Category: The Unfunny

Standup comedian Barry Becker is The Unfunny comedian, and this is a collection of his sets. There are also interludes that study Barry from the outside in. As he studies the array of characters he meets on the road, we understand more about them in a way that suggests this isn’t about Barry, but as we know with every in-depth analysis of character, it’s all about him.

Fantastic, Now What’s a Jiffy?

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“Dr. Jones will be with you in a jiffy,” the receptionist says.

“Fantastic, now what’s a jiffy?” we ask. “I don’t need you to be exact, but I would like a rough estimate.”

Is it just me, or is it a little odd that those who work in doctors’ offices, auto mechanics, and other businesses that offer waiting rooms refrain from providing true Estimated Wait Times (EWT)? I understand that it’s tough, rough, and in come cases impossible to know with certitude, but all we’re asking for is a rough estimate from a receptionist, and her team of employees, with their decades of experience in their shared field, to come up with a fairly decent guess. When I enter their office I do so with my own EWT, my Expected Wait Time, and while I know my EWT might be uninformed compared to theirs, I’d enjoy gathering with them to see if we can find  a Crucial Meeting Ground (CMG). The problem for those of us sitting in waiting rooms, waiting for our services to be rendered, is that most employees at places like doctors’ offices think they can circumvent all EWTs with: “A jiffy!” 

“It will only take a jiffy.”

“Fantastic, now what’s a jiffy?” we ask again, “and before you answer, you should know that we’ve tried, for centuries we’ve tried, to come up with a definition that we can all agree on. Some stay vague, saying, ‘it’s lightning fast,’ ‘blink of an eye,’ or ‘in a flash,’ but physicist Gilbert N. Lewis clarified jiffy as the time it takes light to travel one centimeter in a vacuum, or 33.3564 picoseconds, and a picosecond is one trillionth of a second. So, if you’re equating your Estimated Wait Time to the physicist’s definition of jiffy, then you’re saying Dr. Jones should be ready in 0.0000000000333564 seconds, and that’s not too bad.”

The primary reason these businesses offer vague “jiffy?” EWTs, is the disgruntled customer. Anyone who has worked in the service industry knows that guy who approaches the desk with his “You said he’d be ready between 5:18 and 5:23. It’s now 5:24.” The disgruntled customer loves playing the sophisticate who can spot flaws, inconsistencies, and hypocrisies inherent “in the system”. “This is not a chicken McNugget,” this customer says displaying a small McNugget. “It’s a half of a McNugget. You’ve given me nine and one half of a McNugget. I ordered ten. It’s not even a half a McNugget. Look at it, it’s more of a third of a McNugget. Who do you think you’re dealing with here?” The reader reads this, and they think we’re using hyperbole to prove a point. Yet, if the reader worked in the service industry as long as we did, they know that some aggrieved customers believe that we pimply-faced sixteen-year-olds were in cahoots with our employer in a MickeyD-pimply face industrial complex conspiring against him, John McGillicuddy. If he’s not that far down the totem pole of conspiracy, he thinks the corporation has been putting it to the little guy for far too long, and he Mr. John McGillicuddy appoints himself the emissary for all those little guys who are afraid to stand up to pimply-faced sixteen-year-olds. 

“It’s not about you, John McGillicuddy,” I want to tell these disgruntled customers. The pimply-faced sixteen-year-old in the back, didn’t see that John McGillicuddy was at the drive-thru, so he decided to throw a half nugget into the pack. “And one other thing, Mr. John McGillicuddy, or whatever your name is, all those snarky lines you dreamed up in the mirror the night before. We’ve heard them all before.” John McGillicuddy obviously brings a lot of baggage to the drive thru window, and he brings the same baggage to the waiting room receptionist who offers him a rough EWT. So, even though the jiffy line grates on me, I understand what drives an office to keep it general for the entry-level employees who have to put up with the John McGillicuddys of the world.  

“Okay,” John McGillicuddy will say. “Let me talk to your manager.”

