Carl Grant is good at making people laugh. For this modest service he gets paid somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars per minute. This could be a bad sign, but he isn't a celebrity. His appearances at business conventions and private parties aren't attracting a lot of attention. He's just funny. He does seminars to explain his method and to help others use humor as a communications tool. People don't ask for his autograph; they thank him for showing them how to be funny themselves and enrich their own relationships at work and among friends.
Carl may yet become a commodity on the Hollywood and Lake Tahoe entertainment circuit. If he had started doing comedy sooner, maybe now he wouldn't be able to walk down a busy street in San Francisco or Seattle unrecognized. He might not want to. When you're as rich as Bill Cosby, why not retire to the Riviera. In fact, Carl started learning his craft about fifteen years ago. He did the research that led him to the theories in this book. He analyzed the work of other comics. And he practiced. Lots of us knew him when some of his jokes were clunkers. When asked about that, he says he always found life mildly amusing, but he never tried to work up the enthusiasm of a quiz-show host. He just read up on humor and found out how it was done.
Carl is an important guy in our circle of friends. We love him. We're musicians and writers. Some of us even do honest work. We like to have a good time, both while we're earning a living and at home. We joke around same as you and your friends. Carl is just a special case. He knows why some of our spoofs don't work. And he laughs just as much as anybody when somebody else is funny. He has done well in business and real estate, so he can afford to be candid. Sometimes you and I have to play the game or go looking for another job. But we all know, a little irony or word play, now and then, can make quite a difference.
Maybe humor is the last best hope for humanity. Norman Cousins said an hour of Charlie Chaplin's old films gave him an hour of pain-free sleep, much needed relief during his struggle with Lou Gehrig's disease. What Cousins did with the years he salvaged is well documented. He finished his career at the medical school at UCLA, where he was able to convince some very serious researchers of the benefits of looking on the lighter side. Many of the problems we all meet sooner or later aren't funny, but it sure helps when somebody can find and accentuate a humorous perspective.
The trouble is, humor seems like magic. Some people are able to pull it off. Others try hard, and people groan. What is the difference between a joker who never seems to stop trying, yet only succeeds in irritating people, and someone who makes the difference for us? To transform lonely tedium into a camaraderie that gets everybody to produce at their optimum level takes more than a few jokes from Reader's Digest, but the right attitude can make even tired material come alive.
The Grant technique can be learned, if you aren't trying too hard. That's one of the first rules. The comedian who runs onstage, does a couple of falls, and delivers his material rapid fire into a high powered amplification system is a clown, not a humorist. Clowns can be funny, but we're talking about humor you want to be able to use when your deadline at the office is impossible and your son has drafted you to take six kids to a baseball game on Saturday. Charlie Chaplin does falls. One of the funny things about him, though, is the unperturbed expression on his face as he gets up to face the next catastrophe.
There are a few things about comedy Carl Grant couldn't help but learn while he was still teaching school and coaching baseball. To learn comedy one has to exercise self control. Carl says, keep calm. Easy for him to say! He has been a substitute teacher in Seattle's central district. When Carl delivers his punch line, he seems not to care that much whether we laugh. This is useful, especially while you're learning. People often don't laugh, no matter how good you are. Even the best material needs a little room to breathe. The best stuff, Carl has found, only works on maybe thirty percent of the audience. Watch the audience during the performance of any well known comic. If a comedian can get thirty percent of an audience laughing their glasses off, he doesn't mind if even the majority are still unconvinced.
A second factor that you'll notice before any method is ascertained in a comedian's style is the personal dimension. No method is going to make you--or Bob Hope--into somebody else. It is hard to pin this one down because saying your humor has to fit your personality can miss the mark. It can often be funny when you play a role you are obviously not suited for. Woody Allen aping Bogart is funny. For Woody Allen to try to use Dave Barry's material would be pointless. For you or me, probably none of this is going to work. It is going to take some time to figure out who you are without trying to be anything special, in order to make people laugh when you are trying, without letting on, to to be just incongruous enough to get people to laugh.
In Carl's seminars an occasional person turns up who seems to be rather special with regard to humor. A certain percentage of those who enroll in a class on humor are there because they have been told they need it. One woman was sent by a psychiatrist who thought she was brain damaged. The kind of craziness we are able to walk right into might lead to the conclusion we're all a little off, but this woman was a hard case.
