An invention of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut which appears in his novel "Slapstick".
The Hooligan is named after Francis Iron-7 Hooligan, a janitor who, when placing his lunchpail on top of a disused particle accelerator, hears voices emanating from a length of tube that has also been stored there. The voices belong to people in the afterlife, a mode of existence with which they are far from satisfied. A scientist who hears it describes it as sounding like, "a badly run turkey farm", and the existence of the Hooligan is kept secret in order to prevent the living from learning the full awfulness of what awaits them in the afterlife.
The principle character in the book, Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, finds out about the Hooligan and uses it to communicate with his dead sister Eliza. Unfortunately one of the people present when this occurs, David Daffodil-11 von Peterswald, is a Tourette's Syndrome sufferer, and as a result of this unfortunate condition he begins to shout out a random stream of obscenities just as Dr. Swain is talking to his sister.
"Before Eliza could speak again, dead people in the background sensed that poor David was a kindred soul, as outraged by the human condition in the Universe as they were. So they egged him on, and contributed obscenities of their own.
'You tell 'em, kid', they said, and so on.
And they doubled everything. 'Double cock! Double clit!', they'd say. 'Double shit!' and so on.
It was bedlam."
Those familiar with Vonnegut will know that it is entirely typical of him to make even the afterlife into some sort of badly designed eternal waiting room.
Those of you whose religious convictions or beliefs convince you that it's otherwise: I'm genuinely glad for you.
Everyone else: please take a number and wait for it to be called.
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