Here’s the dirty little secret that most in the service industry businesses won’t tell you. The manager is but another employee, at a higher level and often a little older and more experienced, but they are not granted a magic wand that can fix all of the flaws and inconsistencies you spot. The employees and managers can meet with their higher ups and eventually fix the flaws you’ve exposed, but it’s not going to happen today, while you’re all impatient and frustrated.  

In other words, we know it’s not fair to take it out on the employees or even the manager, but they’re the face of the corporation standing before us. We also know to apply relative constructs to the term “jiffy” in conjunction with the nature of the services we require. In a doctor’s office, we could say that a jiffy should be anywhere between five to ten minutes, if our appointment was at 8:00 AM, and we showed up at the office at 8:00 AM. There are always going to be variables in a doctor’s office, of course, as some patients eat up more of the doctor’s time than expected, but doctors, and all of the employees in charge of the waiting room office, have a combined tenure of decades, and they should have a better feel for “a jiffy” in their Expected Wait Times. When I end up waiting twenty-three minutes for a doctor, I see that as a violation of the term a jiffy, as I know it and physicist Gilbert N. Lewis defines it. Twenty-three minutes waiting should be more of an auto mechanic’s definition of jiffy, but when I end up waiting over an hour and a half for them, I can’t help but think we’re all violating the jiffy. Even after allowing for relative definitions of the term in an auto mechanic’s shop, I can’t see how an hour and a half can even loosely be defined as a jiffy. Like those in a doctor’s office, auto mechanics’ employees have a combined decades of experience, and they should calculate their definition by how many cars are in front of me, and how long they think each job will take, until they 1-2-3 me and say, “I’m going to guess we’ll have you out of here in under two hours.” You know what I’d say to that? I’d say, “Thank you. Thank you for being so honest.” I’d say that because it’s much better to wait a concrete two-hour EWT than a vague jiffy that could take two hours.

***

I only wrote a letter to a corporate home office one time, and to be completely honest, I hated doing it. I hated being that guy, that John McGillicuddy, so much that I didn’t write it that day, because I was overheated. I waited a day and composed a more professional, less emotional complaint letter. It was my only complaint letter, thus far, and I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, but if you’re a “jiffy” guy who violates with variables to the point that I question your veracity, it could vex me to the point that it triggers my emotional mutation into Letter Writing Man … and you wouldn’t like me when I’m vexy.

DIY Garbage Disposal Installation: It Ain’t Easy

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“I done got my ying yang broke,” I would call out to my apartment managers. “Send Scully!” 

“Why do you pay rent to an apartment complex?” my friends would ask me over the course of twenty years. “You’re just throwing money down a well.” This! This is one of the many reasons why, something breaks, call Scully. We don’t have to mow, shovel snow, or know how to fix things with Scully around the corner, and we’ll never know what we don’t know, unless we make the leap to home ownership. When I made that leap, I realized if my dad ever taught me anything about home maintenance, I forgot all of it in those twenty plus years I just called Scully.

And it’s possible that my dad did teach me some things, but I was so bored by it that I didn’t pay attention, or if I did, I forgot all about everything he said as soon as the thing was fixed. I’m still so bored by it, twelve years into the leap, that I forget everything I learn soon after fixing it. If you’re one of us, and you’re tired of paying the Scullies of the world to fix it for you, YouTube is your friend. If you don’t already know this, YouTube is loaded with Do-It-Yourselfers (DIY) who will show you how to fix everything from a leaky roof to your poopeé (as opposed to your pooper, which, to my knowledge, still requires professional consultation).

“It Ain’t Easy”

One of the reasons I recommend YouTube, is that one of the alternatives is the company’s step-by-step instruction manual. My favorite thing to do with a product’s instructional manual is to crumple it up and try to sink it in the nearest waste barrel from what I deem a three-point range. My crumpling process can garner unwanted attention, as I passionately express the bottled up rage these vague, incoherent little pamphlets have caused me over the years. I can do this now, because the Do-It-Yourselfer videos provide so much more clarity.

