Important Stuff

Since Garfield and Friends is now emerging on DVD, I'm getting a lot of questions about the series. One that turns up often is, "What's the deal with the Klopman Diamond?" For a year or three on the show, it seemed like we couldn't go a week without someone mentioning the Klopman Diamond and folks wonder what it was and why we kept talking about it. So here's the deal with the Klopman Diamond. It's from an old joke. If you Google "Klopman Diamond," you'll find dozens of sites that repeat the joke and…well, here. I saved you the trouble of Googling. This is the joke, freshly cut-and-pasted from the first site I just hit…

A businessman boarded a plane to find, sitting next to him, an elegant woman wearing the largest, most stunning diamond ring he had ever seen.

He asked her about it.

"This is the Klopman Diamond," she said, "It is beautiful, but there is a terrible curse that goes with it."

"What's the curse?" the man asked.

"Mr. Klopman."

That's the joke the way I first heard it on (I think) Johnny Carson's show. But I then heard it in a lot of places and it always intrigued me that the name "Klopman" stayed with it. As jokes get handed around and told and retold, they're often changed or embellished. Somehow though, those who tell this one seem to sense that they can't improve on the name of Klopman.

It's really the name that fits best and don't take my word for it. Do some scientific research. Rent a lab and a clipboard and some white lab coats. Pay people to come in for testing after first pre-screening them to make sure they haven't heard any jokes about diamonds. Then divide them into three groups. Tell the joke to Group A but make it the Fazzblatt Diamond. Tell it to Group B as the Lipsitz Diamond. Then tell it to Group C as the Klopman Diamond. You will get the biggest laughs from Group C…by far. Whoever devised the joke with the name Klopman really knew what he or she was doing.

The specificity of the name Klopman amused me so I stuck it into an episode of Garfield and Friends. Everyone in the recording session recognized the reference and laughed so I added it to another episode we were recording the same day. Everyone laughed again so it became a running gag for a while. I even did a whole episode about the Klopman Diamond. I don't know why it's funny but it is. If you rent the lab and run the test, see if you can figure it out.