Some people feel they are gifted and want to make the most of their talent for being funny. In a seminar at the University of Washington, a youngish German immigrant turned up who Carl found rather stunning in his ability to take ordinary material and use it to bring down the house. The interesting thing about him was that he was not special in any way Carl could discover. His English was limited, but it wasn't his accent that was funny. After a great deal of analysis, the consensus was that this fellow simply followed the instructions on Carl's handouts. Like a good workman, he wrote out his lines and repeated them in the way most natural to him. When people started to come unglued, he enjoyed it as much as anybody, but he was also as surprised as everybody else. He hadn't thought of himself as a quick wit. He just followed Carl's instructions.
There is a lot of nonsense in circulation. Pop culture and serious art are infected with the notion that whatever is new is better. No matter how bizarre, the main thing is to be innovative. We have pushed the limits of nearly every field of human endeavor. It is still important to pay attention to fundamentals. Even Einsteinian relativity reduces to Newtonian mechanics in the general case. In music, composers have tried to invent new rules. Similarly in the visual arts, we're in unknown regions. What will endure from all the experimentation is anybody's guess. Just remember that the best innovator is one who knows the old rules well enough to know when to break them. Humor is an art, but it takes technique and practice. The techniques that follow are not new. You may want to stretch them to suit your own style, but give them their due. From them ordinary people can learn to accentuate their own sanity when everywhere sirens are blowing in the streets.
BASIC DEVICES
ANTHROPOMORPHISM
In a high technology world it is easy to confuse the roles of machines with those of human beings. With a little imagination to encourage the already blurred distinction between the the mechanical and the human, machines can be almost as nasty as people. Woody Allen does a routine with the voice simulation in a high-tech elevator. The disembodied voice announces floors and other pertinent information. Given the psychological complexes to which Woody is prone, it isn't surprising that he is soon worried that the elevator uses better diction than he does. Before he gets to the third floor, he is thoroughly intimidated by the machine. Of course, Woody Allen has made enough money on his inferiority complex to buy the building and install an elevator with a sycophantic simulated voice. Still, we laugh. No doubt he does too, with some satisfaction.
Carl's routines sometimes project human thoughts or comments on animals. "What is my cat thinking as he watches me shave?" He might let you ponder that one for a while, or imagine the remarks a pair of mountain goats might make while watching a skier who is out of control. Walt Disney's cartoons are the most familiar use of this device. George Orwell's Animal Farm and Wangerin's Book of the Duncow use it. Another of Carl's routines uses this method combined with a bit of candor with regard to his experience in the real estate business.
Salespeople have been known to suggest a client put up mirrors in their home to make its interior look bigger. How might this impress a prospective buyer? Do people really think they can live in that space behind the glass? A parakeet might get interested before he flaps head first to his demise. "My," he muses, "this is a spacious dining room." Cloink!
So, how might I try out this technique? It could be useful to note that the word anthropomorphism is co-opted from the history of ancient religions. Human characteristics were attributed to natural phenomena like floods and thunderstorms. These entities were often viewed as deities to be revered. Human cunning was attributed to trees. The serpent in the Garden of Eden deflowered Eve of her innocence. The wealth of mythology in this vein suggests we have only begun to project the virtues and vices of humanity on a new environment populated with computers, conveyances, machine tools, and communications equipment.
If a horse could be called ornery back in the good old days, what do you call a car that conks out on the freeway in rush hour traffic? The first thing you call it may be usable as comedy in nightclubs that go in for that sort of thing, but we're aiming a little higher. Amplified swearing elicits laughter to relieve the shocking effect it still has on most people. This isn't really humor.
I once owned a sport van prone to bad moods. It had an electrical problem of some sort. And it used to bitterly turn on me. The first few times it happened I got other drivers to give me a jump start. I carried cables. I've been around the block. I took the van in several times to try to coax her secrets out. She was a fairly new model, and good old Harvey at the Arco Station couldn't find anything wrong. If you have ever had a relationship with a woman who has started working against you, you will understand the feeling I had about this van. She would wait until we were halfway across the span of a freeway interchange someplace and then give me the silent treatment. It was as if she was saying, "I'm mad, and if you were any kind of a man you'd know why."
Of course I'd take the bait and answer "Now look, I'm not a mechanic, and it's no reflection on my masculinity. I run twenty miles a week to stay in shape. I'm a college graduate. So don't insinuate that because I'm no good with wrenches I have no hair on my chest."