These DIY videos don’t just instruct us how to fix our appliances and make better homes and gardens, they show us. They show us the difference. “This is a bolt,” they say to explain that which a product’s manual assume we already know, “and this is the difference between a bolt and a washer.” If they don’t say such things, you can see the difference. They’ll hold the bolts and screws in their hands, so you can see the differences in sizes before you start screwing on and screwing up. They’ll also suggest that you might want to consider borrowing your neighbors’ tools before you start, because the “tools” the companies provide are often so basic that they’ll only make your job harder. 

One warning before you start searching for these videos, almost every DIY guy will begin their video with, “[This] is pretty easy, IF you know what you’re doing.” Okay, but if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t have clicked on your video. For those of us who don’t know what we’re doing, they’ll add, “And I’ll show you how in one-hundred and twelve simple steps.” My guess is that most DIY guys have either done this over hundred and thirteen times, or they had some handyman job where they did it frequently. We do want this level of expertise, of course, but some of the times their knowledge and expertise leads them to take some knowledge for granted. 

If you’re anything like me, and you’ve spent most of your life calling Scully, I’m not going to kid you, fixing most household items properly is hard, or at least they were/are for me. My apartment dwelling friends say, “Just submit your name to that ambitious, industrious kid’s weekslong wait list. It’s worth the wait, and the labor fees, to have someone else fix it properly for you.” 

Another annoying refrain from DIY guys is the “Anyone can do this from the comfort of their own home.” Anyone can change a garbage disposal? Have you ever lifted one of those things? Try it. Walk into a hardware store and lift one, just for giggles. I can lift a garbage disposal, and I could probably curl it over 100 times, average weight 13.4 lbs., but –and this is a huge but— the angle of the extremely tight kitchen cabinet, beneath my old-world kitchen sink, is such that I can’t put my shoulder into it. For me, holding a 13.4 lb. garbage disposal is all forearm, and although I didn’t have to lift it over 100 times, it felt like it, because of all the holding, positioning, and twisting the task requires.  

To connect a new garbage disposal, we need to lift one from a very difficult angle, position it perfectly, and twist it into a groove. “EASY? You think this is easy? DIYers around the world, do me a favor, drop the word E word from your vocabulary. As David Bowie once sang, It Ain’t Easy, at least not universally.” Some of you are probably laughing at me right now, because you think it is easy. All right, well, let’s gauge the relative term easy through another relative term, experience. How much experience have you had doing this? How much experience do you have doing that? Yeah, I can do that, and I’ve done that so often that I consider it easy. So, there’s that.    

The first step, for those of us with no experience changing a garbage disposal, is to make sure your old garbage disposal is completely done. That’s right, it might not be broken, it might just be jammed. First click the overload button to reset the unit. If that doesn’t work, make sure the disposal is plugged in and the switch is working. (If you have no experience with garbage disposals, it will benefit you to run through this basic checklist before you go out and purchase a new one.) If all that checks out, find what they call an Allen wrench. Put it into the flywheel turning hole at the bottom of the garbage disposal and turn it. Turn it two to three times. If it’s a jam, you might experience a tough turn at some point. If you make it through the tough turn, and it turns with greater ease, you’ll know it was just a jam. Turn it on. If it doesn’t work initially, repeat the process (I had to do this three times on one occasion.) If that doesn’t work, your disposal might need replacing.

flywheel

Taking an old garbage disposal unit out can be accomplished by most. I’m not going to drop the E word here, but if I can do it, I have to imagine there are ten-year-olds out there, who’ve never heard the term garbage disposal, that can remove one. Follow the DIY guy’s instructions by unscrewing all of the this and thats, disconnect the tubes, and then twist the old garbage disposal out. (Note: Be careful that you don’t crack any PVC pipes.) It’s at this point, right here, when my fellow apartment dwellers say that they would just hire some ambitious, industrious kid to do the rest. I would’ve laughed hard at that ten years ago, but I nod solemnly now. “It’s probably for the best,” I now say, “because putting a new disposal on is hard. Don’t listen to the DIYers and their E words. Not everyone can do this.” 

