Category: Humor

Stuck in the Middle with You

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“I’m smart. Not like everyone says. I’m smart, and I want respect.” –Fredo from The Godfather. I love this quote, as anyone who has ever read this site knows. I use it so often that I use it so often, too often, because it just seems to be an evergreen quote that fits so many of my themes. It’s an everyman quote. It’s one of those quotes that if we don’t say it every day, we probably think it. We know we’re not able to figure some things out, but we’re able to figure out a mess of other things, so that should make us smart right?  

What is smart, intelligent, or knowledgeable? It’s a question loaded with so many variables that it’s the literal definition of a loaded question. There are so many forms of human intelligence that it takes a lot of intelligence to understand the definition of intelligence. We all have some figurative schemes of thought that we use to develop images for matters of discussion. If I were to ask you what the elite intellectual looks like, you automatically picture the white lab coat. Researchers conducting tests on individuals know that if they want their subjects to take them seriously, they need to have a closet full of white coats. Ear, nose and throat, family practitioners probably also have a closet full of white coats they wear to presumably put an end to us complaining that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Depending on their goal of leading us to assume they’re smart, they might also want to mess their hair up (a la Albert Einstein), exhibit poor social skills, and thet should probably look like he doesn’t spend enough time outside. Our local car mechanic doesn’t fit any of these bullet points, however, but if you’ve ever sat down with one of them, you know the best and brightest among them have such a wide array of intelligence of their profession that it can be humbling and disorienting to hear them go on. That’s pretty relative you might argue, because we all have our areas. That’s kind of the point though isn’t it? If a man in a lab coat has a spark plug go out in his engine, he’s as lost as the rest of us, and the epitome of relative definition of intelligence. We all have our areas that make us feel smarter than most, but we eventually run across something, someone, or some other person place, place, or thing that makes us feel pretty darn dumb.   

Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met also had another key ingredient that is in short supply: clarity. They not only have a clearer vision of life than the rest of us, they have wisdom based on experience. They’re not afraid, intimidated, or confused by questions, arguments, or refutation. They’re able to roll with the punches, because they’ve already argued with so many people that they know every possible argument for and against. Yet, before we consider those with greater clarity intelligent, we have to consider another variable of intelligence: sensitivity. Most clear-minded people I know suffer from some deficits in emotional intelligence. They know the truth as they’ve experienced it and seen it, but they don’t account for all of the variables that could undermine their version of the truth. Can something be true, if it is only true 99.9 percent of the time? If an emotionally intelligent percent invites anecdotal evidence that undermines that truth, is it still true? There are times when it seems clarity and sensitivity seem to be combatants in the pursuit of truth, intelligence, and knowledge. Most clear thinkers are so lacking in sensitivity that they almost seem robotic, and they view arguments against their views as an attempt to cloud the truth and add confusion, but they don’t alter their views one iota.  

The more succinct definition of intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge. That definition might lead us to seek all of the varying definitions of knowledge, and how we apply it. It doesn’t serve a purpose, but some of us have retained more knowledge about the NFL, from the 80s and 90s, than most of the experts on pregame, NFL shows. Try to stump us. Go! Some of us know more about the show Seinfeld than anyone we’ve ever met. Say what you want about such knowledge, but it is information that we’ve retained, and in some cases used, or applied, as we’ve dropped the show’s jokes in a timely manner that has impressed people. Is it smart though? Will our audiences consider that intelligent? Our friends probably consider retention of such information the definition of intelligence, but how many strangers, who didn’t grow up in the same era we did, will put that information/knowledge on the same level with the man who is intimately familiar with Shakespeare or Chaucer? If you’re anything like me, and you enjoy searching for seemingly impossible answers to questions, you’ll probably end up saying, “I honestly don’t know if I’m smart or dumb. I’m probably Stuck in the Middle with You.” 

“Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am stuck in the middle with you
When you started off with nothing
And you’re proud that you’re a self-made man.” –Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan

I’ve met a wide array of writers throughout my life. Some of them exposed for me the difference between the creative term brilliance and the more math and science definition of intelligence. I’ve met brilliantly creative writers who were so good that I was just plain jealous, which led me to try to outdo them with a long stretch of writing. I’ve also met a number of writers who knew the craft so well that they gave me some excellent pointers and valuable information that I still have in my head whenever I write. They knew the ABCs of writing so well that it was a little surprising to learn they were actually average-to-poor writers. When I see them now, I call them editors. Editors can spot all of the errors of the creatives, and their approach to writing can be so oriented in fact that it takes all the fun out of writing. Most of them don’t do it to be mean, better, or correct, it’s just the way their mind works. They’ve learned the craft by studying the masters, and if we run into a wall, they can provide helpful advice based on their studies. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but most of them don’t know their limitations. It seems to me that they know masters’ masterpieces, so well that they wouldn’t dare approach the craft in an innovative manner that might violate the tenants laid down by those they deify. They know the masterpieces far better than jokers to the right, and they’re paralyzed by idea that if they can’t top them, why try? Those of us who aren’t as familiar with the literary canon might be dumb enough to think we have something to add to the conversation. Even if we don’t come anywhere close to what editors determine to be quality material, we don’t lie awake at night in fear of a clown from the right dropping the dreaded ‘D’ word, derivative, on us.       

Those of us stuck in the middle with you grew up on KISS, and heavy metal, and we loved the silly, simplistic movies and shows from the 80s and 90s that knew how to get to the point. If we were to ask members of that generation (my generation) I suspect that most of them would say, “It was a pointless era, but who cares, it was built on being fun, funny, and entertaining.” Whatever point these entertainers had, they got to it quick, because they feared belaboring a point might lose them their short-attention span, key demo. Those stuck in the middle with you have those influences loaded in our neurons, firing our synapses. Is that a brag? Some of the songs, shows, and movies from that era were quite innovative, creative, and influential, but no one would confuse memorizing the lines of dialogue from Buggs Buggy and Gilligan, or studying the lyrics of KISS, with an intellectual exercise. Yet, when we combine all of that silly simplicity with an appreciation for the masters of literature, we end up somewhere in the middle.

Those of us in the middle “Started off with nothing”. The “Theys” of our lives helped us form a foundation by teaching us the elements of style, and the rules, but they couldn’t teach us how to deviate. Those deviations defined us in many ways, ways that led us to be a self-made man when it came to writing. We normally equate the term self-made man with success, but the self-made men who ended up anonymous failures are far more numerous. They just didn’t succeed. They were the dreamers who were so delusional they never paid heed to those who told them to give up, because they were making fools out of themselves. The term self-made man is a nebulous one that we could apply to high school graduates and “some college” applicants. We could apply it to artists, craftsmen, and small business owners who had to claw and scratch their way to some relative definition of success. The opposite of self-made man, arguably and debatably, is the college graduate. The college graduate is the product of at least four years of shaping and molding, until he establishes himself in the workplace or office. 

We could also say that the difference between the self-taught, or autodidactic, and the college graduate, or manualdidactic(!), is status. The mindset of the college graduate is that they’ve achieved status, and the self-made man is forever in pursuit of it. If we think about this dynamic in terms of the waiting room for a job interview, the college graduate believes he completed most of the interview on his resume, as he listed out the bullet points of what he did in college. He has achieved knowledgeable status, and he thinks the interview process will be paint-by-numbers after that. The high school graduate and “some college” applicant sits with inferiority complex believing that everyone else in the waiting room is a college graduate. His need to prove himself surely preceded his entrance into the building, as he apprenticed for the job doing grunt work in the field in question. Who will the head hunter in Human Resources view as more intelligent, knowledgeable, and the better candidate in the interview? It’s all relative to the head hunter, of course, but self-taught man knows that the onus will be on him to prove himself in the interview.

