Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but when I told that story around the campfire, nobody got scared.

Jack Handey is best known for his deadpan, absurdist one-liners, especially the “Deep Thoughts” pieces popularized on NBC’s Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s and later collected in books. This quote fits that mode: it borrows the tone of earnest environmental alarm (topsoil loss as a real ecological concern) and places it in a casual, folksy setting (“around the campfire”), where one would expect a scary story to land. The humor comes from the mismatch between the seriousness of the fact and the social expectation that fear should be immediate and theatrical, as if information alone were a campfire ghost story.

The line satirizes how difficult it can be to make slow-moving, systemic problems feel urgent. “Frightening” is treated as a property of a story rather than of reality: if listeners don’t react, the speaker concludes the tale failed, not that the danger is still present. Handey’s joke points to a broader cultural tendency to respond more readily to vivid, dramatic threats than to statistical or incremental ones. The campfire framing also pokes fun at moral messaging—trying to turn a serious issue into a cautionary tale—only to discover that the audience’s emotional cues don’t follow the speaker’s intentions.