To install a new garbage disposal, you have to position it just so, and twist. It sounds easy, but as I said that heavy thing becomes heavier through all the trial and errors. If it weren’t so heavy, it might be easy, but it’s hard to hold up there for as long as those of us who don’t know what we’re doing to slip it into the waiting groove perfectly for that final twist. If your cabinet is as tight as mine, you might try eleven to thirteen angles before you realize that there is only one angle that will work. You might look at the top of the unit, five to seven times, and try to line it up. It Ain’t Easy.

It’s frustrating, and yet it’s so frustratingly simple that it will become so frustrating that you might reach a point where you consider it impossible. If you reach that point, it’s time to take a break. If age has taught me anything it’s that it’s okay to take breaks, and in some cases, it’s almost mandatory. We’re conditioned by parents, employers, and other authority figures to think in terms of time constraints. Time constraints also define competency and mastery of a project, “I had some problems, sure, but I got it all done in under an hour.” It’s all true, but it’s also true that if you’re as frustrated as I was, you reach a point of diminishing returns. What are you going to accomplish beyond exhausting every profane word you’ve learned from high school? If you continue, trying to achieve a respectable time frame, you’re probably going to be easily satisfied with a half-ass job just to get ‘er done, then after you calm down, you’ll go back and do it correctly.

To clear the mind and approach the project from a new perspective, I suggest taking two breaks. Watch an episode of your favorite comedy in the first one. It doesn’t matter if it’s a movie, show, or podcast. You need to get yourself laughing. In the second break, one that occurs after another thirty minutes of frustration, try punching a punching bag for thirteen minutes. After thirteen minutes of picturing that DIY guy’s face on your punching bag, coupled with attaching some offensive terms to his “Easy” assessments, you should be able to approach this project with a clear mind.

If you take nothing from what I’ve written thus far, remember these two words: The Plug. All garbage disposals come with a plug. The manufacturers add a plug on every the garbage disposal, because some under-the-sink systems (sink, garbage disposal unit, and dishwasher) have the garbage disposal connect to a dishwasher. Some kitchen systems allow dishwashers to connect to the waterline independently. You will need to determine which system you have before installing the garbage disposal. Before removing the old garbage disposal take note of how your under-the-sink system is set up. If the dishwasher connects to the garbage disposal, and you didn’t know anything about the plug, your dishwasher will flood. 

The DIY guy I watched probably covered this, but some of them fellers talk so much that they remind me of my eighth grade teacher. My eyes glaze over, I miss critical information, and I dismiss some of their instructions as blather. Regardless how I missed the information, I knew nothing about the plug, so I installed the garbage disposal with it still attached. When our dishwasher began flooding, we ripped that appliance apart and cleaned every single element on it. We were so confused, until I retraced my steps and realized that all of our dishwasher problems started soon after I installed the new garbage disposal. I turned to my DIY guys, and surprise, surprise, they taught me about The Plug.

If you failed to remove The Plug the first time through, it turns out that you have to undo everything you’ve done. All that frustration that led you to the most comprehensive spiritual experience you’ve ever had, that included forsaking your creator and welcoming him back into your life, was for naught. If you forgot to remove the plug, you’ll have to take the garbage disposal off, grab a screwdriver, and hammer the (expletive deleted) plug out. That sentence was so easy to write, and it was probably just as easy to read. Take it off and put it on again, it’s easy, a trained marsupial could probably do it after they’ve already done it. The reality of removing the garbage disposal, watching the DIY video guy again, taking two breaks, punching him in the mouth for thirteen more minutes, and watching my favorite comedy was as exhausting as the first time through. 

The first thing I think, soon after I’m done, is some people love this. They love getting their hands dirty, doing it themselves, and they love it so much that they invent new projects for the ostensible purpose of updating, modernizing, and renovating. “I think my ceiling fan needs some updating.” Your old one still works. “I know, but it’s so old world.” You can see it on their face, and in the songs they sing while doing it, they love this stuff, and I just sit back shaking my head, asking myself: ‘Why? For God’s sakes why?’

