"Another Situation Wherein Comedy Cannot Bloom"

The ideas come to me in bunches.

Yesterday, I talked about how good news is rarely funny.  Today it’s how, in the face of concrete information – otherwise known as facts – the possibility for comedy is nigh on impossible. 

Factual information is the Kryptonite of comedy.  It arrives on the scene, and the overpowered joke just surrenders and weakens, gasping helplessly on the ground until it sputteringly expires.

R.I.P. comedic notion that was only trying to amuse, blasted to oblivion by a humorless reality.

Comedy is delicate flower, thriving only in a nurturing environment, an environment that excludes both (yesterday’s message) good news and (today’s) factual information.

Example.  Not a big one.  But how big do examples have to be?

I was typing away the other day, when all of a sudden, the electricity goes out.  I could have continued typing, but that would have sent the futility of this exercise into incomprehensible overdrive.

“He’s still at the keyboard and his typing is going nowhere.”

Am I wrong, or that heartbreakingly pathetic?

Anyway, I eventually stop typing, and I look around the room.  The lights are out.  The TV emits a pictureless silence.  My hulking printer is just sitting there.  Normally, it hums.  I immediately miss that, and begin humming myself.

Since I could no longer work, I got up and I went to the bathroom.  To floss.  The thing is, ever since Thanksgiving Dinner, I’ve had gum irritation between my two back teeth on the right side, both on top and the bottom, and I’ve been dreading a dental intervention. 

You know how terrified some people are about being stuck in an elevator.  That’s how afraid I am about taking a troubling set of gums into a dentist’s office.  I get the shivers just thinking about it.  I also, by the way, am terrified about being stuck in an elevator. 

That’s right.  I am the entire package.

So I’m flossing away, for the fourth time that morning, hoping that the mere ritual of flossing will miraculously cause the irritation to disappear and I will not need to go to the dentist who will tell me I need immediate root canal but first both my wisdom teeth have to come out so as to allow the dentist more room to work. 

It is then that a funny idea occurs to me.

Our upstairs Master Bathroom, where I am currently flossing, includes a Top-Of-The-Line Toto toilet, a luxurious product that along with certain warm-water cleansing applications also provides, courtesy of some “electric eye” operation, a toilet lid and seat that rise and lower down automatically.  We have three bathrooms in our house, but only one Toto, hidden upstairs, so that visitors will be unaware we’re pretentious.

In the course of my flossing, I happen to wander by the Toto toilet and the lid doesn’t go up.  And that’s when it hits me:

“What if there are these really rich people and all of their toilets are Totos and the electricity goes out?

You get it?  The lids will not rise on any of them and they will not be able to “go” anywhere!

That’s funny, isn’t it?  I thought it was hilarious.  I immediately considered writing about it, including a scene where supplicating wealthy people ring a poor person’s doorbell:

“We’re sorry to bother you, but our toilets don’t work when the power’s out.  Do you think we could we use yours?” 

I had a catchy title for the piece:

“The Price You Pay For The Price You Pay.”

I was laughing my head off, suddenly oblivious the ticking time bomb between my back molars.  Which may, in fact, be the primary purpose of comedy, if you replace “oblivious to the ticking time bomb between my back molars” with “oblivious to the reality that we are all going to die.”

Later that day, the other member of our household returns home from work, and I tell her about the power outage, eager to regale her with my manufactured hilarity concerning the affluent family that can’t “go” because their automatic toilets won’t work.  To which she immediately replies:

“You know those toilets also work manually.”

Ka-boom!  Thud!

(The sound of a comedic imagining falling, lifeless, to the firmament.)

There is, I suppose, another way of looking at this, wherein a college-educated person who has lived closing in on seven decades on this planet should have had brains enough to figure that “manual” thing out for himself. 

But that’s not funny either.

                                                                                               

Is it?

"The Bad News About Good News"

The good news about bad news is that bad news has the capacity of being funny.

The bad news about good news is that I am not entirely certain it does.

Bad News Generating Good Jokes (over the decades):

Henny Youngman:  “My wife said she wanted me to take her someplace she’s never been before.  So I took her to the kitchen.”

The Bad News:  “The Missus doesn’t cook.”

Janeane Garofalo:  (Re:  Slackers)  “Our parents worked hard so we wouldn’t have to.  And guess what?  We don’t.”

