How a Joke Could Spark The End of Civilization
And other stories of panic.
In 1973, an oil embargo quadrupled gas prices practically overnight. It plunged the nation into chaos. Cars lined up for miles outside gas stations. Drivers got into fist fights at the pump. They drew knives. And guns. Neighbors siphoned cars from each other’s tanks in the middle of the night. Auto parts stores started selling locking gas caps that year. They flew off the shelves.
Panicked families started hoarding gasoline in everything from garbage cans to milk cartons. They stored these improvised containers everywhere they could. Garages. Washing rooms. Sunrooms. Enclosed porches. Hallways. Even utility closets. Often right next to their water heaters and furnaces.
Housefires and explosions skyrocketed.
Here’s the kicker:
There was never any true shortage. The oil embargo only shrank global supplies by about 7 percent. It would’ve been easy to manage. Instead, drivers started pulling up to top off their tanks several times a week, just for a few gallons. The irony? Their cars burned almost as much gas idling in those long lines. They were so terrified of an empty tank, they didn’t stop to think about the math.
Then came the joke.
Why is it always toilet paper?
A few days before Christmas, Johnny Carson made a joke during his opening monologue about the ongoing embargo:
You know what else is disappearing from the supermarket shelves? Toilet paper. Ha, ha, ha. You can laugh now.
There is an acute shortage of toilet paper in the good ol’ United States. We gotta quit writing on it. I wanna tell ya, it is serious.
I just saw a commercial… where Mrs. Olson comes in with a shopping bag and the housewife says forget the coffee…
Just gimme the shopping bag.
If you’re my age, you probably have no idea who Mrs. Olson is. For 20 years, a Swedish woman named Virginia Christine was the face of Folgers Coffee. Some of the most famous coffee commercials in American history show, you guessed it, a woman struggling to make coffee for her judgmental husband.
When marital tension reached its worst, Mrs. Olson showed up with a can of Folgers. The housewife went, “But all coffee is the same.”
Mrs. Olson corrected her: “No, my dear, this coffee is grown in the mountains.” These commercials aired almost every single night, right in the middle of Carson’s show. He knew. He could barely keep a straight face as he worked his way up to the punchline. So the joke wasn’t about toilet paper shortages at all. It was a joke about American consumerism. What would happen next?
Carson had no idea.
Toilet paper stocking stuffers
The next morning, five days before Christmas, millions of Americans swept into stores and emptied the shelves of toilet paper. Because Johnny Carson told all 20 million of them that there was a toilet paper shortage. Even though he was making a joke based on a warning from a senator.
Families literally piled shopping carts with toilet paper and rolled them to their cars. We’re talking five cases, ten. Panic spread as casual shoppers—people who didn’t even watch Johnny Carson—noticed the empty shelves. Stores began posting signs limiting everyone to two rolls.
Even paper towels and napkins ran out.
By the end of the afternoon, speculators were running toilet paper black markets in parking lots, selling it from their trunks.
By Christmas, it was practically impossible to find toilet paper. Reports surfaced of people asking their friends and neighbors for toilet paper instead of regular Christmas gifts. They were even wrapping up toilet paper and giving it to each other. They were putting it in stockings.
Were they joking?
It didn’t matter.
The toilet paper crisis lasted for months. Supply chains didn’t return to normal until April 1974. Carson apologized on the air twice, assuring everyone there was no actual toilet paper shortage. It was all just a bunch of panic.
And we thought 2020 was bad…
Three girls started a bank run
That same year, three teenage girls in Japan were riding a train. One of them was about to start a job at a local bank. Her friends told her the bank was dangerous. She went home and asked her family if it was true.
One of her family members misinterpreted the question. The girl was asking if she was going to get robbed at work. Instead, it turned into a question about Toyokawa Shinkin Bank’s financial stability. The question passed from a beauty salon to a dry cleaner. At the dry cleaner, a customer walked in and asked to use the phone. The dry cleaner’s wife overheard him talking about a large withdrawal from the bank and assumed he was doing it because he knew something. He didn’t. It was just a regular transaction. He was trying to pay a bill.
The dry cleaner’s wife panicked and ran off to the bank to withdraw all of her money. She told all of her friends and dry cleaning customers to do the same. A local ham radio operator even repeated the rumors.
By the end of the week, thousands of people rushed branches of Toyokawa Shinkin and demanded to withdraw their savings.
Nothing the bank or local papers did could calm the population. A citywide bank run caused by a rumor was about to spiral out of control.
So the bank did something unthinkable.
Instead of limiting withdrawals or freezing accounts, bank managers did the opposite. They sent armored trucks full of cash to their local branches. They told bank tellers to stack the cash in walls behind their counters. That way, the lines of angry bank customers could see it with their own eyes. That, combined with detailed reports about the misunderstanding, calmed everyone’s fear.
The panic broke.
