Skippy's list

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article may not be compliant with the content policies of Wikipedia. To be compliant, it must be written from a neutral point of view and must not include unverifiable, unsuitable material, or original research.
Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page.

Skippy's list is a list compiled by former US Army Specialist Jonathan "Skippy" Schwarz, listing 213 things he was supposedly "no longer allowed to do in the US Army." Largely consisting of obscene, illegal, or simply ridiculous actions, it quickly spread through e-mail and became considered the "definitive guide to subversive army humor" according to several web sites. ^{[citation needed]}

[edit] History

Specialist Schwarz had been stationed in Bosnia from 1997 to 1998, and in his words, he "got bored. I mean really bored." To relieve the boredom, he and the other soldiers would pull various pranks on each other, and these became the subject of some emails he sent to friends and relatives back home; eventually, he began mentioning something new that he was not allowed to do at the end of every email. It hadn't actually started out as a joke; the first one was that he was not allowed to watch South Park when he was supposed to be working.

A friend compiled a list of these, entitled "The 101 things Skippy can't do", even though it had only thirty items on it. However, he continued adding to it until the list swelled to 213. They were eventually put up on a web site, which he found to his astonishment then became immensely popular.

[edit] Trivia

All items on the list were either things Schwarz personally had been instructed not to do, or which he had witnessed another soldier being instructed not to do, whether or not they had actually taken place.
There were several misconceptions about either Schwarz or the list itself, ranging from believing he was a woman, to assuming he actually did everything on the list, or that he was discharged from the US Army with a Section 8.