“I’m smart, not like everyone thinks, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect.” I’m not as dumb as I look. I can do things, other things that other people can’t. Some of the things I do are considered hard, very hard to some, but I can accomplish them with ease. I might occasionally, and accidentally, betray some level of arrogance with a look, some sort of unintended feel, or a couple of words, but whenever I start to get all full of myself,  all I have to do is try to fix something in my home that everyone considers so easy to realize that I’m not half as smart as I thought I’d be at this age.   

The Unwanted Heritage

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“How many grown men in the audience tonight grew up wanting to be their dad? If TV is anywhere close to the truth, previous generations revered their fathers. They didn’t call them their dad, they called them father. They did everything they could to impress their father. My dad often talked about how much he respected his father, and how the image he had of his father shaped his maturation. Those days are gone. They just are. We now actively work to disappoint our fathers by becoming artists, influencers on YouTube, writers and standup comedians. We don’t even mind disappointing our whole family now. Is that weird? I don’t know one guy, in his 20’s or early 30’s, who wanted to be anything like their dear old dad when they grew up. Our goal was to be everything but. I’m not just talking money, success, or anything like that. I’m talking about everything. 

“Have we changed this dynamic, or did our dads? The dads on those old fifties and sixties shows never had a hair out of place, and they wore a suit and tie at all times, even to dinner. It’s TV, idyllic images, all that. I got it, but if you talk to people from my dad’s generation, you’ll hear them talk about how different things were in their day. We all make fun of such talk now, but things were so different back then. They respected the people, places, and things around them. They respected personal property. I had no idea why our neighbor, Sam, kept yelling at me for stepping his grass. It’s grass, why do you care? They wore suits to work, to church, on airplanes, and at restaurants.

My dad, I’m not sure if he owned a pair of underwear that didn’t have at least one stain. I’m pretty sure he didn’t buy them that way. He just missed opportunities so often that he didn’t have one 100% clean pair of underwear in his wardrobe. I also think he committed every violation of decorum he could think up on an ear of corn. He’d breathe through his nose while eating it, he had to, because he’d suffocate if he didn’t. There were a couple of occasions when our eyes met, while he was doing it. It was so uncomfortable. “Take it easy on that thing Dad,” I said. “It’s not trying to get away.” Why would I strive to be that man?

“Then there were the farts. The opportunity to hear my dad fart was one of the primary reasons I had friends. They didn’t get in line to hear them, but once he started in, they didn’t want to leave our house. “This is funnier than anything on TV,” they agreed. 

“How many times can you hear a fart and still think it’s funny?” I asked them. It was an endless source of amusement to them, and my dad loved them as much as they did. He built material around his gastric releases. “I just blew her a kiss,” was his favorite. He said that once, when he accidentally let a loud one go on some innocent, unsuspecting woman in a grocery store, and my friend was laughing so hard he couldn’t walk right for minutes.

“Dad also learned what he considered an award-winning phrase, following any expulsion of gas from his intestines, “Better to let it out and bear the shame than hold it in and bear the pain.” It rhymed, so Dad thought he was doing Robert Frost or Shakespeare. It was as close as my dad ever came to citing poetry. I don’t know who came up with that phrase, but I’d have fantasies of doing vile, disgusting things to them, and I am not a violent man. I don’t view violence as a way of dealing with confrontation, but after decades of hearing that phrase, I developed some empathy for those in a desperate search to find something to end their pain. I’ve heard some talk about getting in a time machine to kill Hitler to save humanity from what he inflicted upon so many in the world at the time. I’ve thought the same about the originator of this phrase. Whenever my dad would say it, my friends would just devolve to gales of laughter, and those vile, disgusting thoughts of violence seemed like the only solution to me.