When we hear the self-made man talk about his pursuit of success, we often hear them make the dubious claim that, “Everyone was against me,” and/or “Nobody thought I would succeed,” but we could argue that such lines romanticize their struggle. More often than not, no one cared about them when they weren’t doing anything, because why would they? If they cared at one time, it probably took the self-made man so long to get there that everyone just sort of gave up on them. The self-made man probably had a lot of people cheering him on in the beginning, and that probably ignited something in him, but whereas they started giving up on him, he never stopped believing. The self-made man probably thought there was something to it, even when there wasn’t. Whatever stoked his desire to believe in himself took, and he continued to believe in himself regardless. Most of us don’t even remember the initial driver that spurred us onto further creations, but there is some inner drive to keep doing it. We’re the self-made, self-taught men who spend our time striving to prove that we’re not as dumb as our college transcripts suggest, and we are endlessly pursuing the sometimes-silly things we love with passionate zeal. 

In the craft of writing, over-the-top intellectuals are also handicapped by the Great-American-Novel syndrome. They can’t write anything that is anything less than the most important thing ever written. This is probably why they sit behind a blinking cursor for so many hours. They are profound thinkers who refuse to write anything common (“Don’t be common!”), trite, cliché, hackneyed, or banal. They prefer to dazzle with the unfathomably amazing, the intellectually illuminating, and that which is illustrative of the plight of mankind against the meaning of life. “Just write,” writing experts tell us. “I can’t,” they say. “I can’t think of anything.” They usually sit before those blinking cursors trying to come up with something so brilliant that it’s beyond brilliant. Then, in those writing groups, they criticize those who produce the common, trite, cliché, hackneyed, or banal, until they realize they share more characteristics with editors than they do writers. Those stuck in the middle with you don’t know what we don’t know, and we’re just dumb enough to think we might have something so entertaining we might eventually add a nugget that is enlightening.

“Get in, get pithy, and get out,” are the words we employ.

When we’re stuck in the middle with a quality author we get this sense that we’re joining hands with them as we walk with them on their path of discovery. If they do it right, it won’t be limited to just a facts based adventure. The quality author is still intimately familiar with being dumb on the issue, and we can hear the joy in their voice as they discover all this great knowledge. They know that fuzzy line between intellectual and dumb so well that they know how to tap dance on both sides, and we laugh right along with him. As much as we prefer to think we get it, whatever it is, we actually don’t most of the times, because we’re not as smart as those who do. We do enjoy the pursuit of knowledge, but we don’t enjoy hearing some professorial presentation from someone who knows the facts so well that they are all but reading them on a Teleprompter. Those of us stuck in the middle with you, on that fuzzy line between intelligent and dumb, are not so far removed from our misunderstandings of the world that we don’t take them for granted and no longer question the ways of the world anymore.

“I’m Just Too Dumb!” 

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“Hey Patrick come over here and check out our sinkhole,” Hector said when he spotted his neighbor walking outside. Patrick walked over and looked, because who wouldn’t want to look in a sinkhole? He looked from a careful distance, made a comment that I can’t remember, and he began walking away. “Wait, Patrick, you really gotta see this thing,” Hector urged. “C’mere.” 

“I saw it,” Patrick said. “It’s a sinkhole Hector. I’ve seen sinkholes before. It’s not a circus exhibit.”

“C’mon,” Hector said, “I’ll hold your hand, if you’re afraid of falling in.”

“You don’t understand, I will fall in. I’m just that dumb,” Patrick said, dropping his new favorite line on those of us standing around the sinkhole.

“No, you won’t. They’ve cordoned off the dangerous spots, so we know how close we can get,” Hector said, noting that he already called the police, and they put yellow tape around the weak spots. “Just don’t cross the tape.”

“Trust me,” Patrick said. “I’ll fall in. I’m just too dumb.” 

