Confirmed: Humans Can Wear Muffler Man Heads

Seaside Heights, New Jersey

We've settled an ongoing debate among the Roadside Team -- whether a human being can wear the head of a Muffler Man. Would it weigh too much? Is the neck seating and bolt arrangement too uncomfortable when supported by regular-sized shoulders?

Our opportunity came on an overcast November day on Casino Pier, a family-oriented attraction in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. We inspected a muffler man downed in a storm a year earlier. The statue's head, decapitated and face down on the boardwalk, had been exposed to the elements, but seemed otherwise undamaged. We dumped out the standing water, and our tallest field researcher went Bobblehead for a few minutes.

The head has an interior volume that could accommodate nearly 20 decapitated human heads. Though ungainly, the big fiberglass noggin can be worn unassisted (The Pier owner held on most of the time anyway, mainly to prevent the metal rod protruding out of the neck hole from reenacting the Phineas Gage incident). The acoustics are odd; God-like pronouncements from within sounded flanged and, well, muffled to observers.

A CN8 News video crew recorded the moment, which didn't last all that long. It wasn't the weight or the painful fiberglass edges -- it was the sudden realization that a year of exposure to the elements in Seaside Heights probably includes a summer of night beach revelers discovering a funny place to pee...