Category: humor

CHUD!

[This post is participating in M.A. Peel’s Comedy Blog-a-thon.]

It may be immodest of me to identify, as my “purest comedic moment,” one that I helped to create. But when I try to think of one that I merely experienced, there are a thousand different ones vying for the top spot. On the other hand, of my own comedy there was a single moment that stands above the rest.

As I mentioned a few months ago, some friends and I won our ninth grade talent show with a comic act called “The Epiphany County Choir.” Wearing plaid flannel shirts, bad haircuts, and dumbfounded expressions, we pretended to be country bumpkins from Nebraska newly arrived in the Big Apple. We sang “When it’s hog-calling time in Nebraska” to much laughter and applause.

A short time later, through some connections of Chuck’s as I recall, we got a gig performing our Epiphany County Choir act in front of a studio audience on a local cable-access show. We arrived at the studio early on a Saturday morning excited and nervous, chatted a bit with the station manager, and then were shown onto the stage in front of our audience: a class of 2nd-graders from Harlem.

The show must go on. We gamely performed “Hog Calling Time” in character, but to say our humor was lost on them is giving too much credit to the connotative powers of the word “lost.” We left the stage and huddled in the waiting room with the station manager and the schoolteacher, who registered her displeasure at the choice of entertainment for her charges. She wanted to know if we had anything more age-appropriate to perform for her kids. Chuck, apparently interpreting this to mean “race-appropriate,” indelicately suggested, “We do know the theme song from The Jeffersons.”

Because the world is funny, today Chuck is a professional diplomat.

Embarrassing at the time, that episode is funny in hindsight, and Chuck has gotten his share of ribbing for his gaffe, but that wasn’t my purest comedic moment. Read on.

We reprised our Epiphany County Choir act the following year to reasonable acclaim, with about twenty minutes of new material. The year after that we decided to stage our own hour-long show: “The Epiphany County Choir Home-For-Christmas Television Special” (in April).

Feeling we hadn’t sufficiently promoted the show in advance, we stood outside the entrance to our school on show day, lined up in our flannel shirts and in character, repeating the following in unison over and over and over for about forty-five minutes as students arrived for classes: “Come to the Epiphany County Choir Home-For-Christmas Television Special, 11:30 in the auditorium for free! Come to the Epiphany County Choir Home-For-Christmas Television Special, 11:30 in the auditorium for free! Come to the Epiphany County Choir Home-For-Christmas Television Special, 11:30 in the auditorium for free!” You try it, see how long you can keep it up.

The show included a performance of “Silver Bells” on a set of handbells; an Andy-Kaufman-style pantomime to a recording of “So Long, Farewell” from The Sound of Music; an a capella rendition of the theme music from The Odd Couple; an audience “sing-along” consisting of nothing but hand-clapping; and more. We were a hit; the crowd loved us.

But the coup de grace was the “Chud game.” Steve set the stage with a few minutes of (intentionally) bad stand-up about Chud, the neighboring county to Epiphany. “They call themselves Chuddites over there,” he told the audience with barely suppressed mirth, “but we just call ’em Chuds!” (Whereupon we in the Choir crack up.) There followed several supposedly disparaging Chud jokes — e.g., “How many Chuds does it take to screw in a light bulb? Fifteen!” — and then our helpers distributed Chud cards to the audience members.

The night before, we had drawn up hundreds of Chud cards by hand. These were Bingo cards, but with four columns apiece, labeled C, H, U, and D. Each card was different, just like real Bingo cards, but they were all rigged to win simultaneously when we called the four prearranged “Chud numbers.” I should mention that this was more than a year before “C.H.U.D.” stood for Cannibalistic, Humanoid Underground Dwellers.

After the Chud cards were distributed, Steve announced that the winner would receive a prize. The prize was beef jerky. A few days earlier, Andrew and I had gone to a snack-food wholesaler to buy enough beef jerky for the whole audience.

I cranked the handle of a genuine Bingo cage we had secured from somewhere, and I handed the chosen numbers to Steve one at a time. Although he made a big show of trying to read the numbers off the balls, of course he didn’t actually; instead he announced the numbers we had arranged the night before. “C-8!” “U-32!” “D-49!” By the third number it was obvious to the audience what we were up to and they began laughing and clamoring. Steve threw an unrehearsed curveball, announcing a number we hadn’t planned, and I was momentarily furious with him, worried that someone might prematurely win the game — but no, he succeeded in building a little suspense.