Patrick loved that line. He dropped it so often, in so many situations, that it kind of  became his catch phrase. Why did he love it? I wasn’t there when he first heard it, but I wonder if he thought it was so hilarious that he would start using it. Did he think it was so hilarious because he could relate to it? Did he think it applied to him so well that he thought he should start using it? He might have started using it because he found it funny, but he began using it so often that I think he now believes it. 

“Be careful what the brain hears you say,” a friend of mine said when I told her this story. “It might start to believe it.” 

Others can convince us of just about anything, if they repeat it often enough, but can we convince ourselves of something if we repeat it often enough? If we hear someone else’s schtick, and we love it for being such a great, self-deprecating line, can we accidentally convince ourselves that of something like being so dumb that we might do something that could cause ourselves irreparable harm? It’s possible of course, but is it probable? I would say this is not a joke, but it probably started out that way to Patrick, until he accidentally convinced himself that not only is he dumb, he’s so dumb that if he doesn’t check himself, and his brain, he’s probably going to end up in an emergency room saying, “I told you. I told you how dumb I was. Why didn’t you listen? Why didn’t I?” 

I’m not exactly sure why I considered Patrick’s “I’m too dumb” joke so funny. He dropped this line on me several times, in casual conversations, and I always enjoyed it. We’ve all heard people drop variations of self-deprecating humor, but Patrick’s delivery was so pitch-perfect that I can’t but think he believes it on some level. He was so flat and straight, and nothing about his presentation suggests that he’s seeking laughter. Does that make his joke better, yes it does, but does he deserve credit for his ability to deliver a joke, and is it possible for someone to deliver a joke that well without some belief in it?  

To arrive at answers that plagues us, we need a control group. When research scientists attempt to arrive at answers regarding psychological complexities, they divide their group into subjects and a control group. Patrick is a jokester, always telling jokes, and he’s a pretty funny guy, but he has one flaw. He laughs harder at his jokes than anyone else does. To understand if he is kidding, and by how much, we need to study the methods, patterns, and reactions he has when telling his other jokes. Following his other jokes, he drops a “I mean, C’mon, right?” followed by laughter. He pumps his head back, and his eyebrows go high on his head as he laughs. When he drops his “I’m too dumb” jokes, however, he doesn’t laugh, and his head goes down in the manner a dog’s might to signify submission. Is this part of his schtick? Does he do that to sell the joke better? Patrick is funny, but he’s not that funny. He does not apply such subtle intricacies to any of his other jokes, even the other self-deprecating jokes he tells. I don’t think it would take a team of research doctors to find that the reason Patrick tells this joke so well because he believes it. 

For all the reasons listed below, reasons I imagined later, this instance at the sinkhole struck me as particularly hilarious. Patrick added to the comedic nature of his joke by putting greater distance between he and the sinkhole. He walked away from Hector’s home, and off Hector’s lawn, and he then went into his home. I don’t know if he locked the door, but my guess is he did to presumably place one more obstacle for him to cross to get back to the hole. I presume Patrick did this, because he no longer trusts his brain to help him avoid an impulse that might cause him harm. Those of us standing around this sinkhole in Hector’s lawn could only presume that Patrick lost all faith in his brain’s ability to protect him from harm.  

I flashed to Patrick falling in the hole, a near bottomless pit in Patrick’s imagination (it was about three feet deep), looking up at us saying, “See, gawdangit, I told you how dumb I was.”

“Listen, I have two kids to raise, and they count on me to be there for them in so many ways,” I imagine Patrick pleading if Hector pressed him further. “If I start following whatever impulses my insufficient brain provides, I’m going to leave my wife a single-parent, and I’m not going to do that to her or my beloved children. I have to learn to reject whatever temptations I encounter to protect my body, so I’m there for them throughout their maturation.” 

