Ever tell a story about something that was so amazing that happened to you and then had it immediately swept under the rug by a One-Upper? Do you know any One-Uppers in your neighborhood? I’m positive they’re there. They’re everywhere. In pharmacies and bars and pet stores and public restrooms. They’re a little difficult to spot from far away, but once you get up close and are actively participating in a conversation it becomes crystal clear that you are now face to face with a One-Upper. They use your stories as launching pads for their better, more awesome stories. They never listen to you or anyone else because they already have better anecdotes that always seem to border on pure folklore, cocked and ready to fire, waiting for you to finish so they can empty their story clip into your lame-o story and fill it full of holes, sending it plummeting to the ground where it crashes into a gigantic ball of fictitious fire, probably burning down several homes in the process.
I imagine in the inside of the One-Upper’s heads there are stadiums packed with fans cheering and yelling as they reveal their spectacular yarns to stunned and thrilled audiences who hang on their every word. You could tell a story about how you jumped your BMX bike over 20 schoolchildren when you were ten years old and the One-Upper will tell you how they jumped over 30 school kids plus a pregnant dog, which to them, counts as about six dogs. You could tell a story about how one day you ate a twelve pound burrito in less than an hour and then pooped it out in less than five minutes and the One-Upper will tell you how they ate six three pound burritos in less than twenty minutes and didn’t poop for two weeks. You could tell a story about how you competed in a triathlon on the moon with Neil Armstrong last year and a One-Upper will tell you how they flew to Mars, married an alien and raised a family of five, opened a small import/export business and retired before returning to earth. It doesn’t matter what you say, the One-Upper will always surpass anything you may have done in your life that would seem slightly interesting to normal people but very, very boring to the One-Upper.
If gone unchecked, the One-Upper’s tales of their own fascination with themselves can often escalate into a game of fictional ingenuity, even when the story may seem not only blatantly false, but supremely preposterous and sometimes even physically or mathematically impossible. The goal of the One-Upper seems to be to garner as much attention as they can get. They want us to shut the heck up with our lame stories and start ‘ooohhing’ and ‘aaaahhing’ when they give us access to their spectacular tales. At some point everyone begins to silently realize that certain factoids of the One-Upper’s story may not be entirely true. However, for some reason no one is able to rid the conversation of the One-Upper or inform them that listening to other people is not a bad thing.
The One-Upper often butts into conversations that they have no business being involved in. All it takes is for them to hear more than one person talking and they immediately begin shooting down their stories like a duck hunter firing into a crowd of rowdy NASCAR fans. They hone in on other stories like a lion chasing a gang of alter boys on Good Friday, dicing and mincing them up with their own tales of heroism or misfortune or that really, really funny thing that happened to them at McDonalds one day.
The One-Upper is a close cousin of the Know-It-All. They both think that everyone that they’re talking to is an idiot. They both believe that they are stimulating everyone’s boring lives with provocative and exhilarating yarns filled with gobs of juicy information. What separates them is that the One-Upper is much like a hyperactive Chihuahua constantly on the hunt for baby chipmunks to scare the crap out of, where the Know-It-All is more like a sagely old elephant, slowly walking along dispensing wisdom and knowledge while thinking to themselves, “You’re welcome universe.”
The other day in my Operation Desert Storm Re-enactor’s club we were sitting around a campfire guarding about ten thousand Iraqi Prisoners Of War Re-enactors when a One-Upper tried to tell us about the time he personally invaded the country of Lichtenstein by himself, overthrew the government and renamed the country ‘Hank’ after his grandfather who was a cop in San Diego. We took that One-Upper prisoner, unintentionally changing the course of that particular re-enacted conflict, held him for ransom for eight days, to which a billionaire from Saudi Arabia then paid six hundred thousand dollars for his release, but was immediately disappointed to discover that he had just paid for a One-Upper to a bunch of Gulf War Veteran Re-enactors who have never been in the military at all. Only a couple of us had some Boy Scout experience. Apparently, he thought he was buying a racehorse or something.
The fact that we even tolerate the One-Upper says a lot for our collective mettle, not to mention our national stamina. That we endure the narcissistic, vainglorious oral compositions that contain more wonder, more danger, more action, more adversity and just all around more awesomeness than our own stories says in itself that we are a mightily tolerant society, where in a whole ‘nother part of the world the One-Upper would probably be packed into a suitcase and put on a flight to Antarctica where the luggage would be intentionally lost somewhere during a connecting flight in Brazil and never seen again.
Everyone has an interesting story. Everyone has experiences that we can enjoy and sometimes even learn from. One-upping someone’s story is not the way to have a good conversation. It is a way, however, to identify yourself as someone everyone can really do without. Let us tell our stories of spectacular parties we’ve been to or how poor we were when we graduated from college and had to survive on Top Ramen and sunflower seeds or driving really fast on the freeway while fleeing the cops. Yes, we know you’ve been to more spectacular parties and that you’ve been poorer and have driven faster. Yes, thank you for telling us all that. Now, here’s something I bet you the One-Upper has never heard before: Please leave.
Your essay made me laugh out loud - funny stuff. I once wrote a blog pst that made a roomful of people not just laugh out load, but literally roar with laughter, sending no less than a baker's dozen to an urgent care clinic for treatment for laughing a real lot.
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