Furniture can make you laugh -- no joke

Ordinarily, furniture is not a humorous product, but I’ve stumbled across several recent news items that mentioned furniture and brought a smile to my face at the same time. That’s never an easy task, and has been an especially difficult one during the past year or so.

The most recent furniture funny was uncovered in an excerpt from tennis great Andre Agassi’s autobiography that appeared in the Nov. 2 issue of Sports Illustrated.

The excerpt itself is hardly funny — especially when he talks about his abusive father and his use of crystal meth — but I had to chuckle when he said he often got out of bed and slept on the floor to relieve his aching back.

“I do that most nights. Better for my back,” Agassi wrote. “Too many hours on a soft mattress causes agony.”

As soon as I read that, I could practically hear the bedding industry’s legions of marketing people cringe in unison. No one wants to hear his mattress described as “soft.” To a mattress guy, it’s the most insulting of all four-letter words.

About a week earlier, while reading about a woeful performance by my Chicago Bears in a 45-10 loss to Cincinnati, I came across a brilliant one-liner by Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Morrissey.  He described the Bears defense of Cincinnati wide receiver Chad Ochocinco this way:

“They gave Ochocinco so much cushion, he’ll have a sofa endorsement deal by the end of business hours Monday.”

And finally, you probably have heard about the man in Proctor, Minn., who plead guilty to driving under the influence when he crashed his motorized recliner into a parked car after leaving a bar.

The motorized chair has been described in various news accounts as a La-Z-Boy, but a La-Z-Boy spokesman told me the device definitely is not an actual La-Z-Boy branded chair. I suspect the reports are incorrectly using the name in a generic sense.

Proctor police confiscated the man’s “vehicle,” and the department sold it on e-Bay in accordance with the state’s forfeiture laws. The winning bid was reportedly $10,099.

I’m still shaking my head in disbelief. I doubt the chair cost more than $500 to $600 at retail, and the former owner told CNN he spent about $500 on the modifications.

Could the high bidder have been a recliner manufacturer? Will be see a prototype at one of next year’s furniture markets?