We’ve all heard psychologists talk about a person being at war with their brain. It’s a deep, complex topic they use to describe those with seriously troubling psychological issues. Patrick doesn’t have those, but he does appear to be in conflict with his brain on a level that he describes with repetitive jokes. At one point in his life, I think Patrick decided to wage a cold war against his brain. A cold war, by our definition, involves “threats, propaganda, and other measures employed just short of open warfare.” Or, as others put it more succinctly, “Waging war without firing a shot.” At some point, Patrick’s internal forces decided to mount an internal coup against the brain, because those mechanisms decided that the brain no longer had their best interests in mind. 

One of the primary directives of the brain is to protect us. It protects us from heights, guns, and the prospect of encountering large, man-eating animals through chemical compounds that induce fear. When we fear, we learn to employ various defensive measures, including creating distance from the temptation, to prevent what the brain suspects could cause bodily harm. Over the years, we learn what to eat and drink, and what we do and think to prevent bodily harm. The brain instinctively knows, and learns, what can cause death. What isn’t so obvious are the irrational fears we develop for the dark, ladybugs, and inanimate objects.

Why are we so afraid of insects, even relatively harmless insects such as the ladybug, at a young age? We don’t know what a ladybug is when we’re young, or if we do on some rudimentary level, we don’t know the extent of their abilities. This is the fear of the unknown. As we age, we learn that most animals and insects have an instinctual fear of humans, and it  provides us a level of comfort when we’re walking down the sidewalk, and they clear the way for us. Some of the times, insects occasionally land on us in their confusion, and our young, fantastical mind can interpret that as purposeful, especially when the ladybug begins to crawl up our leg in a manner we could further interpret as a purposeful violation of the parameters we thought we had with insects. We convince ourselves that they’re not afraid of us anymore. They’re crawling up our legs with a specific purpose in mind that we don’t even want to imagine, and that leaves us paralyzed with fear.  

At some point in our maturation, our brain learns the parameters of threats against the body. There’s nothing to fear from ladybugs, even those that appear to violate the parameters of the relationship we have with insects. We’re quite sure that there are some anecdotal tales of a ladybug causing human deaths, but they’re so few that we know there’s little to fear from them. There are, however, a number of tales told of spiders causing death, but not as many as those from the mosquito archive. Yet, the number of people who fear spiders far outweighs those who fear mosquito. The whole world of fearing spiders involves their creepy nature, their physical appearance, and the techniques they use to poison their fellow insects and eat them.     

At some point in our search of what to fear and what we learn is relatively harmless, the brain plays tricks on us. We fear the relatively harmless, clowns and cotton, yet we don’t fear some of the things that can actually harm us, and kill us, like driving ninety miles an hour down the interstate. 

“I like to tease my fears,” a friend told me. “I prefer to live dangerously. It’s a rush to put your life on the line by skydiving from a plane, or bungee jumping, and bungee jumping is actually a lot more dangerous than people know.”

“So, you consider jumping from 50 to 500 feet with nothing but a cord tied to your ankle dangerous?” I asked sarcastically. The fact that she felt the need to tell me that bungee jumping was dangerous suggested to me that most people she knows have tried to argue against her position, and if that ain’t the brain messing with people, I don’t know what is. 

Patrick’s brain has obviously spent a lot of time messing with him in this manner, trying to convince him that nothing is as dangerous as they say, and his brain has obviously done this so often that Patrick just doesn’t trust it anymore. We’ve all heard that those working a police beat believe half of what they see and none of what they hear, but I’ve always assumed that was intended to illustrate their trust of what others do and say. Others can deceive us into accepting what we know is not true, but can we do this to ourselves? Are we at war with our own brain in relatively benign situations such as our approach to a sinkhole? There’s knowing and not knowing, of course, but as Patrick said he’s seen sinkholes before, so he presumably knows how to approach it. He just doesn’t trust his instincts, and he’s skeptical of what he might do. 

