brushfire"This, yes, this, it was always like this." -Stanley Koehler
REFLECTIONS OF AN EMPTY NESTER
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Do people tell jokes anymore?
I don't mean the kind you share on Facebook. I mean jokes as an oral tradition, with half the pleasure coming from the art of telling them, the timing and delivery of the punch line. As a child, we spent hours gathered in our family living room in the evening, telling joke after joke. It didn't matter if we'd heard it before; sometimes that was even better. So many sentences started with: “Tell the one about...” My father was a master joke teller. For years, it was part of our nighttime routine. He would sit at the edge of my bed when tucking me in and tell me a joke. A particular favorite ended with: “And if possible, I'll even find a banana for your monkey.” It's only funny if you've heard the rather lengthy story leading up to the punch line, but it involves a mother on a train infuriated because another passenger insulted her baby, followed by the train conductor's attempts to mollify her. One recent morning, my brother and I exchanged our father's punch lines via text. I was sitting in my kitchen in Michigan. He was at his home in Baltimore. “From here, Doc?” “Good, though.” “Had to. Dead, you know.” This last has to be told with a British accent. The line leading up to it is: “So sorry, old chap. Heard you buried your wife.” In the first, a patient responds to a doctor's instructions to deposit a urine specimen in one of the vials on the counter across the room. You don't have to hear the full joke anymore; just the punch line is enough to elicit that light feeling in your chest, even if you don't laugh out loud. Here's a family favorite: “I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have only six months to live.” “I think I'll need a second opinion, Doc.” “OK, you're ugly, too.” The jokes were always clean. If the original version included a salty word or two, my father would replace it with something PG-rated. They were never offensive and we never laughed at anyone’s expense. He loved the one- or two-liner, but he also enjoyed the occasional shaggy dog story. I remember him telling us the actual shaggy dog story — a long drawn-out tale of a person's search to fulfill a request for a shaggy dog. You know the punch line, of course, when the long sought-after dog, after much effort, expense and travel across the globe, is finally delivered: “Not that shaggy.” He also loved coming up with his own jokes. There was one about absence making the heart grow fonder. It involved the liqueur absinthe, an adult male deer — not a stag, but a hart — the actor Henry Fonda and a misplaced comma. It never really made sense — “Absinthe makes the hart grow, Fonda” — but he worked awfully hard on it. Sometimes we would laugh just to make him stop. A one-liner he was particularly proud of fell into his lap. He took part in a hike organized by the English department at his university. One of the professors, an annoying fellow named Max, didn't accompany them on the hike, giving others the opportunity to complain about him. “This has become quite the anti-Max climb,” my father quipped. He enjoyed nothing more than a good repartee or sparring of wits. He appreciated other people's humor as much if not more than his own and was always quick with a laugh. He was a loyal Johnny Carson fan and always stayed up late for his monologue. His favorite comedian was Pat Paulsen and he often imitated his dry delivery of the line: "Picky, picky, picky." Some of my childhood favorites were tales from his own youth. There was the little girl who stomped her foot and said, “I'm sick, sick, sick of playing house!” There was the little boy looking out his classroom window. “Hey Teach, look at the boid!” “That's not a boid, Robert, it's a bird.” “That's funny. Choips like a boid.” There were boyhood summers spent in Maine at a place called Max's Camp. Max would make breakfast for the campers. He would ask each how they wanted their eggs. After taking individual orders of two eggs over easy, one egg sunny-side up, two poached eggs — you get the idea — he would produce scrambled eggs all around. One of my father's favorite stories was about the campers taking turns cooking. The rule was you would cook until somebody complained. People wised up, keeping their mouths shut even if the food was terrible. As a result, one guy got stuck cooking so long he had finally had it. He found several cow pies in a nearby pasture and fried them up in a pan over the campfire for dinner. The first camper to take a bite looked up. “Hey, this tastes like cow dung!” (Another word would have been funnier, but remember, my father always kept it clean.) The camper looked back down at his plate and resumed eating. “Good, though.”
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Mary Anne BrushJournalist, fiction writer, wife and mother |