Tag: jokes

How The Brady Bunch Damaged Him

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“The thing about being human is,” Bob Peters said to initiate a conversation with my friend Arnold Glass.

“No, I am human,” Arnold said. “I’m standing right before you, two arms, and two legs just like you.” 

That was funny, I thought, examining Arnold’s face for a break that would reveal the joke. It wasn’t award-winning funny, or even knee-slapping funny, but I considered it a fairly decent trap to set for Bob Peters for future jokes. Depending on where he took it from there, I thought he laid some pretty decent groundwork. The three of us were co-workers at a company, on break, shooting the stuff. I didn’t know Bob Peters. He was kind of a floater, who moved from person to person, group to group, but I thought I knew Arnold. We were co-workers who spent so much time around each other that I suppose I could’ve call him a best friend at work, but that just seems like such a grade school/high school designation. It just feels odd to call a grown man that I didn’t know before we started working at the same company a best friend, but we did a lot together over the years. Arnold could be funny occasion, but he was more knock-knock joke funny. This level of dada comedy, or what I thought might be intentionally irrational comedy without a base or direction was so out of character for him that I thought he might follow it up with, ‘Sorry, that just sounded like something to say. It didn’t work as well as I thought it would.’ Not only did Arnold not say something like that or give any cues that he was joking, he was all bowed up. I was almost positive that he wasn’t looking to throw down, during a 15-minute break on company grounds, over something as odd as this, but he looked so defensive. What an odd thing to say, I thought, and what a weird thing to get defensive about.

Bob Peters obviously dismissed Arnold’s comment as nothing more than an obnoxious attempt to interrupt him before continuing, “As I was saying-”

“No,” Arnold interrupted, growing uncharacteristically confrontational. “You called me out here. I’m a human being with all the same hopes and dreams as you. I’m going to need you to acknowledge that before you continue.”

“Fine, I acknowledge that you are a living, breathing human being with all the same hopes and dreams as the rest of us,” Bob Peters said. “Now, can I continue?”

***

“What was all that about?” I asked after Arnold and I finished our conversations with Bob Peters, and he walked back to the office.

“Cripes, I forgot to apologize to Bob for all that didn’t I,” Arnold Glass said. “He just happened to step on one of my land mines, but he didn’t mean anything by it did he?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I think he just thought it was a clever intro … but what do you think he meant by it?”

“I don’t know. It’s that name thing,” Arnold said. “I thought Bob was trying to be funny, but now that I think about it, I’m not sure Bob even knows my last name. I know I don’t know his. We’re not on a last name basis.”

“Peters,” I said. “Bob Peters.”

“Okay, Peters. Well, God bless him for having such a normal last name.”

“Glass? What’s wrong with Glass?” 

“We’ve never talked about this?” Arnold asked me with some fatigue. “You obviously didn’t grow up watching The Brady Bunch, did you?” I said I had, and the name George Glass immediately came to mind, but I feigned ignorance. “There was an episode where Jan Brady made up an imaginary boyfriend. When she was pressed for his name, she said, “George,” and then she looked around and saw a glass of water. “George Glass,” she said.”

“Okay, yeah, I remember that.” 

“I’ve had nightmares about that scene.”

“You’ve got to be joking?” I asked with suspicious but confused laughter. 

“I’m not. I’m really not,” Arnold said with a most serious face. “We were all too young to know the episode when it first came out, but, you know, reruns. I might’ve been in 2nd grade when Mary Beth Driscoll said, “Are you even real?” I didn’t get it, because I never saw the episode, so she explained it. I didn’t think it was funny, but everyone else did. Everyone else did, and they joined in on the joke. It hurt a little, but mainly because I didn’t understand it. Then, every time they reran that episode, I’d get some semblance of that joke, and I probably took way too personal, but I was young, real young, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. ‘We’re just joking, for gosh sakes Arnie’ they’d say, and that never made it any better. Things like that are stupid, insignificant, and irrelevant, until they start to gather moss. Every time you meet a friend’s mom, they ask if you’re real, or they say it’s nice to finally meet you. We thought you were fake. It sort of petered out after a while. The harmless and stupid jokes never ended, but I didn’t hear them as often for quite a while there, until the 1996 movie A Very Brady Sequel came out, and then the internet picked that whole joke up as a meme for imaginary boyfriends, girlfriends, and imaginary friends, and it started all over again.” 

