“If you want to be hilarious, someone has to get hurt,” is something I used to say. “You can be slightly humorous with a knock-knock joke, and quick comebacks might earn you the title clever, but if you want to be truly hilarious, your goal should be offending people and grossing them out.” I used to think that, believe it, and say it all the time, because I thought it was provocative and so true, until I saw someone go after another. They were so savage that I realized causing someone actual pain was not as funny as the theoretical idea of it. I amended my theory by adding, “As long as you’re the victim, because there’s nothing better than a well-timed mean-spirited, self-deprecating joke.”

“And the comedy is in details,” I would add when I heard people keep their stories comfortably vague. “Why would you even tell me this great story about an embarrassing part of your life and leave out the details? That’s like going out to a restaurant and ordering potatoes with a side of broccoli. I like broccoli as much as the next guy, but what’s the difference between broccoli at a restaurant and broccoli at home? No one I know goes out on the town for a head of broccoli. We want the meat.”

When I say stories, I’m talking about those casual, fun stories that two fellas share while sitting in the stands at a baseball game. I’m talking about those tales that are so embarrassing that you may not know the comedic value of them until you say them out loud. They’re the funny ones that get the other fella laughing. Some of us leave out the details of those stories, because they reveal our vulnerabilities. Once we lay those tails out, and the other guy starts laughing his tail off, it can be strangely liberating. The two of us are there, mentally, picturing you in the moment while you remember all of the finer details of your truly embarrassing moment in life, and if you deprive us of those details, it’s the literary equivalent of slamming the door on the best room of your house as you give us a tour.

If you’re anything like me, and you’re in the midst of hearing one of these stories, we don’t want it to end, so we ask them leading questions. Not only do we want to be with them, in the moment, but we want to help them help us find their story entertaining. So, we ask leading questions, such as, “Really? What did you think of that?” or “How did that affect you?”

We ask specific, situational questions that specifically pertain to the other’s story, and some of us have asked these questions for so long that that’s just kind of who we are. We ask active listening questions that some might confuse with those from a psychotherapist, an investigator, or that incredibly annoying person who can’t let someone finish a story without asking five-to-ten questions while they’re trying to tell it. Unlike most quality professionals, however, we only ask such questions to serve the comedy of the story, as opposed to anything that serves a purpose. We’re not tracking our subjects through the trials and tribulations of their life to help them find their core, so they might find their way back to greater mental health. We just want the funny.

If you’re anything like me, you crave funny tales about foibles and failures, because there’s something so interesting about a person who is not afraid to let their guard down and tell you who he really is. We do have to be careful, or if careful isn’t the right word, and it usually isn’t when it’s just two fellas telling each other what a foible he is, how about strategic. We need to qualify such questions by saying, “We’ve all done stupid stuff. Trust me, we’ve all done what it takes to go from idiot to a total idiot.” When we drop a line like that, and we mean it, we develop a temporary bond that can lead our storyteller to test the parameters of that line. 

The only thing I love better than a story full of failure and foibles, is an in-depth exploration of those failure and foibles, and if you’ve read any other articles on this site, you know that I’m not the type to just sit there and feed on another’s carcass. I lead the charge and set the template. In doing so, I make the other person feel more comfortable talking about their own failures and foibles.

Once the two of us lay the groundwork of our hilarious misadventures, we spend the rest of the evening trying to top the stories we’ve both told thus far, and neither party cares why we’re trying to do that as long as they’re funny. This builds until somewhere around the second inning, we start to make a thematic connection. Then, somewhere around the fourth inning, after the second beer is partially consumed, the stories become a little more personal as we become a little more vulnerable, and we achieve the next plane of funny together. Shortly after that second round, we’ve also established the idea that we’re not just good listeners, we’re actively engaged in the other’s stories. The two of us become so good at it that we breed a level of trust and confidence in one another, until the competitive desires set in, and we try to make the other guy laugh harder than we did before. We don’t care if the details prove somewhat embarrassing at this point, so we dig deep into our story bank to find the most entertaining nuggets of our life so far. When they laugh, we know we’re really onto something. Neither of us knows what that something is, but we know it’s something worth exploring.