“When they’d turn to me with their laughter, I basically said, “I find him absolutely vile.” Yeah, I was the priggish old woman to my dad’s Rodney Dangerfield character in a movie. If you’ve ever seen one of those old movies, a rich, snobby old woman would say, “I find you utterly repulsive,” with her nose up in the air. Rodney would say, “It’s a party babe, loosen up.” To which the woman would punctuate her disgust with some final sound of revulsion. My dad was the Dangerfield character who stuck his thumb up the arse of the institution, and I was his institution. 

“I heard so many farts by the time I hit my teens that I could no longer find humor in the fart as a teenage boy. Does that strike you as profound, because I think about all the great jokes I missed out on, because I was so tired of the fart joke.

There was one time when our teacher, a prim and proper nun, let one go in church, and it was loud, and it was during the service. That’s funny now, right? To 99.9% of the pre-teen, male demographic that’s not just funny, it’s once-in-a-lifetime, you-had-to-be-there hilarious. Church is one of those places where every pre-teen gets the giggles over the dumbest stuff, but a nun farting in church might qualify as the most shockingly hilarious event in a pre-teen boy’s life, and to the 99.9% contingent, it is. There is a .1% of grade school-era boys who have heard so many farts in life, so many fart jokes, and so much fart laughter that our reservoir of fart laughter is so dried up that we can’t even smile at a prim and proper nun farting in church. We know each other too, we .1 percenters. We spot one another, down the pew, and we nod one of those closed-eye nods, amidst all the other students gasping for air. It’s the we-have-the-same-dads nod. We’re members of this very exclusive club we wanted no part in, so we smile and force laughter, all the while knowing that our flatulating fathers deprived us of our golden era of the fart joke. 

***

“My mom had her quirks too, and she had her own unusual sayings and traditions. The traditions she learned and passed down had nothing to do with farts, or anything as revolting as my dad’s. She was our version of a normal person, and we needed her dose of normalcy to combat everything being thrown at us. She used to read to us every night, she tucked us in, and gave us one of her sweet, motherly kisses before heading to the door. Then, right after she told us how much she loved us, and before she closed the door she’d say, “Sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite.” 

“I didn’t even know what bedbugs were back then. Are there really tiny, little bugs crawling all over my bed and my body? Is this common, and what do we have to do to prevent them from biting me? She didn’t intend to introduce this horrific thought into our already creative minds. She thought this familiar, little rhyme conveyed sentiment. I love you, and have a good night’s sleep. Oh, and don’t let the bedbugs bite. This was my mom’s idea of punctuating love. She did it so often that by the time I started thinking about what it was she was saying, it was already an accepted part of our parting ritual at the end of a night. I also think she just liked the phrase, because it rhymes, “Sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite.” 

“What you may not know, because I didn’t, is that fossils and early writings discovered that bedbugs date back to ancient Egypt and Rome and industrialization and colonization brought them here. So, when ancient Egyptians issued such warnings, they meant it. The mattresses they slept on were made of straw and feathers, and they were held up on a series of latticework ropes. The origin of the phrase sleep tight was probably made in reference to the parents warning their children to tighten their ropes to prevent sagging. Bedbugs cannot jump or fly, but they probably didn’t know that. Another theory speculates that sleep tight referred to keeping pajamas tightly wound to prevent bedbugs from getting in, but all these theories involve speculation over the origin of the phrase. The point though is that it’s possible that some form of this phrase could be hundreds to thousands of years old. 

“If we took a step back to realize what we’re saying about bedbugs, before we close the door to immerse our kids in total darkness, where their unusually creative minds spin just about everything we say into some form of horror that causes them insomnia and nightmares, we might want to give some thought to ending the tradition that suggests these nasty, little germ-ridden insects are probably going to bite us unless … unless they somehow don’t let them. That’s a question I never asked “How do I go about not letting them?” Seriously? “Are there proactive, preventative measures I should employ here, and why are you requiring me to do this alone?” Isn’t this basically what we’re saying when we say, good night, sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite? We’re saying that we’ve found proactive, preventative measures pointless, and you’re kind of on your own here. Now, good night, and don’t let them bite. Slam! We may have found the answer for why Joey always sleeps with his cute little Mattel swords and shields, he’s preparing for battle. 

