We’re putting OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the test with Make Room 4 Joy.
We asked ChatGPT to produce more flowery versions of the titles and the text of each chapter of Make Room 4 Joy. We made it easier on ChatGPT by removing the character limits.
In some instances, ChatGPT did pretty good. In others, it was no match for the brilliantly imaginative mind of the genius behind Make Room 4 Joy: A Mr. Funny Bones Flash Fiction Challenge and the entire Mr. Funny Bones global franchise.
Mother Chip took a victory lap around her picture gallery. All her progeny were there, skelekin immortalized on canvases set in gilt frames suspended on dank, dusty damask. Chief Birdygo. Rich the CSI Guy. Nurse Janet and Brad the Surgeon. Pirate, Cruz, Coco, and Amazing Grace. Chica Mutante and her useless brother, Alejandro (Mother Chip made them share a single canvas and frame). Those androgynous Terranean burkini models, Inané and Insané (also jammed into a single frame). The guys from Bin 206. That buffoon of a clown dentist, Dirty Rich. That impossible granddaughter of hers, Missy (more about her below). And of course, her favorite grandson, Butterscotch, whom she loved more than death itself.
Why should she care that thousands of potatoes and skeletons from some other clan in some nearby Podunk farm town were on the brink of mutual assured destruction?
With the help of that unwitting lascivious clown dentist, Mother had succeeded in getting rid of Allie, that freak of a mermaid skeleton, before she could pollute the gene pool of Mother’s storied Chip clan. Mother tittered as she thought about how much easier it was this time round to manipulate that potato head of a potato-farming potato Joy into carrying out her plan.
Unrelated events, the urban encroachment and massacre of that skeleton family at Arbor Ring Farm set the community on edge, handing Mother the perfect pretext for sowing division and enlisting Joy as her stooge. The potato rumbler in the barn—Mother’s idea—stoked distrust. The not-so-secret meeting of potato diseases—also her idea—triggered genuine alarm and the fatal calls to arms.
How different things would have unfolded had Missy just heeded her grandmother’s advice and stopped fooling around with the other kind. But Missy, always impossible, ignored her counsel and kept spreading her pubic symphysis secretly for one young spud after another in a neighboring town.
“A Potato Chip in the family?!” Mother Chip had asked herself upon uncovering Missy’s deception, shaken by the ramifications. “Over my dead body!”
Joy spent the morning shopping online for osteoclasts. Although a longshot, the release of large amounts of human precursor cells on sound asleep skeletons just might trigger resorption on a massive scale and, without the possibility of producing new bone, accelerate their decay. She put 50 million in her cart.
For years, Joy had watched with dismay as one local farm after another gave way to a residential subdivision or an office park. To avaricious developers nothing seemed sacred, not even cemeteries inconveniently consecrated on suddenly commercially desirable property. Urban encroachment on their rural community impacted potato farmer and skeleton in equal measure, and they now found themselves competing against each other for control of their destinies and the same plots of land.
Recent events at Arbor Ring Farm and rumors of a secret convening of infectious potato diseases called their relatively peaceful co-existence into question. If the tensions bubbling beneath the surface were about to erupt in biological warfare, Joy wanted to be prepared.
They all showed up as instructed on the invitation, though they had no idea who had invited them or why.
Scab and Rhizoctonia Canker—a.k.a. “Rhizo”—were both there, along with the Scurf twins, Black and Silver. Fusarium Dry Rot and her colorful sister, Pink, made an appearance. And to everyone’s surprise, Early and Late Blight somehow managed to arrive on time.
One potato weighs an average of eight ounces. Arbor Ring and neighboring farms produce approximately 42,750 pounds of potatoes per acre, or roughly 85,500 potatoes.
One human skeleton weighs an average of 26 pounds. The county cemetery buries approximately 1,000 corpses per acre.
So, although outweighed, per acre during any given growing season, potatoes outnumber skeletons in the community by about 85 to one.
Joy and the other mature potatoes couldn’t believe their eyes. Hundreds of new potatoes were frolicking skinless and wild between barn and yard, seemingly bruised and blissfully unaware of the consequences of their youthful yet destructive behavior on the farm’s bottom line.
Self-identifying poletons, Arbor Ring Farm’s latest crop of young spuds took the unorthodox mannerisms and outré fashions of local fringe skeleton culture to the extreme, going so far as to disavow their skin-ness and mutilate their flesh in a rebellious move to look less potato- and more skeleton-like. Arbor Ring would be lucky to sell them cooked or fried to pig farms, let alone unprocessed to area food pantries, in their scandalous and unmarketable state.
Inside the barn, in a corner behind a hay bale, Joy discovered an industrial-sized potato rumbler—a wicked piece of equipment long banned in the county—ringed by scores of spent iodine injection syringes. Although not one to point the fingerling, she had her suspicions.
By the time she arrived at the tent, the judges had already awarded Joy the Blue Ribbon for best organic potato at the county fair. Appointed in a gesture of goodwill, the judges—all of them from the community’s skeleton minority—were absolutely giddy with anticipation about solving the horticultural mystery behind the prize plant.
The luscious green foliage, flawless blue-violet blossoms, and well-shaped berries attracted their attention, but it was the tuber’s balanced starchiness, slightly creamy yet slightly dense texture, and silky smooth skin that stuck in the jurists’ mandibles and earned their highest gastronomic praise.
When asked the question on everyone’s cranium, Joy demurred. “Secret ingredient.” Nobody dead in that tent that afternoon needed to know that she fertilized her prize-winning potato plant with locally sourced bone meal in scandalously large amounts.
The Tuberson family farmhands had started picking potatoes after dusk to beat the arrival the next day of an unusually hot Indian summer. By four in the morning, Joy was standing in the middle of a field at Arbor Ring Farm trying to figure out what went wrong with the haulm topper and harvester.
Too many rocks near the surface? She wondered. Both pieces of machinery had failed in spectacular fashion. She knew better than to try to fix them in the dark. She’d wait until dawn.
A rooster crowed. The yawning mid-September sun rose golden over the fields, illuminating a wasteland of scraped and scattered glowing yellow bones—all that remained of a decimated family of skeletons violently aroused and dismembered overnight.
Missy and her clique of morbidly skinny bitches were all that stood between her and the front door. Joy could tell from the tortured looks on their wasted bony faces that they resented her full-bodied beauty and voluptuous curves.
But they were no match for Joy Tuberson, whose family had deep roots in their small farming community.
Mr. Funny Bones 