The Bad News:  “Our parents made us lazy.” 

Chris Rock:  “No white person would change places with any black person.  No white person would change places with me.  And I’m rich!”

The Bad News:  Self-explanatory.

On the other hand…

Good Good News Jokes?

Um………

Which explains my trepidations concerning this post.  The conundrum:

Good news.

Not funny.

Fear not that I may be tacking in a new positive direction; that is temperamentally impossible.  Consider this deviation from the norm a momentary blip in a virtually unblemished chronicle of hopelessness and despair.  That’s my meat and potatoes.  If I can’t complain, I have nothing to write about.   

My intention here is to cram my good news into a single post, so I can return to my habitual terrain, bewailing a world I can barely negotiate, with its preponderance of bad news which is simultaneously a comedic breeding ground.  Hand to God:  I’ll be negative tomorrow.  And pretty much from here on to the end of the line.

Besides, not everyone will consider the following examples good news, finding them discombobulating to the status quo.  Others will undoubtedly feel the opposite.  For precisely the same reason.

I discovered these four stories over a period of just two days, all of them reflecting the same – I do not believe it’s an exaggeration to say – revolution.

Common Denominator:  The People are taking control!

To some, the descriptive triggers an immediate “Pinko Alarm.”  But viewing it another way, this self-same phenomenon exemplifies the essence and vitality of capitalism – former monopolies, challenged by entrepreneurial innovation, fueling the very engine of capitalism – competition.

And with no further ado or extended setup, here they are:

1.  Uber  – A ride-offering transportation service that goes head-to-head with the taxi monopoly.  You call tell they’re succeeding.  The cab companies are smearing the heck out of ‘em!

2.  There’s a company that, for a reasonable fee, finds you the lowest price for the car you want to buy, liberating car buyers from the uncomfortable clutches of disreputable dealership personnel.

3.  An Investors’ Club arranges for fledgling entrepreneurs to obtain “seed money”, allowing these businesses to bypass conservative bankers and rapacious venture capitalists.

4.  You can now walk into a drugstore (instead of making a more expensive doctor’s appointment), have two drops of blood (instead of numerous test tubes full) drawn from your finger (rather than poking around feverishly for a vein), and you can have that blood automatedly tested (avoiding “Human Error”) for an extensive array of health issues and receive confidential delivery of the resultant information (which you can then decide independently what to do about, instead of doctors running the entire show, evaluating the “numbers” and prescribing ameliorating supplements you can conveniently purchase at the Front Desk.)

That’s four “game-changing” new business models.  And I bet there are more of them.  Barring the inevitable “snake-oil percentage”, these entrepreneurial breakthroughs provide consumers the opportunity of reduced cost and increased individual control.  (Plus a chance to stick it to the Big Boys.)

These innovative approaches will inevitably meet with resistance, because a lot of consumers are comfortable with things being the way they have always been, and because there are vast sums of money on the table, and the people who have traditionally been raking that money are less than enthusiastic about sharing it. 

It is, however, impossible to oppose this tsunami of progress.  Although throughout history, people futilely have tried.  (See:  “The Automobile – A Passing Fancy.”  And “Indoor Plumbing – Do we really want ‘that’ in our house?”)

If you can extend this list with other examples of democratizing new business models bringing traditional monoliths to their knees, feel free to pass them along.

And if you can do it comedically…

Extra credit. 

And a tip of the hat from a professional.   

Who was humblingly unable to pull it off.

"Sometimes I Steal"

To the best of my recollection, I have stolen things three times in my entire life.  Mathematically, that breaks down to one theft every twenty-three years, which, although perhaps higher than the national average – or perhaps lower – does not, in its sum total, seem to be an egregious amount of pilfering. 

I recall a childrearing expert discussing the issue of spanking saying, “If you make a decision never to spank your children, you will spank them just the right amount.”  Similarly, having personally determined never to steal, three deviations from that pledge seem to me to be “just the right amount.”  (Although that rationale is unlikely to hold up in a court of law, where in California at least, until recently, if you committed three criminal infractions – and not necessarily big ones – they shipped you off to the calaboose for life.)

I come by this inclination towards unlawfully taking stuff hereditarily.  My mother – albeit extremely rarely – also took stuff.  Once, while I watching. 