I could’ve, and probably should’ve, expressed some sort of sympathy, but I couldn’t help but find it so harmless that it was cute and cute-funny. The general idea of a man being mentally badgered about anything calls for a sympathetic response, but to hear someone say that a Brady Bunch joke was the source of his pain was so unprecedented that I couldn’t help but find humor in it. I managed to keep a straight face, a solemn, sympathetic face, until he said:

“I’ve even considered changing my name more than once. I’m serious. Totally serious,” he added when I ‘C’mon’ed him’. “If my dad didn’t talk me off that ledge, talking about breaking the long, storied history of the Glasses, and their proud British heritage, I would’ve gone through with it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said when I laughed. “It’s just the words breaking the Glass got to me,” I confessed. Those words weren’t funny, but it didn’t take much to tip me into laughter, and I considered it a decent excuse for laughing.

“It’s really not funny, and it’s not a joke,” Arnold said defensively. “When I was in my teens, and I’d meet my girlfriends’ families, their sisters would jab me in the shoulder with their finger and say things like, “I just wanted to make sure you were real.” Another person, a mom, a nice, sweet maternal mom said, “We thought it was like that time Jan Brady made up a boyfriend, and she said his name was George Glass. We thought Julie did that with you. Sorry, but we thought she made you up.”

“My guess is that’s probably happened a million times,” I said after I achieved some level of control. “Nerdy girls and boys have made up boyfriends and girlfriends since, probably since the cavemen.”

“I get that,” Arnold said, “and if it happened once or twice, I’d say it’s only happened once or twice, and that’s normal, as you say, but it’s happened so often that … that you can’t help but question your identity and your existence.”

“Your existence?”

“Well, I never thought I wasn’t real, if that’s what you’re asking,” Arnold Glass said, “but these things, these little tiny, and seemingly insignificant things, can have a cumulative effect that can, regrettably, end up all over someone like Bob. Remind me to apologize to him when I see him.”   

“Example?”

“Example, let’s see,” Arnold said. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your nose. Let me make that clear, because I’d hate to put you through what I’ve been through. I mean it’s not too long, too big, or crooked. You have a very normal nose on your face, but imagine if someone joked that there was something wrong with it. Imagine if it was nothing more than a dumb, insignificant and untrue comment on your nose. You’d tell them to shut up, or some variation thereof that allows you to swat their comment away, like a pesky mosquito. Now imagine that someone else, someone who had no relation to that first person, says the same exact thing. You might start to think there’s something to it. You might be a little paranoid about your nose, right? Maybe? Now imagine that this silly, stupid thing is the same thing your grade school peers hit you with when you were young, very young, too young to know how to deal with it properly. It has a way of chasing you into adulthood, until you’re impulsively launching on someone like Bob. Do you think it could lead to a cumulative effect equivalent to wanting to change your name, like getting a nose job or something? And the whole time, you know you have a perfectly normal nose, because everyone says there’s nothing wrong with your nose, like I had a perfectly normal name, until some writer on some stupid show decided your last name would be the perfect name for an imaginary person.