Salt, sugar, and matches
In 2006, a national newspaper in Moscow printed a story claiming that Ukraine was planning to raise salt prices in retaliation for natural gas prices. Readers started exaggerating the story, saying Ukraine wasn’t simply going to raise salt prices. They were going to cut off Russia completely. Since Russia got 40 percent of its salt from Ukraine at the time, panic erupted.
The panic spread like fire among older Russians, who remembered the shortages from the Soviet era. They cleaned the aisles of salt.
Within a week, shelves were empty.
The panic spread to sugar and matches. Why? It had nothing to do with supply chain problems. These were just the items that Russians had learned to stockpile for shortages and emergencies.
It was a reflex.
Older Russians led the first wave of hoarding. Younger Russians started hoarding once they saw the empty shelves. For a month, everyone was trying to stockpile hundreds of pounds of salt in their pantries. Once again, speculators filled their homes with salt, thinking they’d make a fortune.
When the fear died down, many of them tried to return the salt or sell it. But because everyone had more salt than they knew what to do with, that was hard. So the salt mostly just stayed put. It’s a good thing salt doesn’t go bad.
What about rice?
The great American rice panic
2008 was a rough year for everyone.
On top of the financial meltdown, newspapers started running dramatic headlines about countries like India and Vietnam restricting rice exports. It didn’t matter that the U.S. was also a top rice exporter with deep reserves. Within days, bulk buyers started swarming warehouse clubs like Sam’s and Costco. Shoppers started piling flatbed carts with giant bags of rice.
Once again, the first wave of panic buying drove second waves. It spilled over into pantry staples like flour and oil.
What happened to all that rice?
The pattern you can’t miss
Well, studies have shown that panic buying routinely results in severe food waste. Up to 66 percent of households simply throw away what they stockpiled after it goes bad. In particular, one study on food hoarding during the 2020 pandemic found that panic buyers threw away roughly:
- 35 percent of their fresh fruits and vegetables
- 25 percent of their bread
- 25 percent of their meat
During times of crisis, hoarding actually accounts for 60 percent of food waste. In other words, the panic makes everything worse.
We see the pattern over and over. When catastrophe hits, the public can choose from two paths. They can come together and help each other. Or they can devolve into panic and hoarding. When they choose panic and hoarding, they always make things worse. They turn a manageable burden into a crisis.
Americans turned a gasoline supply crunch into a massive rolling crisis. They turned a late night joke into a national toilet paper shortage. Around the world, panic turned a conversation between teenagers into a bank run. It turned a few newspaper headlines into empty store shelves.
Missing the point
These days, our screens are filled with doomsday predictions followed by some expert who shrugs and tells us we have nothing to worry about. It doesn’t help that government agencies tell everyone not to panic, regardless of the actual facts on the ground. Either way, this conversation misses the point.
It’s not really about whether something bad is going to happen. It’s about what you’re going to do when it actually happens.
What are you going to do when hackers turn the freezer aisle into an oven? What are you going to do when the shelves actually run out? A pantry full of food gets you through a few weeks, maybe a few months. That’s assuming your neighbors don’t dogpile you for a can of beans.
The Long Island Express
In 1938, a radio play about an alien invasion triggered a massive public panic in New Jersey. Almost everyone knows about that incident. What they don’t know is that a Category 3 hurricane slammed Long Island just five weeks earlier, killing nearly 700. Nobody freaked out about it. Most refused to evacuate, precisely because they believed that a Category 3 hurricane would never make it that far north. They even gave the hurricane a trivializing nickname.
They called it “The Long Island Express.”
Why?
People don’t respond to actual emergencies. They’re conditioned to ignore them, precisely because they happen more often. They respond to bigger, more sensational threats, even if they’re not actually happening.
The average person spends more time freaking out over an empty tank or an empty pantry than they do about blowing up their house with poorly stored gasoline. They’ll ignore a storm that kills hundreds, then they’ll jam roads over an alien invasion that’s not even happening. That’s us.
Panics don’t come from nowhere
These moments of panic have one thing in common.
They happened during longer periods of turmoil. There were larger truths beneath them, deeper layers of resentment toward institutions. Social trust was also running at record lows. Neighbors were suspicious of each other.
Panics don’t come from nowhere.
They come from conditions.
The panics happen because societies repress and sublimate these deeper angers and fears in order to keep up their version of “normal.” They dedicate endless amounts of energy to maintaining the illusions of a status quo. They ignore the larger problem. Then something happens to break that illusion. Sometimes, it’s a newspaper headline. Sometimes, it’s three teens talking on a train.
Sometimes, it’s just a joke.
What can you do?
The answer is simple, but it’s not easy.
You have to become the source of stability and sensibility for yourself and everyone around you. You’ve got to be the bank managers who stacked cash behind teller windows to calm people down. You probably don’t have a wall of cash, but you’ve got other resources to offer.
So do that.
If you’re interested:
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