As much fun as these baseball nights can be, age and experience has taught me levels of restraint. I offer some of the details that I require of others, but I refrain from offering details that could prove so embarrassing that the next day at work is a little uncomfortable, and I expect them to do the same. I get as caught up as anyone else in these moments, but experience has taught me that there are details and there are details. Details are funny, as I’ve written, and they’re crucial to the quality story, but some details provide irreversible images that our audience will remember the next time they see us.

I’ve also learned firsthand, the hard way, to avoid too much poking and prodding, because once we convince a fella how entertaining he can be, some of us have trouble stopping. They’re not accustomed to someone finding them so interesting and entertaining, and their competitive desire to top their last story, or ours, can lead them to taking a step off that comfortably vague cloud and accidentally imprint an irreversible image in our brains.

When I’m in one of those conversations with a fella, and he’s dropping details of his failures and foibles on me, I’m so engaged that great plays and key moments in the baseball game we’re attending only serve to interrupt our fascinating discussion.

Roy and I talked about personal details from our lives, but we kept our details comfortably vague, because that’s just what fellas do at a baseball game. No one wants to lay out detail-oriented, personal problems at a baseball game, because we know no one wants to hear about all that at a baseball game. No one wants to go so deep that they end up with tears in their eyes at a baseball game, because as Tom Hanks said, “There’s no crying in baseball.”

Yet, most people can’t stop themselves. They have no governors on content, in the manner automobiles have governors on speed to prevent the vehicle from accelerating faster than programmed thresholds. They dig for more provocative details, because provocative details aren’t just funny, they’re hilarious, and what’s more provocative, embarrassing, and hilarious than misadventures in the bathroom?

Some people just love a great story about what happened to them during the waste removal process. The moment I start to hear them go down this road, my stop sign reflexively pops us, in the manner a stop sign automatically pops us when a train bypasses an indicator in its destination. I instinctively stop poking and prodding, and I try to change the subject, because I’ve learned that some men have no problem discussing their gastrointestinal issues (GI), as long as they’re funny, and they’re always funny to some. “Oh, c’mon, it’s nature!” they say. “Deer poop, dogs poop, even your beloved octopus has to excrete what its body can’t use.”

“That’s true, undeniably true, but for most of us their byproducts are not the reason we hike through nature preserves and swim in oceans,” I return. I say most of us, because I’ve met the exceptions on more than one occasion. I don’t know if it’s a talent, skill, or a preoccupation, but some men are wired in such a way that they can take any topic and turn it into a discussion of misadventures with waste removal.

Tommy Spenceri proved to me how pervasive his talent in this arena was when he told me about the highlight of a relatively expensive whale spotting cruise he attended. These cruises have become so popular that they’ve become an industry in some locales, generating over $100 million a year, and creating thousands of jobs for locals. Some of these tourists are almost spiritually moved at the very sight of the beast, others find the geyser of misty spray bursting skyward from its blowhole an almost religious experience, but Tommy’s wiring led him to find the size of the whale’s excrement the most memorable experience of that vacation. “You should’ve seen it, it was larger than my whole body,” he said with restrained excitement. “I’m serious, I could’ve dove into it Vitruvian Man and still not touched its outer rims.”

As the son of a man with such wiring, Tommy and Roy’s unusually obsessive preoccupation with the products of our biological functions was not new to me, but that didn’t mean I wanted to hear about it. So, the moment these discussions pop up, my stop sign follows suit. I switch my active listening skills into the off position, and I put the picks and shovels of my poking and prodding away. 

I’ve been relatively successful in this endeavor over the years, unless I’m at a baseball game drinking beer, and when I talk about beer I’m not talking about the standard beer that everyone drinks just to tie a buzz on. I’m talking about the delicious craft beer designed by master craftsmen who are so good at what they do that the results of their brainstorming, testing, and hard work go down so smooth that we miss all of the indicators that tell us to stop.  