“See, what you saw was a one-time, seemingly insignificant incident,” Arnold continued. “But you didn’t see the buildup, the accumulation, and you probably just think it was bizarre, and all that, but it was the result of a cumulative effect. Have you ever heard of the Chinese Water Torture effect? They strapped a guy into a chair so tight, he couldn’t move, under a slowly dripping water faucet. Now, we can drop anywhere from one droplet of water to a million drops of water on a person’s forehead, and it won’t cause any physical damage to that forehead, but psychologically? Psychologically, it’s been documented as one of the most cruel, brutal, and inhumane forms of torture ever invented. Why? It is the accumulation of seeing the next drop of water, knowing it’s going to hit your head, and it finally hitting. It’s the same thing here, but my slow drip has occurred over the years, the decades, and it can manifest in ways you saw today with Bob Peters. Some say it can be stressful to the point of panic-inducing attacks. That’s never happened to me, those final stages, but it could. Some say it could.” 

I still couldn’t see it, and in many ways I still can’t. The whole idea of it obviously still fascinates me, but no matter how well Arnold researched what happened to him that led him to his unusual outburst, and how persuasive he was in the moment, I still couldn’t wrap my arms around the idea of what he described as a cumulative effect, even under the umbrella of Chinese Water Torture effect. It was hard to see through the bizarre, silliness of the idea, and it’s still difficult for me to wrap my mind around the idea that a person could be so damaged by a Brady Bunch joke that he’s reflexively lashing out at anyone who even hints that he might not be real, imaginary, or in this case not human. The only thing I can come up with is it’s the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is something we feel for someone experiencing something foreign to our experience. Empathy is almost a shared sentiment we have for someone who is experiencing something for which we experienced ourselves to such a degree our knowledge of it can be intimate, and the only people who can understand The Brady Bunch Glass effect are those who have experienced themselves. 

“For the First Time in my Life, I’m Glad I’m Handicapped.”

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“I never thought I’d say this,” my uncle John whispered to his friend, “but for the first time in my life I’m glad I’m handicapped.” The joke was the conclusion of a “frustrating moment,” John’s experienced on his trip to Florida to see Simon & Garfunkel. 

As funny as the conclusion to John’s story was, I had a hard time laughing. I knew too many sad details of his life to just turn it off and laugh at some insensitive joke John made about condition. Even though John was laughing harder than the three of us, and his lifelong friend Jim Rhodus had tears in his eyes from laughter, I couldn’t just turn it all off, because I knew how much he suffered in life.

With his guidance, I learned not to feel sorry for him, because he said that often did him more harm than good, but when he told me that the first signs of his muscular degenerative disease appeared in high school I couldn’t help but feel bad for him. 

“It affected you in high school?” I asked.

“Kind of,” he said. “I fell a lot. When I ran, I fell. We thought I was just a big old klutz.”  

“That was what we called him, a klutz,” his older brother told me later. “He’d fall for no reason at all. He was the star guard on an undefeated, champion high school football team, and some of the times he’d just fall, in the open field, with no one else was around. It was so embarrassing that we just laughed about it. We developed jokes, like kids do, to avoid wondering if there might be a greater explanation of it. You don’t search for an explanation when you’re a kid. You just laugh and joke about it. We had no idea that his eyes bounced when he ran, and we had no idea that his clumsiness was an early warning sign of a muscular degenerative disease. You have no idea about stuff like that when you’re young. We didn’t even think about greater things. We just thought he was a klutz.”     

Over the course of the next forty years, this disease would gradually rob John of his muscular strength. He lost some of the functionality of his legs before he was thirty, and before he was forty, he began losing use of his arms and hands. Doctors guessed that if John hadn’t spent so much time in the gym, in high school and college, the degeneration could’ve been more rapid. The gradual degeneration was such that before he was sixty, he began to lose his throat muscles. It was difficult for him to speak, and even more difficult for us to hear him. When he inhaled and drew the full force of his lungs, he could muster something equivalent to a loud whisper.