By then we had come to a stand-off at the edge of the concrete span. "So what is it?" She wouldn't even look up, much less answer me. "Suppose I just leave you here? You can hook up with the first trucker who rolls up. You want to spend the night with some cowboy with Chile Size on his breath!"
After twenty or thirty minutes of this I could usually turn the key and get her going again. We would cruise along fine until the next crisis. I spent a lot of money on that one before we finally burned out.
Home appliance repairs can give you the same sense of confrontation--always fun. Last time I think it was the dryer.
Trying to get caught up on your laundry? Expecting your wife's sister this week end? Of course, she'll want to unpack her suitcase and run a load or two. We've got news for you, sucker! This is a union shop and we're throwing a wrench in the works. We're on strike. Grrrrind! Just pile those wet clothes up until they're moldy. Consider your options now. They're all expensive. No way are you getting out of this until your knuckles are battered, and you've paid through the nose.
A perverse affair with a sport van and labor relations problems with the dryer pale to insignificance compared to quarterly reports at the office when all the computers are down.
"Jim, do you know how to get the payroll figures under the circumstances? You were here before the era of the Beast."
"We used to have a couple of bookkeepers, and everything was on hard copy."
"What's left of the hard copy?"
"Time cards, I suppose, and the tax-deposit receipts."
"Yeah... ."
Having chosen this situation, we can see how anthropomorphism in Mesopotamian cult objects relates to humor in the machine-dominated modern world. The person responsible for quarterly reports to government agencies while the computer system is refusing his entreaties is in a pickle equivalent to that of a Babylonian overlord--circa 1500 B.C.E.--when the river does not recede before planting season. If you are not disposed to pray, probably the words you choose are reminiscent of the imprecation oaths of some primitive fertility cult.
"Right... . How would you feel, Jim, about manually retrieving the data? Employment Security and the Department of Labor & Industries honor other gods, not our Marduk."
"You're joking, of course."
"Right... ."
You're joking--sort of--because it's your ass that Marduk seems to be sacrificing on the altar of his magnificent technological indifference. There are a lot of things we can do at this juncture. We can fire the office manager who glorified this system's speed and efficiency, and then recommended letting go the one woman in the office who understood Marduk's programming. She knew more than the office manager, and you realized too late that he wanted her out for precisely that reason. But, this is not the time to fire him. It's going to take all hands now to row against the rising river.
The ugliest mess will be recovering the payroll records for the past quarter. Our branch employs something like twenty five people. It's a freight terminal with sixteen drivers and half a dozen office workers. Maybe three or four hours of very tedious work will be required to salvage the data. It takes fifteen minutes when Marduk is being benevolent. The first thing to do that shows you have a sense of humor is to assign this chore to the office manager. Everybody else knew before you did why his rival was ousted, and seeing him with the problem she could have helped avoid is poetic justice.
On the phone with the people who sold you this sophisticated monster you have another opportunity to struggle toward sanity and self control. "You bind me for life to this merciless equipment and now tell me the service people are booked until the middle of next week! I'd rather deal with the auditors than these useless green-eyed dragons. Is this going to be part of the ritual every fifteenth of the month? Listen, we have a virgin word processor from Kelly Girl. We'll send her over. The first-born sons of all our Teamsters are yours. Throw them down the gullet of one of your mainframe machines. Just get a priest over here by this time tomorrow!"
We could have told them the Main Office would hear about this, but our next call is to their salesman. He understands well enough how many branches are interested in the outcome of our flirtations with this new system. Even if he has to strangle the service manager, he'll get somebody over here with the holy fire--maybe in time to avert a disaster.
Now, do we need to analyze this attempt at humor in the workplace? It's simple. The human predicament has changed only to the extent that we are now at the mercy of machines instead of flooding rivers and beasts. We are still trying--more or less--to keep from being drowned or eaten. Maybe a little humor will help. Try not to be sarcastic. Mainly, we don't want to start smashing CRTs against the walls. Funny or not, our small effort is better than just going down the street to the bar. There are always a few modest proposals that can be implemented, one by one, to grind the problem down without sacrificing too many of our players. The game is a little madcap anyway. Of course, when you consider the alternatives to keeping this office running, it seems worth the effort--win or lose. We could be facing mornings of the milking pail and swarms of flies. Tennessee Ernie Ford made hay with that material. Remember? He used the same device we've been talking about. Bossie looks over her shoulder as you come in with the pail, and she quips, "Here comes old icy fingers."
