in the lower part of the screen. One was dressed as the cop who was putting handcuffs on the one wearing a black mask and playing the robber. I was so fascinated by the rodents that I really wasn’t listening to what the Judge said. But I know it wasn’t important because the prior video clip introducing the course warned the first 10 minutes were legal mumbo jumbo they were required to cover.

The premise of this course is the animation was interesting enough to keep you awake. And studies show that students learn more when they’re awake. This is a direct quote from the course.

I then had to answer a series of personal questions about my favorite food, model of my first car, where I want to travel, and other tidbits that I didn’t feel sure I could remember later so I took a screen capture. You never know at what point in the day your favorite food changes from pizza to chocolate. I figured I wouldn’t pass if I couldn’t remember those answers.

The meat of the course opened up in a classroom that gave you a perspective from the second row. The first row of students introduced themselves. Jimmy-Bobby lived in his car under a bridge. Next to him was Toker, who lives high on the hill, man. Bambi was the required clueless chick, but this one had red hair. An older couple was then introduced, and you find out later that she can’t see very well and he can’t hear very well, not unlike many older couples I know very well, who don’t drive very well. The front row of students was rounded out with a robot and an alien named Zornak.

A teacher stood at the front of the room next to a screen with the required facts and figures that had to be taught in this course. The teachers took various forms. The most popular was an alligator, who made more than one mention of the University of Florida’s mascot.  A caricature of George Bush taught a course, and the actor doing the voice over was spot on. There was a super hero, who was called out by his friend for wearing a cape and tights. At one point he reminded the so-called hero, “We went to high school together and you’re really not a super hero.” And then there was an Elvis impersonator who covered a few topics before he left the building.

Quite a few insensitive comments were made throughout the course. One chapter covered various colors of signs you’d see along the road. You know: red for stop; yellow for warning; orange for construction, and brown for homeless people begging for money. One clip showed two cars humping with a voice-over explaining that’s where Mini-Coopers come from.

The requirement to make this a four-hour course resulted from being unable to fast forward any of the individual lessons. You had to stay on each screen a required amount of time. And every so often, those personal questions pop up asking about your favorite food so you needed to be there, awake, and remember your original answers before you could move on.

Overall, it actually was an enjoyable class. It served as a good refresher and I did learn a few new things. One is the new thinking that your hands should be on the wheel in the 4 o’clock and 8 o’clock positions (not 10 and 2 as we were originally taught.) You gotta wonder that since analog clocks aren’t around much anymore, how do today’s kids know where to put their hands? But maybe that doesn’t matter since one hand is usually texting anyway.

And just so you know, if your car is ever stuck on railroad tracks in the path of an oncoming train,

the safest path to run is parallel to the tracks toward the oncoming train. That’s the only direction that stick figure could go without getting splattered on the front of the train or crushed with flying debris from his car after it got smashed to smithereens by the train.

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