TWICE AS GOOD

The alarm at my bedside goes off at 6:15 but it’s purpose is not so much to wake me but to announce the time. I wake up several times beginning around 4:30, maybe later, then periodically until I rise which could  be, rarely but just the same, as late as 9:00 a.m. The onset of consciousness is unconvincing, sort of like drizzle before it rains. I can remember when raising up on my elbow and swinging my legs over the side required a command, a conscious impulse but now-days they go on autopilot. Sitting or standing there, whichever, I concede that my body has acted without permission and of necessity, we must join forces. It won’t do any more by itself and I can’t go anywhere without it. By the time I’ve completed my wake-up duties I’m on my way to the kitchen. I keep thinking I should put the coffee pot on a timer so all I have to do is pour but convenience is overrated. I like the routine of brewing my morning ration, hearing a human voice on the radio. It’s more likely there will be good weather on any particular day than good news on the radio but I listen just the same. 

This morning, after detailing both natural and political disasters the lady and a well known stand-up comic plied their humor to the dangers and pitfalls of holiday, family get togethers. Somebody thought humor would be appreciated after the news. They laughed a lot but I didn’t. In my lifetime I’m afraid humor has been rejiggered to sell air time at the audience’s expense and the audience has been rejiggered to laugh on cue. Entertainers tell their unfunny stories with sharpened timing, with a calculated pause every 12-15 seconds. Audiences know to laugh at the pause even if they don’t get it. Humor has always come at the expense of someone else, their blunders or misfortune or out of some irony that begs the imagination to go along. I suppose it’s not that different than when Rodney Dangerfield gave an example of his wife’s craziness, “Take my wife;” then a pause, “Please, take my wife.” Oh, it’s a play on words, not an example, it’s a plea: laugh-laugh. I have to admit my lack of enthusiasm is about me more than some trendy stroke of humor. 

Yesterday I helped celebrate birthday #80 for a coffee-clutch friend. We passed all the birthday cards around, many if not most alluded to body parts and their disfunction; clever but not funny. Then there was one with simple text only; no insulting caricatures or brazen snubs. You had to read it. It went, “I am twice as good with math as half the people my age and I can tell you this; you look twice as good as  half the people who are twice your age.”  I heard myself laughing before I thought about funny. I know, it says more about old age than about humor but you have to work with what you’ve got. I thought Tommy Smothers was funny; I still do. He made fun of himself. He could get a laugh just raising his eyebrows and looking foolish. When he and his straight man brother Dick made music, it was real music. When they made funny there was no pause, no prompt to  laugh. They just kept on  through the laughter with more nonsense. He is 81, still alive, laughing all the way to the bank. “But I can tell you this; You look twice as good as half the people twice your age.”