“Traditions are what they are, thoughtless traditions,” Barry said, “but they are also an inner node of our family tree that we consciously, and subconsciously, use to connect us to our mothers, our grandmothers, and their definition of love. There’s also that added ingredient, in some weird and inexplicable way, that we see it as a definition of quality parenting. We don’t think about it. We just do it. It’s a set of parental instructions or system of rules written into our code and our peculiar programming language. It’s as much a part of our fabric as familial tales of our cranky old uncle swearing every time he has to stand up, the way our grandpa makes noises when he sits, and playing cars with our cousins on kitchen tile in our pajamas.   

***

“These generations-old, odd traditions that influence and enhance who we are surfaced when I picked my kid up from school. Some kids, somewhere on the playground, began singing the borderline horrific song Ring around the Rosie. Everyone knows this singalong song, right? Why do we all know it, and who taught these kids this tradition? We did. Who taught us? We just sort of pick it up from somewhere, and no one remembers where. It’s a tradition that was, is, and probably will always be. I smiled when I heard them sing it. Ring around the Rosie, sing it with me now, pocket full of posies, ashes ashes, we all fall down. 

“Apparently, there are numerous versions of this song sung around the world, and some of you might know a different one, but that’s the one we sang in my pocket of the world. For as many versions as there are, there are nearly as many interpretations of the lyrics. As kids we sang it just to sing something while we did something else, but some folklorists suggest the lyrics ‘ring around the rosie’ might have developed as a result of kids teasing other kids when they spotted a red owie on their arm. Any owie, I assume, was subject to ridicule, and if you know a kid, you know they can get bruises, bumps, and red spots walking through an aisle at Walgreen’s. “Where did you get that bruise on your arm? Joey” “I don’t know,” and they don’t. They really don’t. It’s as much a mystery to them as it is to you.  

“When one of these 1665-era kids of London spotted an owie on one of their friends arm, they sang Ring Around the Rosie to tease him that he might want to consider the idea that he might have …. the plague. The plague! Some call it The Great Plague of London, others called it Black Death, and historical chroniclers called it last major epidemic of The Bubonic Plague in England. Some trace the origin of this little song to this Bubonic Plague that slaughtered over 100,000 Londoners at the time, and the total population of London, at the time, was around 460,000. So, it killed nearly one in four Londoners. 

“Ring around the Rosie! Yeah, we saw your little owie, Joey, and we’re pretty sure that means we’re going to be throwing your body in one of the local burning, plague pits soon. 

So many people were dying from the plague that they couldn’t keep up. If you’re from an area of the country that can be affected by wintry conditions, you know that there are times when police won’t respond to minor car accidents. They tell you to exchange information, and drive on. This is what was happening in 1665-England. If a loved one dies, just wait till nightfall and give them to a corpse carrier, who would stroll through the night with his agricultural cart, yelling out, “Bring out your dead!” Fans of Monty Python’s 1975 movie Holy Grail know this scene well. When his cart was full, the corpse carrier would take his load to a plague pit to burn and bury the corpses. 1665 England didn’t bother with funerals, ceremonies, caskets, or graves. There were just too many corpses in too short a time. So, unless you had the money to get a proper service, they threw your corpses in a plague pit, and we can only guess that little Joey probably saw a few of his cousins, aunts, and friends thrown onto the corpse carrier’s cart or into the pit. We all use various mechanisms to deal with the horror happening around us, and kids are more sensitive, thus more brutal, in trying to prevent the horror from getting inside their head, so they developed this cute, little rhyme to suggest that their friends, or that kid who sits two seats up and to the right in class, is headed for the burning corpse pit soon. Isn’t that just the cutest thing? What do you say we teach our kids to sing that for the next three hundred, plus years?