We were shopping at Macy’s Department Store in Manhattan, my mother replenishing my London-acquired wardrobe, which she – inexplicably to me – found sartorially unacceptable.  Mom picked up a belt, and we got in line to pay for it.  Suddenly, I saw her veer away from the queue and head straight for the door.

“Mom,” I inquired anxiously, “did you pay for that belt?”

“Not yet,” she replied, and casually exited into the street.

Okay?  So that’s where I got it from.

Back in London not long afterwards, I found myself at a similar criminatorial crossroads.

At a bookstand in the “Underground” waiting for a train, I picked up a paperback copy of what would become my favorite book of all time, Catch-22, and, as in the “belt situation”, I lined up to pay for it.  The line, however, was taking forever to move forward, and an electronic sign indicated that my subway was about to arrive.

So – just like Mom – I stepped away from the line, and when my train pulled into the station and the doors opened, purloined paperback in hand, I stepped into the nearest car, I found myself a seat, and I began reading.  (Believing, arguably incorrectly, that once you start reading a book, no matter how it arrived into your hands, it was yours.)

My second act of inappropriate appropriation also took place in London, during the same extended visit.  (Another possibly inaccurate belief:  If you “nick” something away from home, it doesn’t count.)

I have written about this before.  There’s this historic bookstore in London called Foyles, selling books, plays, possibly a stuffed Pooh bear.  I was in drama school at the time, and had virtually no money.  (Which is also, at least legally, no excuse for the behavior I am about to confess to.)

I selected five plays, slipping three of them into my large raincoat pocket and paying only for two of them.  (Believing they were too expensive and that the price of two plays equaled the legitimate value of five.  Well now, aren’t I the hotbed of parenthetical excuses!  None of which admittedly hold water.)

When I originally wrote about this, consequent to some technological wizardry I do not come close to understanding, my simple mentioning the name Foyles triggered an electronic reaction that led to somebody named “Foyle”, presumably a scion of the original owner, e-mailing me in response, calling me a “naughty boy” and inviting me to coffee on any subsequent visit to London. 

So hey… if the scion didn’t care…

Maybe I should not even count that one.

Lastly, approximately fifteen years later, when I was living in Los Angeles – so you see, I have an unblemished record in Canada – being an extremely slow writer, I was required to work on the weekend, searching for ways of making some Best of the West episode or other funnier.

My boss, Ed. Weinberger, as far as I knew, never worked on the weekends.  Ed. had fun on the weekends.  Partly because he was in charge, and partly because he was a considerably speedier writer.  My resentment bubbled up regardless.  The man was enjoying himself, and I was stuck there in the office.

So…

During a break in my onerous sweatshop drudgery, I put down my pen, climbed the stairs to Ed.’s office, stepped surreptitiously inside, went over to the hand-carved humidor where he stored his prodigious stash…

And I took a cigar. 

I must confess that this “cigar rustling” took place on more than one occasion.  But I bunch those experiences together, the way, when I purchase three small bottles of Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice (because they do not have the big bottles in stock), I count them as a single item when I am patronizing the “Six Items Or Less” “check-out” line. 

It’s juice. 

It’s cigars.

I have – I swear – stolen nothing since the early 1980’s.  So I appear to be cured of my affliction.  My hand will occasionally dart out for things – shiny trinkets and colorful souvenirs – but that’s more like a reflex.  Or an effort to stay sharp.  Only time will tell which.

Still, those three inexcusable misbehaviors (if you consider the bunched-together cigar-nabbings one misbehavior) continued to weigh heavily on my conscience.  An unburdening was undeniably overdue. 

At this “fresh start” juncture of a brand new year…

I kind of thought to myself,

“Why not today?”

"What They Taught Me When I Was Nine"

We used to sing this at camp - a song of tolerance and respect for those we disagree with, around the world, and also at home.  The words went something - actually exactly - like this:

I'm proud to be me, but I also see

You're just as proud to be you.

We may look at things a bit differently

But lots of good people do.

It's just human nature

So why should I hate ya

For being as human as I.

We'll take and we'll give

And we'll live and let let

And we'll all get along if we try.

I'm proud to be me, but I also see

You're just as proud to be you - it's true - 

You're just as proud to be you.

I cannot tell others what to do.  But this year's personal resolution is to try and remember this song.

Happy New Year.

Hopefully the best ever for the world.

And now, I shall try to enjoy the Bowl Games, played by college teams I don't care about.