You Don’t Bring me Flowers, Anymore!

May 14, 2012December 11, 2023 Rilaly2 Comments

“You’ll make it work in the end,” an adult baby said with a hand on his wife’s shoulder, as she pined over their financial affairs, “you always do.”

The wife recognized the compliment for what it was in the moment, but the full import of the gesture failed to register with her at the time. She had no idea, for example, that her husband would not be participating in the sacrifices needed to “make it work out in the end,” unless she was adamant, and she could be adamant. Even when she was adamant with detailed instructions, he would alter his lifestyle for only as long as he deemed necessary to get over what she declared their dire financial state.

The adult baby intended the compliment to serve as a standalone, a statement of appreciation for his wife’s abilities. He wasn’t lying, and he had no ulterior motives. It marveled him how she did it, and he wanted her to know he would stand by her, as long her findings didn’t affect his preferred lifestyle in the long term.

The wife did have an excellent record when it came to making their lives work, and he wanted her to know that he recognized that. Her record of achievements in this regard did not begin and end with finances however. The family made sacrifices to offset his irresponsible behavior, and she informed him of the sacrifices they needed to make to offset his actions. He saw the effort she put forth, and he was aware of the idea that his family needed to sacrifice, but he viewed it from third-party perspective.

Adult babies are like small children playing with toys in the living room. Neither party expects children to clean up after themselves. Children simply don’t put that much thought into it. If no one instructs them to pick up their mess and no one enforces the practice to the point of making it the child’s habit, the idea of cleaning up doesn’t enter their purview. They play as much as they want, then, without any effort or sacrifice on their part, the area is clean. They won’t even notice that the area is clean, when they return to it, it just is. It always is.

Adult babies hear about financial problems, but like those mysteriously disappearing toys on the floor, they hear about these financial pile-ups so often that even adamant tirades go in one ear and out the other. They know everyone in the family must make sacrifices, and they might even echo the wife’s sentiment to the children, but no one knows how these blips end. They just do. She probably has something to do with it, and we should congratulate her just in case.

The wife might have to work some overtime and even take on a third job to keep food on the table, but no one ever starves. He might not have much involvement in the lives of his children, but they get the attention they need. All he knows is that the home is always sound, so sound that he can eat his tortilla chips and watch his shows in peace. The little woman may harp, and she might nag a little, but she gets over it once she’s had her say. She always does, and to keep a happy home, he knows that he has to let her have her say.

If he wants to continue doing what he wants to do, he will not only have to endure those occasional rants, he will respond with a line that suggests that the woman is always right. A nice “Yes dear!” sprinkled into those conversations makes the clocks run on time, balances the books, and allows him to live the life he’s always wanted.

The adult baby has no powers of reflection. His woman might adamantly ask that he look around on occasion, but she’s not adamant very often. If she was adamant more often, he probably wouldn’t be an adult baby, for the adult baby species would be on the endangered list were it not for its enablers.

***

“I used to love getting flowers,” the wife named Sheila confessed, “until I found out how much I was going to have to pay for them.”

Sheila’s ex-husband, Craig, used to bring her flowers. He bought flowers for her when they dated, and he continued to buy her flowers long after they agreed to tie the knot. Craig loved Sheila, and he didn’t want to be an ordinary man who brought a few roses home to the woman he loved. He bought flowers. The rooms of flowers he bought and choreographed made cinematic statements of how much one man can love a woman, and he did so regardless of the effect it had on their financial statements.

“How can you put a price on love?” Craig would ask when she interrogated him.

As far as finances were concerned, Craig would be the first to tell you that he knew little to nothing. “The wife takes care of all that,” Craig said on one occasion, “and she can be a real drill sergeant. That woman has a gift for turning symbols of love and romance into economic principles. She can be so anal-retentive, like that character on the show Friends. Monica Geller. That’s what we call her,” he added with a laugh.

“Money is her big topic,” Craig said when he talked about how she was always harping on him.

As is often the case when one person complains about another, Craig refrained from offering any of the details from Sheila’s side of the argument, for those details might have revealed the substance of her argument. Craig did not say anything about how Sheila complained about his spending habits. He didn’t acknowledge her complaint that he signed up for multiple credit cards without telling her. He also would not repeat Sheila’s line, “You spend money like a child learning the power of money for the first time, and what’s worse is you’ve done so for so long that it’s obvious that you are incapable of gauging the consequences of your actions.”

