Why?:Are there voices coming from the closet?/contest

So, you're settling down for a quiet evening of reading, eating a nice candlelit dinner, watching a movie, perhaps throttling the cat (or is that just me?), when all of a sudden you hear something emanating from the depths of your closet. What are these voices? Is it a human being hiding inside your closet, and talking to you? If so, is it somebody attractive? Is it possibly R. Kelly, trapped in your closet and hiding there and hoping not to be found, yet singing loudly for some reason? Why, for God's sake, are there voices coming from your closet?

Are you sure it's your closet?

Before reading on any further, you must make absolutely positive that it is indeed your closet that appears to be talking to you. Are you sure it's your closet, and not, say, your bathroom, your couch, or perhaps your wife? You might not think this mistake is common, but it is indeed a common illness for people to get their spouses confused with closets. "Oh yeah, my husband mixes us up all the time," says one woman on the subject, "Always trying to hang up his clothes in me, and have kinky, role-playing, latex-fetish sex with the closet. Oh well. It really isn't that much of a problem, I just hit him with a ferret or some other rodent and he usually snaps out of it. If not, I just deal with it. The coat hangers don't hurt after a while."

In order to ensure that it is indeed your closet that is the source of the voices, try throwing a dinner plate at it. If it screams, and starts brandishing a butcher knife in your general direction, odds are that it is your wife (or a particularly grumpy closet). If the plate shatters on it, but it does not respond, then it is indeed your closet.

Okay, so you're sure it's your closet. Now what?

Once you have determined that the voices are indeed coming from your closet, you are ready to move on to the next step of determining why voices are emanating from it. You must identify what type of closet you have in order to proceed any further. Knowing specifically what type of closet you have can help you narrow down possible reasons. First, try asking your closet what type it is. If it answers with "I'm the only type of closet that can understand questions, and respond to them," then you're in luck. You can then converse with your closet. If it answers with "I don't know what type of closet I am, because I didn't understand the question," it is obviously a highly dishonest closet. If it answers, "Huh? Closet? What the fuck are you talking about, man?" then it is indeed not your closet, it is actually your roommate. An easy mistake to make. If the closet doesn't respond at all, then you might have to run out and buy a field guide to closets, which can be found in your local wildlife store. While there, you might want to pick up a man with a tranquilizer so he can shoot the closet if things go out of hand. Look around for a field guide to closets. Of course, there won't be one, but you can buy a field guide to birds and pretend it's a field guide to closets.

Possible reasons

Okay, so you're sure it's your closet that has voices coming out of it, and you've got a field guide to birds, to identify the type of closet you have. You are now ready to analyze possible solutions to this problem. Below are listed reasons that have been proven in the past for voices coming from closets, all of which have been documented in full by TOBFAUTR (or The Official Board For Analyzing...Uh...Talking Rooms, a federal bureau founded in 1997, which, as of today, has one member).

R. Kelly is trapped inside

Many United States citizens have reported finding R. Kelly in their closets in the past. According to one account: "We heard this loud singing coming from inside the closet, and thought, "Oh my God!!! We've got singing cockroaches!!!" So we called an exterminator, and he opened the closet, and there was R. Kelly, sitting in there and singing like mad. The exterminator said he could exterminate Kelly for us, but it would cost a few dollars extra. We decided to put up with the infestation, and left him in there for a while. We finally got him out with some rat poison, and found that he had presents all over the closet floor. It took us weeks to clean it up."

R. Kelly may very well be lurking inside your closet. Whether or not it actually is R. Kelly should be fairly easy to figure out. First of all, is the voice narrating everything that's going on? If so, it is very likely to be R. Kelly. A simple test would be to walk up to the closet door and stand there dramatically, with your hand over the doorknob. If it is R. Kelly in the closet, you're likely to hear the voice inside start singing; "HE'S WALKING UP THE CLOS-ET!!! I HOPE HE DOESN'T FIND ME!!!" In the event that it is R. Kelly, you have little to worry about. He can be a bit of an annoyance if you're trying to sleep, as he actually sings "He's inhaling!!! He's exhaling!!!" as you breathe, but other than that, he's quite harmless.

Your coat hangers are engaging in a philosophical debate

Believe it or not, coat hangers are actually extremely advanced beings, and, as far as intelligence is concerned, have far surpassed the human race, and are far more capable of grasping complex and elaborate philosophical concepts than human beings are (which is fairly impressive, considering the fact that human beings are complex, elaborate mounds of endless nerves, cells, and electrical impulses sculpted by millions of years of evolution, whereas coat hangers are just twisted pieces of wire). All coat hangers are extremely intelligent. Except for the plastic ones. They’re another matter entirely.

If you are hearing voices coming from your closet, it is a distinct possibility that you are hearing the coat hangers in your closet discussing philosophical issues, such as the relevance of solipsism in a modern industrial society, the concept of string theory with relation to nihilism and an “everything is nothing” perspective, and of course, the ongoing question of “which is better, McDonald’s or Burger King?” If the coat hangars in your closet are arguing about philosophy, you’d best let them do so. If you open the closet and say “Could you please quiet down, I’m trying to watch Hee Haw,” they are liable to start discussing the question, “How do we talk, anyway? I mean, we’re coat hangars! We don’t have mouths!” And discussions on this topic can last anywhere from three days to an eternity.

The moths in your closet are organizing a protest

Moths don’t like the way you constantly smother them with lethal mothballs, you know. Moths are inherently a very Liberal species, and therefore, if you don’t agree to disarm, and throw all your mothballs away, they are liable to become angry with you. If the voices in your closet sound angry, then you may have a crisis of insect rebellion on your hands. Insects, you see, keep a close watch on the constant cruelties that the human race commits against the natural world. Seal clubbing (which, admittedly, is pretty fun), kitten huffing, blowing air into the anuses of gerbils, all of these cruelties are observed by insects with a great deal of malice. Insects don’t like to see humans being incredibly cruel to creatures they somehow deem “inferior.” Therefore, to keep the moths from your closet from rebelling against you, it might be best to go inside your closet and convince them that you mean to stop driving them away with mothballs, and that hopefully, the human race and the natural world can learn to work together for the improvement of all. Or you could just squash the little bastards.

The voices in your closet are gay, and they want to announce their pride by “coming out” of the closet

You know what? I’m not going to bother writing this section because it’s a ridiculous idea for a joke.

The dead bodies you stored inside are actually alive

If you had a collection of dead bodies inside your closet, then perhaps you hadn’t killed them properly. Perhaps the supposedly “dead” people you had stored inside your closet were actually only injured, and our now waking up and asking such questions as “where are we?” “Are we inside a closet?” “Why are there used condoms all over the place in here?” You might want to go inside and finish them off.

Your closet is lonely

Closets are very sociable rooms. They need someone to talk to every now and then. Most of them are content to simply talk to the bed, or perhaps the couch, but if they feel like these social relationships are somehow hollow or substanceless, they may go insane and start talking to themselves. If this is happening, stay calm. Simply call a therapist and have them talk to the closet. Of course, the therapist will probably refuse, as most have signs on their office doors saying “I DO NOT SEE INANIMATE OBJECTS!” If this is the case, then just grab a janitor and pay them to pretend to be a therapist. Believe me, the closet won’t know the difference. Closets don’t have eyes, you know.

Or…

…you might be hearing voices from your closet because you forgot to turn the fucking radio off.