One of the most difficult aspects of his handicap, he once told me, was kids. “Kids don’t understand. They’re scared, and when a kid sees me in the mall, or church, or somewhere they turn to their parents for an explanation. ‘What is wrong with him mommy?’ I’ve heard more than one kid whisper that to their mom. The parents don’t answer, not in front of me. They give me an apologetic look, and I want to scream ‘just tell them I’m handicapped’. Most adults don’t know this, or they don’t think about it at the time, but we handicapped people feel like more of a freak when you don’t answer. Refusing to answer in the moment only leads the child to being more confused, and that confusion can lead to greater confusion and fear. Whatever is going on inside the kid’s mind, the parents make it very difficult for me to talk to the child. It can be so frustrating that I some of the times I wonder if it’s all worth it.”  

It wasn’t the first time I heard him talk about death in a round about way. He talked about it often enough that by the time he did finally pass on, I considered him a soul at peace, and I never saw it that way before no matter how many times I’ve heard it. 

On another occasion, I told him of a family member who wished for death, so he could be with his wife again. “I told him that even if there is a heaven, my bet is we will all look down and think about how much life we wasted on Earth. We do not know if there’s an afterlife, but we know life has a beginning and an end, and that life is short.” 

“It’s true,” John said, “It’s all true, but some of the times it seems to take forever.”  

“What does?”

“Life.”

He did not say that in a profound manner, as if to wrap up his views on life as a handicapped person. He said it as he might the details of the St. Louis Cardinals game from the night before. He shut the game of solitaire game he was playing on the computer down after he said that, and we spoke of the plans we had for the evening. He didn’t intend that to be a room silencing, thought-provoking line, in other words, it was just something he said before saying something else.

It didn’t strike me how illustrative such a line was to him being a handicapped man, until he relayed the Simon & Garfunkel story to me. 

John asked me to accompany him on this trip to see Simon & Garfunkel in concert, but I just couldn’t see traveling halfway across the country to see two men sing. For John, it was a matter of life and death. He spent a lifetime listening to those two old men sing, and he feared he might die before he could ever see them again, or they would, or they would simply stop touring as a duo.

“If you can’t find anyone else to take you, I’ll go, but I want you to drain the swamp of possibilities before asking me again. That’s how badly I don’t want to go.”

Most from John’s generation grew up loving either The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. Some loved Elvis Presley with equal levels of passion, and I’ve met more than a few who pledged allegiance to Johnny Cash, but for my uncle it was all about Simon & Garfunkel. He owned every single album they made together, and he owned most of their solo albums. He also traveled the country to see them sing in concert any time he could. He preferred to stay close to home, of course, but he always had that fatalistic belief that this particular tour might be his last opportunity to see them live, even though he already saw them perform live over a dozen times before. When he sorted through their list of tour dates of that year, he found that the closest they would appear on this particular tour was Florida, an eight-hour flight.  

Why anyone would love the quiet, calm stylings of Simon & Garfunkel this much was beyond me. I have nothing against Simon & Garfunkel. They wrote meaningful songs that my high school administrators used to inspire us during high school spirituals, and I’ve also heard them at a number of weddings and funerals. That’s where I heard Simon & Garfunkel most often growing up, so my associations with them probably hindered my ability to appreciate their craftsmanship. I honestly didn’t care about them one way or another, but my uncle adored their music.

As we age, we learn that there’s no use trying to explain why one person loves a certain type of music over another. The one thing I did needed him to explain was why he needed to see these particular men sing calm, contemplative songs live. What’s the point of watching calm and quiet artists take the stage to play quiet, calm music? I’ve never seen them live, but I can’t imagine they put on much of a show. If they do something that is can’t-miss, how does one show differ from another, and what’s the difference between seeing them live and listening to them on the stereo, or watching their live show on TV? They probably walk onto the stage with little fanfare, carrying a guitar and a bottle of water. 