“I made the money she complains so much about,” Craig said to conclude his rant. “And I’m a grown-ass man who worked as hard as any man I know. I don’t know who she thinks she is, always trying to tell me how to live?”

As with most adult babies, Craig lived by his own set of rules and standards. As far as he was concerned, no one –not even his beloved wife– was going to tell him how to spend the money he earned. He confessed that he might have had some problems with impulse control, “But who the hell doesn’t?” he asked. Spending money and purchasing things gave Craig a sense of identity he couldn’t explain. He confessed that purchasing products gave him a rush.

“You’re selfish,” Sheila said the day she found evidence of yet another one of Craig’s out of control spending sprees, evidence he usually hid better. “You’re the most selfish person I’ve ever met.”

“Only to you guys,” Sheila said, quoting Craig’s reply.

Craig was referring to Sheila and their two daughters when he said, ‘only to you guys’. We all say such things in the heat of the moment. If someone accuses us of something, we defend ourselves, and most of the things we say are impulsive, knee-jerk responses to an accusation. We don’t evaluate how our responses might be perceived, and we don’t calculate the public perception.

Craig apparently said this without reflection, and to remind her that he was not a bad guy. “People love me,” he added, assessing his character via perceived public opinion. “While I might seem a little self-involved when it comes to you three, I’m not a bad guy. I know better. I help people Sheila. Your opinion doesn’t extend beyond these four walls, so don’t try to tell me that you know who I am.”

‘But those three should be the most important people to you,’ someone outside his family might argue. ‘The perceptions of the common people you encounter in your daily life, on the job, shouldn’t be half as important to you as those of your family.’

These things we say, in the heat of the moment, reveal what we believe our image should be, and what we believe others see in us or what they should see. As far as we’re concerned, those aren’t lies, fabrications, or exaggerations. We might step on a landmine on occasion that exposes our failure to mature in all the ways our peers have, but, hell, everyone makes missteps.

While not all adult babies are male, the majority of the demographic consists of over-nurtured, 40-something males who are unable or unwilling, to shake the leash of the people who control them. Women have reminded them of the need to share, that they need to eat their peas, and that they need to clean up their own messes, but at some point, the adult baby becomes fed up with it. Women have set their clocks, raised their children, and handled the more inconsequential matters for most of their lives, while they did what was necessary to provide. Even though their wives have had to make sacrifices and they’ve done whatever was necessary to supplement the family income, the adult babies argue:

“I’m the one who’s been clocking in and out for decades, without complaint, and now you’re asking me to do more? Where does it all end?”

“I’m not asking you to do more,” the wife counters, “I’m asking you to do less. I’m asking you to stop doing what you’re doing. You’re making my job impossible.”

“Women have it so good,” the adult baby says. “They get to sit home and watch their shows, while the man goes to work and caters to the whims of a boss. Whatever happened to the idea that the man is the king of the castle?”

If the man wants a new motorized vehicle that only travels on water, he gets it, even if he lives in a land-locked state that requires the vessel to sit in a high-priced storage unit 364 days a year. If the man wants a leaf blower that has a high-powered engine, when his is working just fine, he gets it, and if the man wants the electronic gadget or device, that one of his friends has, he gets it. The woman is in charge of the accounting, and she does what she can to balance the books in the wake of his attempts to indulge his desires. “I don’t know how she does it,” the adult baby says if his friends ask how he can afford such luxuries, “but she always makes it work out in the end.”

Experts might have informed Craig that his current predicament resulted from a cycle of dependency, but Craig probably would’ve dismissed that as daytime talk show gibberish. He was unaware of his role in the matter, and he was naïve to the fact that as soon as the first eighteen years of his cycle of dependency ended, he married a woman, straight out of college, who reminded him of his mother. He was not cognizant of the fact that the responsibility for his welfare transferred from a mother who coddled him to the wife tasked with doing the same.

Craig was crazy in college. He “got drunk” in a manner that suggested he was trying to make up for the time he spent acquiescing to his beloved mother’s request that he act more responsible. He also engaged in a number of sexual liaisons, until he met the good woman that could cook like his good old ma’. Craig never lived alone. He didn’t encounter the pratfalls of being irresponsible in those years, and he never learned the level of freedom that allows one to succeed and fail. Craig was thus deprived the lessons that young people learn during these years and carry with them throughout life.

