The Best of Andy Rooney

(This classic Andy Rooney column was originally published Jan. 11, 1990.)

A lot of things happen in the movies that never happen to me:

-- When two men come up a long flight of stairs in a movie and stop to knock on a door, they almost always have to break it down to get in. When I knock on a door, someone usually comes to it and opens it to see what I want.

-- When a lone person comes into a house or an apartment and starts looking around, he or she almost always finds a body on the floor in the living room. In all the years I've come into thousands of living rooms, I've never found a body on the floor.

-- Cars in movies routinely screech around corners at high speed, spin 360 degrees and continue on. I have never done this in my own car and I've never seen it done on any of the streets I drive on.

-- The long road, winding through the woods, leading to the big house on the hill in movies, is longer than the driveway to the house of anyone I've ever known.

-- When a man sitting behind a desk is confronted by someone unfriendly who comes into his office, there's almost always a gun in the drawer when a man opens it. I've seen a lot of desk drawers, but I've never seen a gun in one.

-- The stairways actors go up and down are always wider and longer than the stairs in our house.

-- Although I don't know anyone whose house has them, the average home in most movies seems to have sliding, glass-paneled doors leading out to a stone patio overlooking the swimming pool.

-- The women around the swimming pool and lying on the sand in movies are better looking than any I've ever seen around a pool or at the beach.

-- I have never seen a fight in a bar where they threw chairs and broke the mirror behind the bottles.

-- The only time anyone in a movie watches television is when there's a news show on with an item about a murder committed by person watching.

-- No one in a movie making a phone call ever gets a wrong number or busy signal.

-- Whenever a big car pulls up in front of a building, there's always a parking place for it. I haven't seen a parking place in front of any building I want to go to in 12 years.

-- The cars have all been washed recently, too. You never see a dirty car in the movies.

-- I've seen hundreds of them in mysteries, but I've never actually met a real live butler, or even heard of anyone who has.

-- In a movie, when someone is stranded or abandoned out in the middle of nowhere, on a road that stretches straight for as far as the eye can see in both directions, at least three cars and two big trucks always go whizzing past before anyone stops. The person who stops often has something to do with the plot.

-- If a good guy in a movie sneaks into an office in the middle of the night to look for something in the files, someone always comes in and catches him.

-- The average person in a movie seems to own a yacht and there's usually someone really bad on board. I have a small wooden boat, but I never just barely pull away as someone runs down the dock trying to get on board.

-- No one in the movies reads in bed.

-- You can tell the good guys from the bad guys by looking at them on the screen a lot easier than you can in real life.\

The Best of Andy Rooney - Humor & Satire Classics

Humor & Funny Stories - It Only Happens in the Movies | Andy Rooney

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