We all engage in self-deprecating humor, and we all enjoy the fruits of a person showing that he doesn’t take himself too seriously. As I’ve written many times and many ways, be careful with this comedic tool, because your audience might begin to believe it. Patrick’s use of self-deprecating humor seemingly adds another layer of caution, be careful how often you use it, because you might start to believe it.   

Patrick is not a dumb man, and if we are ever tempted to join him in the belief that he is, all we have to do is talk to the man for about forty-five minutes to learn how knowledgeable he is on so many different and diverse topics. Somewhere along the line, Patrick heard someone say that they were “so dumb” that they might not be smart enough to prolong their health and well-being. Patrick obviously considered that so funny that he began using it, and he saw how this exaggeration of the typical self-deprecating joke comforted his audience. It obviously comforted him too, to a degree, to think that he wasn’t all that. At some point, he began to fear that he might actually be “so dumb” that he could find a way to convince himself that he might cross that yellow, police tape to end up in a bottom of a sinkhole without knowing how it happened or why he did it, because his brain is now so deficient that it might lead him to him harming himself in some life-altering manner. Faced with such internal strife, Patrick decided that it was just safer for him to walk away, enter his home, and lock the door to try to prevent his kids from being fatherless children. “Trust me, I will fall in,” he warns us, and presumably himself, “because I’m just that dumb.”  

Hi, I’m Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl

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“Hi, I’m Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl,” the actor William Sanderson, playing Larry, would say to introduce he and brothers Darryl played by Tony Papenfuss and John Voldstad on the Newhart show. With the passing of the actor Bob Newhart, and all of these retrospectives on his career, one would think someone, somewhere would break ranks and tell the story behind one of the most iconic and oddest running gags in television history. So far, nothing, silence, crickets!

It feels a little odd to call this line a catchphrase, because it’s not a phrase, and it’s not catchy, but it was repeated so often that we could at least call it a running gag of one of the most popular shows of its era. It was such an odd part of the show that one would think that everyone from the studio execs to the cast members themselves would demand some sort of explanation, backstory, or point of origin for the audience. (To my knowledge, there was never an in-show explanation.) We also wonder why, thirty-years since the show last aired, no one has ever taken credit for the line, told the insider story on how many hurdles it surely had to cross to before making it on air, and how it evolved from a simple introduction to a cultural staple. (My guess is it was a throwaway line someone threw in as a lark, and test audiences reacted so well to it that they decided to keep it in.) 

Newhart aired from 1982-1990, so it came about in an era where the demand for catchphrases, from sitcoms, was just starting to wane a little. This isn’t to say that the catchphrase died, because it probably never will, but prior to Newhart, every sitcom was almost required to have a catchphrase, but this was no longer the case when Newhart aired. My assumption is that the writers never intended for this to be the show’s catchphrase, and my guess is they probably didn’t want a catchphrase at all, but if you even mentioned the show Newhart to a bunch of people, during this era, someone said, “I love Larry, his brother Darryl, and his other brother Darryl.” The intro to the eccentric woodsmen caught fire, and before I knew it, everyone I knew was saying it in one way or another. 

Most shows from the 70s to the early 80s developed catchphrases to help audiences quickly identify with the characters on their show. Just about every popular show from this era had a catchphrase, and rather than try to list them all, we suggest you go to Flashbak.com for a top 25 list of the best catchphrases from the 70s, or you can go to Ranker.com for a list of the top 80s catchphrases. Characterization can be difficult and time-consuming of course, depending on the character, but screenwriters of TV shows needed something more immediate to help audiences identify quickly. Some of the times, networks only bought four-to-six episodes after the pilot to see if these shows could establish themselves, so the writers, the cast, and all of the others involved in the production knew they had to develop and characterize quickly, thus they created a word or phrase to help audiences relate to their characters quickly.  