I wasn’t drunk when the generally unappealing discussion of food poisoning began, but those delicious craft beers dulled my senses just enough that I accidentally ushered him on with my laughter. In a completely sober state, I know that the food poisoning discussion is a war story. It spawns the competitive, “You think you had it bad? Well, get a load of what happened to me,” as the two of us try to top one another with our experiences. Two beers in, and a discussion of food poisoning becomes a part of the funny conversations two fellas have at a baseball game. In that moment, Roy introduced the food poisoning discussion with an innocuous, comfortably vague version of his worst case, but I made the mistake of topping him with my story of an eighteen-year-old, living on his own for the first time.

“I was on my own for the first time, and I knew nothing about the proper ways to preserve meat.” I said. “No one effectively warned me that meat is basically poison when you leave it uncovered in a fridge for a couple days. The meat had little white spots on it, but I thought that the gallon of milk I had a shelf higher sprung a leak again. That happened about a week earlier, with a different gallon, and I just thought it happened again. I basically poisoned myself. The pain I felt from that bout of food poisoning was something I never experienced before or since. Not only did I question whether I was going to live through this, I kind of questioned if I really wanted to.”

That was it from my end, comfortably vague. I could’ve gone into detail, embarrassingly specific detail, but I didn’t want to go down that road. I didn’t want to go down that road, because that’s not what you do when you’re talking to a fella, over beers, at a baseball game, during an otherwise beautiful Friday evening.

Roy saw my move, and he decided to checkmate me with his “You think you had it bad …?” plank. My guess is Roy thought that the best way to top a relatively entertaining story that remained comfortably vague was to go into detail. The humor, Roy must’ve thought, is in the details. Roy must’ve thought that my story was the culinary equivalent of a potato with a side of broccoli, and to top mine, he brought the meat.

“Mine was coming out both ends, you know what I’m saying?” he began. I knew what he was saying, and while the image I had in my head was cringe-worthy, it wasn’t completely irreversible. I don’t know if Roy was feeling ultra-competitive in the war story arena, but he decided that he needed to put an exclamation point on his story by adding one final, irreversibly disturbing nugget, “You know that point where you have to change your underpants three times in a day …”

I’m all for my storytellers telling me about their epic fails, but when this grown man told the tale of his inability to make it to a facility on time, I wasn’t sure how I could help him restore his credibility. To my mind, unless you’re medically declared incapable of doing so, failure to make it to the facility on time might be the most humiliating and embarrassing moment in a grown adult’s life. The one proviso is that if it happens, it happens behind a closed, locked door, and with some diligent effort devoted to the cause, we can destroy any and all evidence until no one will ever find out that our streak of not soiling ourselves since that embarrassing moment in second grade is now over. The only thing that can make that ultimately embarrassing and humiliating moment in life the second most humiliating moment in life is by going public with it.  

My new rule: if we’re having such a discussion, and we’re both grown adult males, at a BASEBALL GAME, keep it vague. I know that goes against everything I wrote earlier, and it goes against my personal constitution to say that, but everything is relative and situational. When we’re sitting at a baseball game, I don’t want to hear excruciating details about an emotional moment from your life that leaves tears rimming your eyes, and I don’t want to picture you, my adult, male friend, with dirty underpants around your ankles, and a look of shame and disgust on your face, as you bear witness to the consequences of your inability to make it to the facility on time. 

As a storyteller who values “The Funny” so much that I don’t care who gets hurt, as long as it’s me, I understand that it’s all about our vulnerabilities, and I understand that comedy is confessional, but we’re smashing some valuable signposts that warn us against going further. We do this, because our standup comedians, podcasters, and our Facebook friends are now saying some of the most awful, embarrassing and incriminating things about themselves. We laugh at/with these boundary smashing and taboo tweaking comedians, because they’re brand of funny feels so new that it feels transcendent, and  we all want to be the guy who tops the other guy and breaks on through to the other side of conventional storytelling and conventional comedy. Before we break through, though, I think we should all ask ourselves what we will look like on the other side? I might be an endangered species now for overthinking such matters, but Roy, Tommy, and my dad taught me that garnering intrigue, eliciting sympathy, and getting the laugh isn’t a gumbo that means so much to me that I’m going reveal an ultimate humiliation that contains irreversible imagery around my ankles. They’ve taught me that there’s nothing wrong with keeping it comfortably vague.