Even when we marry, buy a house, and have kids, there is that constant need to relive the crazy, college years when we were old enough to know the complexities inherent in adulthood, but young enough to shrug off the consequences of ignoring them. Back then, we thought we were equipped and entitled to show all those who mattered that we were no longer children, back when we were young enough to shrug off the ramifications that come with continuing to live like them. In our adult years, we flexed the muscles of independent living in college, all while our parents footed the bills. We were in a zone toddling between adulthood and childhood that allowed us the freedom to form an identity without any concerns for the responsibilities that might help better form it.

Few, however, have the resources to make those crazy college year last well into adulthood, and the lack thereof requires most to make choices no one wants to make. We work hard to put ourselves in a comfortable position in life. We kowtow to bosses, and we hold our tongue when our peers have said things with which we disagree. We try to build an empire that will allow us to do most of what we want, but some others who just do it. That’s the gist of their answers to the curious who question how they’re able to afford such luxuries on their salary, with two kids, “Like Nike says, you just do it.”

Most full-fledged adults know the despair that results from crushing debt, and they learn to fight off the impulses and temptation that could drive them to shut-offs, red box “past-due” notices, and shameful credit ratings. We’ve all made our share of mistakes. We’ve all been broke at one time in our lives, and we all know the horrible feeling of not having as much money as someone else, but we’ve all come to terms with bitter reality that the good times of living like a child ends. For some of us, this is a long, painful process. Others might never have to face these inevitable truths because others make it all work out for them.

The women in the lives of the adult baby learn to do everything they can to avoid leaving them to their own devices. As a result, the babies don’t experience embarrassment, aren’t required to deal with inadequacies, and ever fail. They are good boys and good sons that become good and honest men, but they are the half of those relationships rarely held to account for their failings.

“I never spent us into unmanageable debt,” Craig said. It was his best defense, for in those moments when the family had to sacrifice Craig decided to control his spending, in the short-term. He refrained from purchasing big, luxurious items when the family budget hovered near ground zero. He even felt some guilt for the role he may have played in the familial sacrifices, albeit only in the short term. To rectify whatever damage he may have caused, Craig bought his wife flowers, but he didn’t just buy her flowers. He made his apologies cinematic.

“You can’t buy me flowers anymore!” Sheila shrieked, “We’re broke!” Sheila would later say she felt bad about the times she yelled at him like that, because she knew he meant well. She said he bought her flowers, because she used to love flowers. “They used to be one of my guilty pleasures,” she said, “until I realized how much I was going to have to pay for them.”

In the wake of their divorce, Craig entered the house to collect those prized belongings of his not listed in the decree. Craig also considered this his opportunity to tell us his side of the story. He answered all of the questions posed, as listed above, and he pointed out the days when he acted “all growed up” to counter Sheila’s claims. Craig also provided us a list of the purchases he didn’t make, because he knew the family couldn’t afford it to counter Sheila’s claim that he was such a spendaholic. He added that that list was not comprehensive.

Who does that? Who submits a list of purchases they didn’t make in defense of their financial responsibility? If a member of his defense did such a thing, the judge might privately advise that Craig fire his lawyers. That judge would know that we, the jury, would consider Craig’s list as noteworthy because it details how rare, to the point of memorable, it was to Craig that he didn’t impulsively buy something he wanted.

As Craig worked his way through the list, collecting all of the trivial items he did purchase impulsively, we were reminded Craig of one of his favorite sayings, “Money is power! Money is freedom!

“Was I saint in our marriage?” Craig continued, as we loaded his final belongings into the moving van. “I was not, but I was not an idiot. We always found a way to made it work. Somehow or another, she always made it work in the end.”

As Craig ran back and forth from his car, we couldn’t help avoid thinking he slipped up in the second sentence saying she as opposed to we in the second sentence. He did that, that was Craig, we thought as he slipped a final bouquet of dead roses into a living room now full of dead roses to complete what he considered a final cinematic statement to his now ex-wife.

The Notification that Should be Placed Outside Every Karaoke Bar

April 17, 2012November 14, 2012 RilalyLeave a comment

10) There are no A&R (Artists and Repertoire) men in the audience tonight. It’s just a bunch of nobodies listening to you, so sing your song and get off the stage.

9) Don’t feel your way through a song. There’s nothing we hate more than watching some fool “feel” their way through a song. Feeling your way through a song involves closing your eyes to spiritually feel your way through a song, it involves swaying, dropping your head emphatically when a crescendo hits, rhythmically dropping the mic between verses, and smiling or waving at people in the audience in the manner Crystal Gayle would. You’re not Crystal Gale, and there are no A&R men from any major record labels in the audience. Just sing your song and get off the stage.