When he finally announced, “H-18!” the entire audience jumped to its feet and roared, “CHUD!” in unison. Somewhere there is video footage of me, Steve, and the others in the Choir with perfectly astonished looks on our faces as the crowd dissolved into screaming laughter. (We never could have pulled it off without cracking up ourselves if we hadn’t stayed awake the entire night before, preparing the show and rehearsing, making ourselves weary and slightly sick from too much beef jerky.) In my wildest dreams I could not have imagined causing such merriment or producing such a response. It was my purest comedic moment.

Target acquired

We didn’t go to see the Blue Angels on Saturday as originally planned. Too much else to do around the house, and Archer and I were both still recovering from being sick earlier in the week. Going into the city to see the Blue Angels is a major production, between the parking hassles and the crowds. We just weren’t up to it. Plus we were in the middle of a major reorganization of the house, with the kids graduating from toddler beds to bunk beds!

On Sunday, the last day of Fleet Week, we planned to skip the Blue Angels again for the same reasons. But we ate lunch out, and after we finished and emerged into the sunshine, we marveled (knowingly) at the gorgeous weather and decided on the spur of the moment to try to catch what glimpses we could of the air show.

It was already 2:15 and the show was probably already in progress. We knew we had no hope of parking anywhere, but we could at least drive back and forth over the Golden Gate Bridge and see a little bit of the performance from that vantage point. And that’s exactly what we did. Here and there we got brief, distant looks at close-formation flying over San Francisco Bay, heart-stopping dives toward the water, and multi-colored smoke-trail designs. Even at a distance, and even without the spine-rattling flyby engine roar, it was cool, if a bit of a letdown. We promised ourselves not to miss them again next year.

For the next fifteen minutes we drove back up 101 to go home. Jonah dozed. We got off the freeway, navigated the usual maze of local streets, and rode up the middle of the little valley where our house sits. Surrounded by hills on three sides, a lot of the sky is blocked from view.

And yet! We parked the car in the driveway, shook Jonah awake, gathered lunch leftovers and other items from the car, closed the doors, and stumbled lazily up our front steps, when we abruptly heard a growing, almighty roar. We all looked up, and an instant later were treated to the dazzling spectacle of all six Blue Angels appearing over the hill to our west! They screamed directly overhead in a tight delta formation, disappearing a moment later behind the hills to the east.

They followed us home! The uncanny timing and positioning of the flyby can mean only one thing: the Navy knows I’m onto them.

More evidence for the conspiracy

You know what was in yesterday’s weather forecast? Rain. You know what actually happened? It was a gorgeous day. In fact I had three people separately comment to me on the gloriousness of the weather yesterday, which is a couple of standard deviations from the usual number of people who make such comments to me on any particular glorious day.

It’s would have been surprising — if I didn’t already know the score. You see, it’s Fleet Week again.

Don’t you know that slapstick is DEAD?!

[This post is participating in the Slapstick Blog-a-thon.]

“Don’t you know that slapstick is DEAD?!” hollers movie-studio honcho Sid Caesar to washed-up director Mel Brooks near the beginning of Silent Movie (as Brooks is pitching the idea of a silent movie to Caesar). He promptly topples backward into his office chair, which flips him onto his back and inexplicably rockets him across the room, colliding with the wall.

At ages four and two, my kids were already movie buffs, both able to devote their attention to a full-length movie and speak intelligently about the stories and the characters. Jonah, age four, exhibited enormous sensitivity, mirroring the emotions of the characters on the screen — joy, sorrow, fear, excitement. Archer, age two, hadn’t reached that milestone. He watched and enjoyed movies without becoming emotionally involved.

One day I put on Silent Movie and read the title cards aloud for them (making a few judicious edits along the way). I could tell the boys were enjoying it, but Archer was impassive as ever…

…until the elevator scene. Mel Brooks and Dom Deluise board an elevator at the hospital to visit Sid Caesar, but their friend Marty Feldman — distracted by a toy airplane — misses it. There are six elevators, so he waits for the next one. When it opens, he is prevented from entering by an improbable crush of exiting passengers. When the next elevator comes, the doors close almost immediately and he collides with them. The same happens with the next elevator, and the next. Soon he is ricocheting between the elevator doors like a pinball.