They also had to use these words and phrases to accomplish a wide variety of things, other than characterization, quickly. They had to sum up everything about the character, they needed it to be fun and silly, and the phrase had to be a malleable word or phase that the writers and actors could use to match a wide variety of situations.

We all attached these shows to their catchphrases, and we all repeated them, because we all watched the same shows back then. Even if we didn’t watch the shows, we knew the phrases, because everyone we knew said them. The actors responsible for reading these lines said they couldn’t go anywhere in the United States without someone dropping the catchphrase on them, and some of them have tales of traveling to remote, third world locations where the locals would drop an ‘Aayyy’ or a ‘Kiss my grits’ on them.

If someone dropped the phrase on you, and you never heard it before, their response was usually laced with ridicule, “How could you have never heard this phrase before? Do you not watch TV, leave your home, or talk to other people?” We had three channels back then, and if we wanted to know what other people were talking about, or have friends of any kind, we knew we had to watch these shows.

For those who weren’t around during the 1982-1990 era, we all tried to come up with our own variations of “Hi, I’m Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl”. I had three friends named Adanna, Madonna and Lisa. When they hung out together, they decided to mess with the strange fellas they would meet in bars by introducing themselves, “Hi, I’m Adanna, and this is my friend Madonna, and my other friend Donna.” It was funny at the time, but it was probably funny because I was there, and I knew them. It might be one of those ‘you had to be there’ jokes for which you had to be there, but the point of retelling this is that this ‘Hi, I’m Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl’ joke was everywhere for a time.

With the passing of Bob Newhart, we might read writers of various publications attempt to eulogize him by placing his shows The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart in the upper echelons of quality programming. They weren’t, in my opinion. They were occasionally funny shows that weren’t extremely influential. Bob Newhart played the straight man to the silliness around him, and silly and funny gags and lines developed around this premise, but neither show was groundbreaking in situational comedy, and neither of them were headline stopping influencers. They were just occasionally funny sitcoms.

‘Hi, I’m Larry, this is my brother Darry, and this is my other brother Darryl’ also managed to have an insider/outsider quality attached to it. We all repeated the joke, and tried to develop clever ways of twisting it to those who would ‘get it’, and those who ‘got it’ were insiders, but the show was so popular for a time that everyone got it. We considered it a slightly quirky, clever way of describing salt of the earth type characters that added some backwater qualities to those who exhibited some physical characteristics that matched the three brothers. The question we never asked back then is who came up with this line, and what was their thinking? Was there an origin story, or some kind of backstory behind it? Was it a result of success, failure, or success through failure?

Was the joke a result of some typo in the original bible the head writer wrote for the show? We don’t know. Was there an original third brother, who had a name like Elmer, but the two actors were both mistakenly cast as the character Darryl, which led to an argument between the actors? Did one of the writers note the confusion and decide to pacify both actors by calling them both Darryl, and it turned into an inside joke that eventually leaked into the script? We don’t know. Did an original writer come up with an equally banal name, like Elmer, and the writers decided that name might be too on-the-nose for a backwoods hillbilly? Did the writers want a different, subtle, and unstated characterization of the brothers’ parents that illustrated the family’s backwoods nature by giving the same name to two different sons? Or, did some ingenious writer just spontaneously shout out, “Let’s just name the other brother Darryl too?”

“That is the ultimate taboo,” I imagine the head writer saying. “You can’t have two characters have the same name in a production. It will prove too confusing to the audience. We’re not even supposed to have characters names start with the same letter, much less the same name. What if we have one Darryl do something one week and the other do something else next week? How will people refer to them at the watercooler at work the next day, and how do we have the other characters refer to them? Do we label one Darryl one and the other Darryl two, or do we eventually call them one and two in some subtle homage to Dr. Suess? If we don’t do something like this, it will prove too confusing for the audience.”

“We keep the actors on the show for the sole purpose of this one joke,” one of the writers responded. “They don’t do anything themselves. They’re a trio, and Larry does all the talking for them, and he answers any and all questions for them.”  