8) Don’t suck if you sing. We’re not talking about you marginally talented people that are only on stage for fun. We’re talking about the inebriated, tone deaf people that attempt to overcompensate for their inability to sing by yelling and screeching their way through lyrics. You’re not Axl Rose or Kurt Cobain. There’s nothing to be gained by finding an octave that would cause a dog to bash its head into a wall.

7) Stop grading people when you’re in the audience. It’s all right to laugh at them. That’s what they’re there for. If you’re doing this from a point of superiority, however, you may need to reexamine your life for just a moment. You may have a mutual respect society built up at this bar, based on the fact that you can do a mean Bohemian Rhapsody, but remember that the people who have that appreciation for your talent will no longer feel that way when the bartender says last call.

6) Karaoke is not an art form. Most of you who will sing tonight have no artistic abilities. I don’t care what American Idol and The Voice have done for this novelty, it is not artistic. Most of you who will sing tonight cannot read music, much less write it. We’ve all had people compliment us on our karaoke abilities, and we’ve all had that urge to consider it an artistic achievement. Fight that urge. Sing your song. Have fun. Get off the stage. We’re all pretending here tonight.

5) No matter how much you drink, nobody cares what you think. You know nothing about the music business, so quit pretending like you know talent when you see it. You will see some good singers up on stage tonight, and you will see some bad ones. There is very little discrepancy between the two. No one cares that you can spot it.

The American Idol and The Voice shows have turned us all into Simon Cowell-style harsh critics. Fight the urge to think you’re Simon Cowell. Even Simon Cowell isn’t the Simon Cowell you think he is. He brings on dupes that are terrible, and he tells you he thinks they’re terrible. He does this so that you’ll give him credibility. The golden rule in the bar tonight is: ‘No one cares what you think, no matter how much you’ve had to drink.’ No one cares that you used to hold some obscure job in the music industry, so you know what you’re talking about when it comes to talent.

You know as much about the music business, as I do about football…Even though I’ve watched it and read about it going on forty years. I’ve listened to critics, experts, former players, former coaches, and former General Managers talk about the game of football in intricate ways, but the more I learn the more I realize I know little to nothing about the game. Just because you were a sound guy for some local, cover band doesn’t mean you’re any more qualified to spot talent than I am, so quit pretending that your opinions on a karaoke singer are any more relevant than ours.

4) You’re not that much better than “that guy” on stage. Hundreds of people enter onto our karaoke stage with the notion that they’re not as bad as “that guy” that took the stage before them. The business of karaoke singing is built on the “at least I’m better than that guy” meme. We have news for you here, that we’ll tell you for one night only! It’s something that even your closest friends won’t tell you, you’re not that much better than “that guy”. We’re not talking about some anonymous guy that reads this bill either. We’re talking about you, even if we haven’t heard you sing yet.

*(A Side note for all dreamers.) Most artists featured in the Top 100 in Billboard are, in fact, as talentless as you are. Labels hire people to hire other people to buy songs for “the artists”. The labels then have the album’s producers arrange “the artist’s” music, digitize “the artist’s” voice, then sample other people’s music into the artists’ music, and the producers are then required to use all of the technology available to them to prevent you from hearing how talented “the artist” is. They do all this, because some big honcho, at some big label, has deemed this “artist” a prized commodity. Yet, these “artists” still don’t know how to read or write music. There’s one minor distinction between you and them: no one is willing to invest millions into you becoming a star. I know, you can sing better than Britney Spears, but so can 90% of the U.S. population. No one cares. Investors don’t care. Investors want someone that one portion of the population wants to have sex with, and the other portion of the population wants to be. Most of the business that you purport to know so much about isn’t even about singing ability anymore. So you may be somewhat better than “that guy” but no one really cares.

3) Don’t massacre the song. We’ve had plenty of “fun” singers get up on stage and just have a blast in the opening minutes of a song. They got us all excited that they were going to be a “fun one” who did some justice to the song while making everyone laugh and sing along. You don’t have to know all the lyrics, but you should know the song. There’s nothing that makes us cringe more than a person who gets lost halfway through a song. If you’re going to do a song, you should listen to that song like you’re going to do it. Again, perfection is not what we call for here, but you should at least be able to murmur your way through a song to rhythmically pass it off, until you get to the part you know.

