At 6:30 this morning I woke up to
the cries of my bathroom-imprisoned Freakshow Cat wanting breakfast. Which
got me to thinking: I wonder if I can
get an alarm clock with that sound?
Which led me to: Where did I get my
alarm clock from? And then: How
in the hell has the goddamn AA battery
in that alarm clock lasted for more than
5 years? Which, in turn, led me to:
Is Milton Berle funny or does he just
get sympathy laughs because he's older
than crud? Yeah well, sorry. My
brain-train tends to jump the tracks a
bit at o' dark thirty in the morning.
So as I peeled out the crust in my
left eye, the question arose: What is funny and what isn't? Well, spelling
"funny" with 3 n's notwithstanding, as a
general rule much of the shit I see,
read, and hear that's supposed to be
humorous isn't.
For example, I don't find Dennis
Miller Live funny, but The Larry
Sanders Show just kills me. John
Candy? Flat. Robin Williams? Genius.
Dave Barry produces only mild chuckles,
yet Jim Bouton's Ball Four had me
going non-stop. I prefer the Monty
Python gang, Jim Carey, and Mr. Bean
over The Three Stooges, Chris
Rock, and Andy Kaufman. Don and Mike
kick Howard Stern's ass. And I can
watch a Little Rascals marathon
for hours, but Friends has taken
such a nosedive that I'd rather watch
SpongeBob SquarePants (which is
the best cartoon on television since
Heckle and Jeckle).
Half of the comedy out there
is just media-produced massive-market
drivel compared to what's truly funny.
The real source of comedy lies in The
Everyday (Hey, the old brain was heatin'
up). Trust me, everything is funny. In
case you didn't catch that, I said everything. Yeah, yeah, I know,
some humorists/comedians have caught on
to the ironies of The Everyday, but not
enough people see the humor in embalming
fluid, my plastic souvenir ValuJet cup,
or Dick Vermeil crying at every single
press conference (Mr. Brain was
jiggling in his juices now). Or
Pro-Lifers who support capital
punishment, bologna, the Popemobile, a
very bad sunburn, or one of my employees
simply mailing in his W2's without a
1040 form in an attempt to get his
refund (Well, okay, that last one's
obviously funny. I mean, if it was that
easy, why doesn't CVS just mail the W2's
straight to the IRS?).
So let's test this great
theory of Comedy In The Everyday. Pick
something, pick anything (Go brain! Go
brain!). Object, person, idea, noun,
belief, thing, story, whatever.
Anything. C'mon, I'm cocky. I can find
the humor in it. Alright, I'll pick
something out of the air. Let's see,
how about a park bench? What's so funny
about that, huh?………
Um. Hey, did you know it's 6:30 in
the morning? I should be sleeping, not
doing all this thinking.