“It is kind of funny, in a taboo breaking, offbeat, and weird sort of way,” the head writer would respond, “but no family gives two of their sons the exact same name?” (George Foreman would later name all five of his sons George.)

“Like everything else, it could be funny,” another writer adds, “through repetition.”

In any song, TV show, or movie, we eventually learn the long-held secret behind lyrics, lines, and why things in the production were the way things were, but to my knowledge, based on some research, no one has broken ranks to tell the tale behind ‘Hi, I’m Larry, this is my brother Darry, and this is my other brother Darryl’. The best explanation I’ve found is it just “became a recurring gag throughout the series”. The first time it happens, we’re kind of, ‘What did he just say? That’s odd.’ The second time through, we remember it from the first time, and then it builds and builds until it eventually catches on.  

We can only imagine that ‘Hi, I’m Larry, this is my brother Darry, and this is my other brother Darryl’ was a tough sell in the beginning. We have to imagine that it was not part of the original pitch of the show, and that it had to be a tough sell in subsequent production meetings. “We think it will be funny, eventually,” one of the writers probably said, early on, “and who knows how or why these things catch on, but we think this will eventually catch on.” We have to think that such a line required some big-time backing, “Besides, Bob [Newhart] loves it, and he wants it kept in.” We have to think it was not the make-or-break hill anyone on the production team were willing to die on. “We like it a lot, but we’re not married to the idea.” This is all speculation, of course, but the staff obviously did whatever they had to do to get the green light from the network. 

Now imagine how shocked everyone involved in the early stages of the production was when this line eventually caught on. Imagine how shocked they are now, when these retrospective articles come out and this line, and the final episode, are the two things most people remember about their beloved series, thirty-plus-years later. The cast had to be shocked that it proved so popular, the writer who wrote the line was probably stunned, and the studio execs who surely offered notes that it was a dumb joke that would have to be clarified, were probably the most stunned of all. I was not a huge Newhart fan, but I watched it a lot. If there was ever an in-show explanation of the parents naming the two siblings Darryl, I never heard it, and if anyone on the production offered an explanation for this catchphrase, after the fact, I haven’t heard that either. My current searches, through all the venues offered today, turned up no explanation.

Whatever the case was, everyone I knew repeated this line, tried to use it in their own context, and they tried to further it in some sense, but even though we all greeted these references with a giggle, they never worked as well as it did on that show.

In the age of the internet, talk shows, podcasts, and DVDs with commentary added, we’ve grown accustomed to answers to every question we could possibly have. If Newhart were more popular, we might have that answer by now. If it carved out a niche in the zeitgeist, similar to Seinfeld, Frasier, or Friends we have to imagine that fans would badger the stars, creators, or writers for some kind of answer. There might be five-to-ten people who know the origin story, or some sort of backstory, but no one has badgered them for it. My best guess is if the story behind the recurring gag was half as funny as the line, somewhat interesting, or it hinted at the creativity of the originator, we’d all know it by now. The backstory is probably one of the best examples of how the explanation of a joke is almost never as funny as the actual joke, so you take a step back and leave it as a standalone.

The actual explanation probably involves the fact that one of the writers knew a family that gave two brothers the exact same name, a family name that was given to the siblings as an homage to another family member, but to avoid confusion they addressed ‘the other brother’ with a nickname. Whatever the case is, the writers probably considered the origin story so unfunny that it undercut the perceived brilliance of the idea so much that they decided to never tell it. I searched through search engines, Bing’s Co-Pilot, and I even left the open-ended question on a chat platform for anyone who might know how this recurring gag was born. I expected some internet searchers, or some huge fan who saw the commentary edition of the series to offer up some explanation they heard. So far, no takers. I was a little surprised to learn that it doesn’t matter how much research we do, in the Information Age, some of the times the truth is not out there, because some of the times, the arbiters of truth won’t give it up.