2) Don’t sing sad or meaningful songs. Sad and meaningful songs are self-indulgent. This is true of most songs, but it is especially true of karaoke singers’ songs. Remember, we are not at this joint tonight to discover the next Crystal Gayle. We’re here to have a good time and to hear some guy rock out in a fun way that causes us to laugh and drink more. If you have had a sad week, either stay home, or go to a bar that allows you to sit in a corner and sulk. No one cares that you feel like Karen Carpenter’s “I won’t last a day without you” perfectly captures the way you feel about your most recent breakup with your boyfriend. Most of the sad and meaningful songs you sing will be forgotten the minute you step off a stage, or we’ll talk through your sad and self-indulgent moment until you leave the stage, and if we even notice you when you leave we’ll probably be laughing at you. If you still want to sing these songs, you’ll have to do so before 9 P.M. when no one is here. After 9 P.M. you’ll receive a second playlist that has all of the sad and meaningful songs removed from our playlist, because no one wants to drink anymore after they’re sung.

1) Sing fun songs. We brought karaoke to this establishment to have dopes get up here and sing “Meet the Flintstones” out of key. The patrons of our bar are not here to hear someone sound exactly like Kenny Rogers. They want sing-a-longs and chanteys. They want “The Theme from Gilligan’s Island” and “Grease”. It’s why they go out to karaoke bars like ours in the first place. If our patrons wanted to hear something closer to perfection, they’d go see the latest incarnation of the group Journey. That guy has, at least, practiced more than you have.

The Exit Strategy of Sitcoms

March 31, 2012September 22, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

I want it, you want it, we all want the funny. We want to laugh, we want to learn how to make others laugh, and we’ve all seen the people who don’t seem to mind putting themselves in embarrassing and vulnerable positions that lead to others laughing at them as opposed to with them. They don’t mind it, because they just want to be funny.

Most of us don’t want it so bad that we would take a class on it, read a book, or watch an instructional video on it, but we study, mimic, and outright steal the jokes we hear at school, in the workplace, or in the media. We share funny posts under the guise of “If I considered it funny, I thought others might too,” but we all know what you’re doing. You want others to consider you funny.

One of the most rewarding elements of being funny is that it doesn’t happen too often, it’s often so subjective that 50% of the people around you won’t find you funny, and it’s just really hard to be truly funny. Repeating a knock-knock joke or a Bazooka Joe joke might elicit a chuckle, if delivered correctly, but if we want hysterical laughter, we have to be situationally spontaneous, and that ain’t easy.

Most of us screw jokes up in some way, so often, that it can be embarrassing. Some of us mess the stresses up when it comes to punctuating a punch line in a proper manner. Some of us have horrible joke-telling rhythm. Some of us provide our audience the exact same material as the best comic in the world, but for some reason we don’t hit the mark the way they do. What happened? Why didn’t they fall over laughing the way they did when that comedian told the joke?

The first thing we all need to do is relax for just a second and realize that we’re not as funny as Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno are, and we never will be, and they’re not as funny as they are either. “What? I’ve seen their acts. They’re funny,” you say. You’ve seen their standup routines, and their standup routines are hysterical, but they’re works in progress. They spend hours, months, and sometimes years perfecting their jokes. They test them out on audiences, and they adapt their material to the audience’s laughter. They change words, phrases, tones, and even pauses to perfect their comedic rhythm. In the process to perfection, they fail as often as they succeed. When we watch one of their specials, we see their (‘A’) game material that has been tried and tested to perfection. We see the results of their sometimes painful process. This is their craft, and they do it so well that they make it look easy, but it wasn’t always this way. They have natural gifts, of course, but they honed those gifts over the course of decades, until they found their groove. They also wanted it more than us, as they proved on the day after they bombed on stage. They are funnier than the rest of us, however, and we hear that in interviews, but they’re not as funny as they are on stage. That’s their (‘A’) game material.

As hard as we try, we can never be as funny as Leno and Seinfeld, but we can steal their material and sell it as our own at the various water coolers. We can mimic their rhythm and patterns when we retell their jokes, and we can (and do) mimic the reactions of our favorite situational comedy stars. One of the primary reasons such theft is so successful is that the standup comedians and sitcom stars do all the hard work of laying the foundation for what’s funny. They’ve tried and tested the rhythmic structures of their tones and exit strategies, and they end up influencing what he all consider funny. When we repeat those patterns, rhythms, and reactions, there’s a level of familiarity to it, and familiar is funny. People are just more comfortable with these patterns and rhythms, so it’s just easier, and less taxing, to copy them. We all do it in one form or another. Some of us wish we didn’t have to resort to that, but we can’t help it. We want the laugh.

