It was an exhilarating experience. Not often does a man find himself a witness
to scientific history.
I was in no way the first person to shine the light on this
phenomenon. Mark Twain, Steve Allen,
Carol Burnett, Woody Allen in Crimes and
Misdemeanors – albeit satirically, lampooning not the idea itself but the insufferable
“know-it-all” espousing it – and if these respected sages agree on it, it is at
least worth listening to. Steve Allen alone, maybe not, but throw in Mark
Twain and Carol Burnett… I mean, now we’re talking.
The oft-mentioned, universally accepted observation:
“Comedy is tragedy
plus time.”
To the degree that anything
is true, or true substantially more than it is false which places it near if
not in the top tier of “Indisputable
Trueness”, comedy really is “tragedy
plus time.”
“Have you ever seen a ghost?”
“Yeah. Rachel Maddow
on Election Night.”
Possibly too soon.
Joke-exposing is a tricky proposition, in which timing is
everything. (I believe Steve Allen also
said that. But it could
have been Marty Allen. “Hello,
dere!”) You jump the gun on a joke and
it’s tasteless. You wait too long and
it’s dated. Like Goldilocks’ porridge,
it has to be “just right.”
Not long ago – and my hands are still shaking writing about
it – I took this comedy truism a gigantic step further. It was not deliberate, but how many great scientific
advances are? (Maybe a lot of them, I don’t know. But I know there are also numerous scientific
advances where they forget to refrigerate the stuff in the Petri dish and are subsequently
awarded the Nobel Prize. Call it hubris – I would if anyone else
said it – but this personal discovery merits inclusion in the vaunted pantheon
of “Great Accidental Illuminations.”
It is only a first step, I grant you, but I sincerely believe
that… all right, that’s enough. Here it
is.
Last night, I woke up about three-thirty in the morning. If I had known I was on the verge of scientific
advancement I would have noted the time precisely
but I didn’t. I just thought I needed to
go to the bathroom. It was then I made two surprising discoveries.
One, I did not need to go to the bathroom. And two, when I woke up, I was
chuckling.
And I knew exactly the reason why.
I was chuckling because something was funny. But also, I was delighted that, due to my
invaluable awareness of the situation, the world as we knew it would now never
be the same.
For my specific example at least, I had discovered the
duration of time involved for tragedy, like a caterpillar transforming into a
butterfly, to flutter across the “Dividing Line”, morphing identifiably…
… into comedy.
I truly knew how long that “tragedy-to-comedy” metamorphosis
took. In the case of the following
anecdote, it took…
Three days, eleven hours and twenty-eight minutes.
It was an astonishing revelation. With my discovery as a guide-posting
“Measuring Stick”, it is now possible, based on its position on the
tragicometrical hierarchy – more
tragic than my personal situation or less
tragic than my personal situation – to determine how long it would take for that tragedy to transmogrify into
comedy.
No more embarrassing faux
pas. It’s just a simple matter of
arithmetic.
Here now are the facts of my personal situation.
It was during a pre-visit to a gastroenterologist, prior to
the always-popular upcoming colonoscopy.
The much anticipated “Finger Test” suggests the need for further
investigation, involving additional, follow-up “blood work.”
The doctor escorts me to a picture window in his office,
pointing in the direction of a nearby clinic specializing in blood work.
Congenitally anxious about understanding directions, and also
concerned that the time on my street-side parking meter will expire if there is
an extended wait at the blood-taking clinic across the street, I say to the
doctor,
“You don’t do ‘blood’ here?”
Hearing that they do, I opt to save the time and
inconvenience, and have my blood work completed “in-house.”
The first blood taker, after puncturing my right arm, is unable
to draw a sufficient amount of blood to complete the requested lab tests. She then punctures my left arm, generating similar unsatisfactory results. At that point, she abruptly retires from the
field, ceding her duties off to a confident, blood-taking co-worker.
Failing to draw sufficient blood himself, accessing the
same portals, the replacement phlebotomist jabs the needle into the top of my
hand, where the veins are so prominent, blind
blood-takers could find them. It just
hurts more going in.
For me, this incompetence-driven discomfort qualifies
indisputably as a tragedy. Which is how
I present it when I get home, garnering the pity and consolation I was looking
for. Getting jabbed multiple times should
at least earn you a hug. And the last remaining butterscotch dessert,
which it did.
Three days, eleven hours and twenty-eight minutes after the
fact, I wake up chuckling. And I
immediately know why. In that (less than
precise but close to) measurable period of time…
Tragedy had been immutably transmogrified into comedy.
Fearful of getting lost or getting a parking ticket or both,
I had eschewed the blood-drawing professionals across the street, in favor of
two Bozos who had used my precious body as the proverbial pincushion.
I belatedly realized that I had done this to
myself. A self-inflicted blessure, if you will. And not just in French.
An agonizing experience, at first. Suddenly, after the appropriate – and, now
thanks to me calibratable – interval…
…. it was funny.
Hypothesis: If
you can measure the duration of that inevitable – according to Mark Twain, Steve
Allen and Carol Burnett – transition once,
as I did, you will, in time, and with
increasing precision, be able, in a similar fashion, to calibrate the duration
of all of them.
Making it possible, then and for all time, to know the exact
moment when tragedy becomes comedy.
Heroes of Science:
Madame Curie, Louis Pasteur…
And E. Raymond Pomerantz.
Send the prize to the house.
I am not flying to Stockholm in the winter.