“Some folklorists suggest that the ‘pocket full of posies’ verse was used to mock those kids whose parents believed that if their Joey carried flowers in his pocket, it was a homeopathic remedy to prevent the onset of the plague. So, this portion of the song basically says, “Even though you had a pocket full of posies, you still caught the plague, Joey, SUCKER!” 

The conclusion of the song might be the most horrific, as the “Ashes, Ashes, we all fall down” lyrics suggest that Joey’s tormentors realized that they were acknowledging that they were going to get it too, we all will, and we’re all going to die en masse. One would think that in the age of COVID, we should consider ending the tradition that involves a sing-a-long about catching plagues, airborne or otherwise, that could slaughter hundreds of thousands.  

“I’ve heard that the folklore surrounding these interpretations of the lyrics might not be true, but even the most obnoxious, cellphone-checking sleuths will have to admit that there’s enough speculation among folklorists who’ve examined the lyrics of the song that we should probably stop teaching it as a sweet, pleasant “singalong” rhyming song our kids can sing on a playground. I mean, how can anyone spin “Ashes ashes we all fall down?” as anything other than a relatively disturbing dystopic image? A creative, young mind might even spin the lyrics as a warning for all participants to prepare for a nuclear winter? 

***

“Almost everyone here tonight is a complex, fully formed adult who has lived through several different, complicated eras of life, met thousands of different people, and read at least a few books,” Barry said. “Yet, we don’t know what we’re doing anymore than our parents did when it comes to parenting, and even if we did, we wouldn’t know what to do about it. I’m sure some of you are more confident in your parenting skills, have a master plan, or whatever, but most of us are just making it up as we go along. 

Have you ever had another parent look to you as a model of good parenting? It’s unnerving. You’re looking to me for some sort of guide for good parenting? What kind of dysfunctional and confused parent must you be to look to me? Good God man, I’m a mess. My model for everything I do, as a parent, is my dad, and he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. I mean, look how I turned out. I’m this big ball of the contradictions, hypocrisies, and family traditions that involve dystopic songs and nighttime warnings of bug infestations that my parents taught me. The greatest thing my dad ever taught me was independence, and there are a vast number of merits to teaching your children how to solve their own problems, play alone, and to prepare them for the reality that they’re going to spend most of their time alone, but the constant refrain of my dad’s parenting was, “You’re on your own kid.” I learned most of the strengths and weaknesses of total independence at 11. “Don’t get in trouble, keep your grades up, and don’t touch my stuff.” 

“One interesting byproduct fell out of my dad’s relatively dysfunctional definition of parenting, and that was that I learned that he didn’t care about me near as much as I thought he did. He didn’t attend my sporting events, so he wasn’t cheering me on from the stands, but he wasn’t booing either. This led me to the notion that no one’s cheering us on from the proverbial stands either. We’re on your own here. They might applaud an accomplishment of ours in the moment, but they really don’t care near as much as we think. But, and here’s the element of life it took me decades to fully comprehend, no one cares as much as you think about our failures either. It’s one thing to say people don’t care much about our success. That’s yours to love, cherish, and celebrate, but when we fail, we’re sure that everyone from our parents to that guy in the checkout line at The Supersaver knows too. The truth is, they’re not paying near as much attention as we think. This is not only a bizarre way of thinking, it’s wrong, right? 

The fact that people don’t pay as much attention as we think, or fear, is actually documented in various psychological studies. They’ve performed tests that involved a student walking in front of a huge college classroom to interrupt a professor and ask them a question. That student, in question, was wearing one of the loudest T-shirts he could find. The result, 10% of the people noticed that shirt. When a separate but similar test was done with a student wearing the finest suit known to man interrupting a class to ask the professor a question, 10% noticed that suit. We’re not paying as much attention as we think, and they aren’t either. 

Some might find it depressing to learn that we’re all alone in the world, but if you turn that study around, you might find that it frees you up to try things we otherwise wouldn’t if we thought anyone was paying attention. If you latch onto the idea that no one’s near as much attention to what you do, who you wear, or those silly jokes you tell, then just do what you do with the knowledge that no one’s really paying any attention.