Archer started laughing and laughing. Jonah had been only mildly amused but Archer’s infectious giggle got him going, and then me too. Helpless with mirth, we missed much of the next minute or two of the movie.

Archer’s three and a half now and plenty else has made him laugh or worry or cheer in the movies he’s watched. But Silent Movie was the first one to get a genuine reaction out of him. For him, slapstick definitely wasn’t dead.

Penis

Jonah has been doing a great job learning to read, but until now we haven’t spent much time on writing. He can write his name and a few other words (suitable for use in birthday cards), and recently, in conjunction with his beginning kindergarten, we’ve started encouraging general-purpose word-writing.

This morning at breakfast at the Bayside Cafe, Jonah and Archer got the usual kids’ placemats with crayons. After coloring the picture on the front of his placemat, Jonah flipped it over and started doodling on the back. We asked him to write a word. At random he wrote the letter B, then, trying to think of what begins with B, finished the word BEE. We gave a little cheer and I drew a picture of a bee next to his word. “Any word you write,” I told him, “I’ll draw a picture of it.”

We asked him to write another word. At random he wrote the letter P. Casting about for a word that starts with P, he shouted, “Pee!” (By analogy with “Bee,” I suppose.) Then, more jubilantly, “Penis!”

Carefully sounding it out, Jonah wrote the word on his placemat, and then started chanting, “Penis! Penis!” before we shushed him.

(Fortunately, the family seated at the next table was sympathetic, having twin boys who were Jonah’s age. Amazingly, the mom of that family recognized us when we came in: back in the ’90’s, long before kids, she and her dogs frequented the same local dog park as Andrea and I did with Alex.)

Jonah held me to my word and bade me draw a penis peeing. Here are his words, his doodles, and my dubious artwork. (The bee that I drew is obscured by later scribbles.)

Dishwasher Knife Bread

For a couple of years now, Jonah and Archer almost always have gotten bathed together, and I’m the one who does the bathing (though Jonah now appears to be outgrowing that and is starting to bathe himself). In a tandem bath it is necessary to choose who will get washed first while the other plays with bath toys. They’d both rather play with toys, so we needed a way to choose fairly. I taught them many months ago about Rock Paper Scissors and for a while we used that, but one day Jonah decided he was tired of that game and invented his own variation: Dishwasher Knife Bread. As he explained it:

Dishwasher washes knife.
Knife cuts bread.
(After some thought) bread covers dishwasher.

Once we had Dishwasher Knife Bread in our roshambo arsenal, we faced a new choice at bath time: which game to use for choosing who got washed first, Rock Paper Scissors or Dishwasher Knife Bread? When the kids couldn’t agree on that, a coin toss settled it — but then, which game should be heads and which should be tails…?

Made everyone laugh

Among the very earliest artifacts available for Star Trek fans to own was the book, The Making of Star Trek, by Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, and I read it in the 70’s.

One anecdote that I remember from that book had to do with production of the original pilot episode, “The Cage.” In one scene, the actress Susan Oliver dances as a seductive “Orion slave girl,” covered from head to foot in green body makeup. The optical lab that processed the film footage from those scenes believed they had screwed up — and they color-corrected Oliver back to her normal skin tone! As I recall the story, this happened two or three times before the studio finally sent explicit instructions to the lab and they got it right.

I thought of this story when I learned from my dad a few weeks ago that someone made an unwanted “correction” to my mom’s cemetery headstone (on the proof that he saw). As long as I knew her, my mom jokingly maintained at each birthday that she was turning 29 (a source of extra hilarity when I “passed” her in age). So we put it in her epitaph, since with my mom, humor was paramount. But someone saw fit to change it to 73, which is correct only in a narrow-minded arithmetical sense — pah.

Fortunately we were able to correct it before production of the real headstone, which is newly erected.

Ten like Ken

As this blog approaches its first anniversary, the proportion of posts regarding blogging inspiration Ken Jennings has dwindled considerably, which is as it should be, of course. But I’m still a regular reader of his and could not let this latest coincidence go unremarked: just a few days before our beloved — and incredibly aged — dog Alex went to her reward, Ken wrote about his own dog’s age.

For those keeping track, this is ten points of similarity between me and Ken which, if we were talking about fingerprints, is almost good enough for a conviction.