Life is a Comedy

Don’t take life too seriously, or so they say. What if you got to Heaven and found yourself in a comedy competition with ten other candidates? The rules: the humor has to be true; losers do some P.T. (Purgatory Time); and the winner is The Last Comic Rising.    

I’d consider using the following:

The story of a friend, Bob, who celebrated the entire first day of winter in a New Hampshire bar. While he was imbibing inside, Mother Nature was snowing outside, and a foot of the white stuff greeted him in the parking lot. Undaunted, Bob got in his car and drove off. Minutes later he saw a police cruiser in his rear view mirror. One more ticket and he’d lose his license so, only three miles from Vermont, Bob decided to run for the border. He accelerated to fifty; the cop still on his tail, blizzard still on his nose. 60, 70, 80 miles an hour and he couldn’t shake the cop; the chase was taking on mythic proportions in Bob’s mind.

The speedometer read eighty-five when there was a knock on his side window. Bob turned and saw a cop, standing there! He rolled down the window, more out of habit than understanding.

“You’re just digging yourself in deeper,” smiled the cop standing outside the car spinning its wheels in the parking lot. (I wrote a short story about that one.)

Then there was the late night flight out of Pittsburgh. Eric, one of my partners, and I entered the empty 727 and chose opposite aisle seats near the back. A man in a business suit was behind us and picked the middle seat in front of Eric. Then came one of those movie moments. Someone blocked the light from the doorway. I looked up and one of the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen sway slowly down the aisle. She passed twenty lines of empty seats, stopped at the row in front of us, pointed to the vacant aisle seat, and asked the businessman, “Is this seat taken?”

Eric leaned toward me and whispered, “That’s the third saddest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Or I might tell about the Thanksgiving dinner when we had strawberry shortcake for dessert, with lots of whipped cream piled on top. My cousin Michael, about six, bent down to take a bite and got whipped cream on his nose. Everyone laughed. Michael knew an audience when he saw one, and repeated his new trick. Everyone laughed again … except his parents.

“Michael,” Uncle Bill said sternly, “that’s enough. If you do that again, you go to your room with no dessert.” Michael looked at his father, then at his audience. You could see him weighing the decision  —instant fame or dessert. No contest, it’s all or nothing. His head moved so quickly, his entire face was buried in the strawberry shortcake.

I could talk about: when Susie, my three year-old daughter, brought her mother a red wagon full of daffodils for Mother’s Day — forty of them, just the heads, freshly picked from the neighbor’s garden; or when I told my daughter Christine that staying in her bed after a nightmare was the hardest thing she’d ever learn in life. After a thoughtful pause she said, “No, dividing by fractions is;” or about my son George’s first homework assignment, to write a hundred word essay on George Washington. Proving himself to be his father’s son, and under some pressure to not miss the beginning of Starsky & Hutch, he proudly produced the following: “George Washington was the first President of the United States. He was a very brave man.” To meet the requirements he repeated the word “very” 85 times.

I’d also consider the story of a young boy who was upset, loaded his favorite book and teddy bear onto a little red wagon, and announced to his mother that he was running away from home. Silently, wagon in tow, the little boy turned right onto the sidewalk and sadly headed away from the house that had been his home for five wonderful years. The mother waited patiently, using the opportunity to prune some geraniums, and soon saw the little boy approaching from the opposite direction, which just proves it’s hard to run away when you’re not allowed to cross the street alone.

Or maybe I’d just tell the one about the same guy, now grown up, who spent a whole week trying to decide what was his funniest story and still never got very far from home.
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