*******

Erik Schmidt never studied the finer points of funny, but he obviously believed that nothing left a better punctuation mark on a punchline better than a well-executed, perfectly timed exit. Our guess was that he didn’t marvel at the sitcom, stage left exit, and believe he should try it one day. He just sort of absorbed it over the years of watching sitcoms, and he ended up believing that the perfect exit could cover for any deficiencies his jokes may have had.

Erik was a nervous guy. He wasn’t a public speaker, and we never broke the barrier between acquaintance and friendship. He wasn’t at ease telling me a joke, and for some reason it made him nervous, but he loved doing it.

Through the years we worked together, I attained some sort of upper-echelon status in his joke-telling world. If he ever came across what he considered a fantastic joke, he felt compelled to bring it to me for some reason. It might have had something to do with the fact that I enjoy laughing. I’m not afraid to make an absolute fool out of myself laughing at a joke. I’m also not one of those types who tries to top a joke with one of my own. If you’re funny, you’re funny in my world, and I let you have the stage for however long you want it and need it. Most of us just can’t live with that. We hear a joke, and our instinct is “You’re funny, but I’m funnier. Catch this …” and we tell our funnier joke. I try very hard not to do this, which is why I found his comedic exits so confusing. “I’m giving you the stage,” I wanted to say. “Where are you going?”

Before attempting his comedic exits, Erik would lean down, and put his hands on the desk before him. This was, I’m guessing, his joke-telling stance. I can’t remember any of the actual jokes he told me. Most of them weren’t as great as he thought they were, but they weren’t that bad either. The actual jokes don’t matter though. What mattered to me were his exits. He had this whole routine down. He would lean down, tell the joke, and deliver the punch line. In the immediate aftermath of the punch line, he would pull his hands away from the desk in a swift manner and exit in an erratic fashion. This erratic exit was supposed to punctuate the joke. It was supposed to add to the comedic rhythm. “Get in, get out” was his strategy. Don’t stick around for the laughter. If you execute an ideal exit, the laughter will follow as a matter of course. It will arise in appreciation of the exit, as punctuation for the rhythm the audience feels compelled to conclude with you. “Get in, GET OUT!”

It’s a compulsion sitcom fans feel compelled to add to the tail end of their jokes after watching sitcoms for decades. This compulsion is so strong that it feels instinctual. The “don’t try this at home” lesson Erik should have learned the first couple times he tried it was, make sure you have somewhere to go when you exit. There is no “exit stage left” in real life. There is no curtain concealing the actor’s exit in real life. Even trained TV watchers, who know they’re not supposed to watch you exit can’t help it, and some of the times, they see the real life actor trapped in the reality of having nowhere to go.

There have been times when my friend attempted an exit stage left, after executing the perfect punchline tone and pitch, and ended up in another row of desks looking back at me uncomfortably. It’s embarrassing. The sitcoms don’t cover this territory well, for their characters always have a predetermined destination. No one offered my friend this luxury, and anyone watching him could see that he didn’t plan his exits well.

The pained question I see on his face, when I ask him to return is, “Why do you need jokes explained to you. Most jokes don’t survive explanations.” True, but some do. The presentation of some jokes requires explanation, whether that be due to a flawed presentation, or the inability of the listener to follow it well. Call those of us who require explanation stupid if you want, but if you’re going to come to us with a joke, be prepared to stick around for some of the questions.

On those occasions when the nature of his joke forced me to call Erik back, we would both look at each other with pained expressions. “I’m sorry,” my expression would say, “I just don’t get it.” Some of the times, he would come back and explain his joke to me, and we would be so uncomfortable that I felt compelled to laugh harder than I otherwise would have as an act of contrition for forcing him to provide follow-up. I ruined his exit, and we both knew it, so I felt the need to cover for this sense of violation.

After a number of violations on my part, Erik decided to exit to a location so far away that it would be inconceivable for me to call him back. I would still call him back, but he would pretend that he could no longer hear me. We would then share an uncomfortable look when he established the fact that he was not returning. You’re not ruining what I consider the perfect exit, his stance stated, to explain things to you in the manner I have far too many times before. You’re just going to have to figure this one out yourself. After committing a number of violations of this sort, I lost my stature in his joke telling world, as he no longer considered me his go-to when it came to telling great jokes. I can only assume he found someone who wouldn’t call him back.