My frame of reference for concerts is admittedly tainted. I was a teen in the 80’s when heavy metal acts put on shows that we now call arena acts. I’ve never been to a calm, quiet concert before, but I suspect that someone like Paul Simon doesn’t body surf over the audience while singing Bridge Over Troubled Water, and I suspect that their choreographers don’t employ KISS-style pyrotechnics during Here’s to You Mrs. Robinson. My guess is the two of them walk out from behind a curtain and sit in comfortable chairs to sing and play guitar for an hour or so. If they stand, is it more engaging? If they sit, is it more comforting? Do they engage in colorful banter between songs? They probably do, to give us our money’s worth. Garfunkel probably drops a humorous anecdote about Simon that everyone in the audience knows about, and Simon probably hits back with some comment about Garfunkel’s afro, and everyone laughs as they lead into The Boxer. If my Uncle John successfully convinced me to take him to this show, I’d probably miss that rapport, because I’d be asleep.

My guess is a Simon & Garfunkel tour is as low-cost as it gets. How many employees do they have to pay? Does their show require roadies? If they do, my guess is they could use a Volkswagen to transport their equipment from city to city.  

John didn’t care about any of that. In fact, he enjoyed spending hundreds of dollars for the flight, the hotel nights, the ticket price, and everything in between, and traveling for about sixteen hours to and fro to watch a couple of gown men sing calm, quiet songs to him for a couple hours. Even though he said he didn’t consider it a hassle, the idea of what he went through to see that particular Simon & Garfunkel show was at the forefront of his mind when a feller in the audience, near him, began singing along with Simon & Garfunkel. 

“That’s kind of the price you pay when you go to a live concert,” I told my uncle. 

“This guy was singing every song, word for word, and he was singing them at the top of his lungs,” my uncle replied. “Those of us who were near him could barely hear Simon & Garfunkel over him.”

“It’s true. The guy was all but screaming the lyrics,” Jim Rhodus said. Jim was John’s lifelong friend, and the one who eventually accompanied John to Florida. He was also in the room, enjoying John’s retelling. “We could all understand the guy getting swept up in the excitement of the first few songs, but it started to get a little obnoxious after a while.”  

“Yeah, when he continued doing this, what was it, four or five songs in? It was pretty obvious that this guy was going to continue to do it throughout the concert,” my uncle continued. “I just spent eight hours flying, ten total when you account for TSA and other delays, to see these two sing, and this guy was ruining everything for me and everyone around him. So, I finally just had it, and I yelled out, “Would you just shut up!” I was so frustrated that I think I dropped an ill-advised word in there somewhere.”

“And he heard you?” I asked without mentioning how surprising it was that anyone could hear my uncle, due to his condition, and the idea that he was so loud that anyone could hear him over the music was shocking, no matter how quiet and calm the music is. 

“Oh, he heard him,” Jim Rhodus said, starting in on his laughter, as John passed the three-quarter mark of the story.

“I guess I was so frustrated that I mustered more strength than I ever have,” John said, “but yeah, everyone between me and him heard me. This guy bolts out of his seat, as if he received an electric jolt, and he begins scanning the crowd in my general direction. As he stood, he just kept going and going. He had to be, at least, six-foot-five, but in my nightmares, he’s a seven-footer, and he was broad too. I couldn’t see much in the limited light in the audience, but his shadow made him appear 250 pounds of lean muscle. It was like the scene from a 1980’s comedy. So, this Ndamukong Suh-looking fella stands up and looks around for who said that, and he’s ticked off.”   

“Did he look at you?” 

“Not at first,” John said, “but everyone could see his intentions when he stood, and everyone between us gave me up pretty quick. They all turned around and looked at me, and this guy spots me, and the lighting was such that he was mostly in shadow, but I swear I could see flared nostrils. He continues to look at me silently for about five seconds, and then he sits down without saying a word. After I calmed down, which took a little while, I turned to Jim and said, “What did I say exactly?”

“You said,” Jim said. “I never thought I’d say this, but for the first time in my life I’m glad I’m handicapped.”     

The Exit Strategy of Sitcoms

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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.