If the omens are propitious, you get home in time to kiss your wife as she works out on her Exercycle, and go collapse in the home entertainment den. Your teenager's video disk is projecting demon women on a big screen. Where the hell is the remote control? First we can mute the audio that accompanies these organ grinders' contortions. Their makeup is scary enough without the tortured music. Zap them into blissful oblivion.
Try the cable programming.
Hyping the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan smiles from his podium in some urban coliseum. Change channels. Maybe the networks are better.
A beer break. Have you ever seen people as perfect as the face-men on these commercials. Are they ever hung over from the party they're having for TV advertising?
Football on 9. A slick western on 7. Preying mantis mating on PBS. This is interesting, the female bites off the male's head after mating.
Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play, way down upon the Swanee River.
Back to football. "Look at that blitz! The linebackers pasted him before he could throw. What a play!"
A laugh track so loud it rattles the levelor blinds on the windows erupts from a sit-com on channel 12.
Click... .
CANDOR
Being a professional comedian requires a lot of travel. It's hard figuring out why Carl Grant, who otherwise seems very bright and has more education than is good for anybody, would want to do it. He says he likes to keep one engagement ahead of his hecklers. I suspect he likes his work. Able to see the humor in most every "civilized" activity, Carl can develop new material from the ordeals most of us need a couple of strong drinks to endure. In fact, he doesn't drink, even on first class flights when it's complementary. What is this? And he says he doesn't mind airports. Flying in all kinds of weather is part of the job. Actually, what he says is, he doesn't worry about flying, it's crashing that bothers him.
Have you ever wondered about the vague pantomime airline stewardesses employ to describe the safety features of modern planes? Isn't there a lot that is funny about their smiling indifference? Passengers ignore them anyway to read the stuff in the seat pocket. A few eyes are trying to see through their clothes. They may have the opportunity to get their revenge. Through a smile of clenched teeth they assure you that, in an emergency, a gas mask will drop from the overhead compartment. But notice the vague manner with which they indicate the emergency exits. Something about their manner says cynically, "If anything goes wrong, nobody gets out of here before I do."
The stewardess is just working for a living. We recognize the feeling. She is trying to keep a sense of humor, and Carl is too. Who can blame her for little wink, or Carl for being amused? Stating the obvious can be very funny. Woody Allen's candor is charming. His complexes get to be fun when he isn't trying, short-attorney fashion, to cover them up or compensate. The material ripe for this device is endless.
Woody's psychiatrist could be hilarious. I'm surprised he hasn't gotten the treatment from his master patient. What is obvious to any observant visitor is the last thing poor rich Woody's shrink would mention. Most of us couldn't afford the wallpaper in his office. Imagine. "Gee, Woody, you're an incurable nerd. About all we're going to be able to do here is spend a few hours every week--and as much of your money as possible. You'll talk. I'll listen. Now and then I'll nod sagaciously while glancing over your shoulder at the clock. I can do it as discreetly as if I had noticed my reflection in a mirror. Based on your income, my hourly fee is, well, pretty handsome. Of course, I'll often be thinking about something else--my golf swing, the jiggle of my receptionist's hip under her skirt. By the way, what are they saying about my latest book? Your book? In all honesty, Woody, your angst is too philosophical for my med-school mind. I didn't have time to read Kierkegaard and Karl Jaspers. I had to get A's in organic chemistry and microbiology. It all comes down to this: I'm going to try to resolve, using drugs, the problems with which human beings have struggled since we started scrawling hunting-party art on the walls of caves. And--heh heh--I find it, well, rather astonishing that your ancestors' seed survived natural selection and that material like yours is still in the gene pool. Your blinding intelligence? Well, sure, but I get a lot of intelligent people in here. That's half their problem. They're too smart to believe what's happening out there."
We have picked on Woody enough for a while. We still have stock brokers and attorneys to get even with. Woody knows better than to let the kind of guy you and I are likely to run into handle his money. If your stock broker was candid, would he say something like this? "Your account is pretty small potatoes and I can't make much on the volume, but, frankly, I'm not doing that hot myself, and if we can roll your money over often enough, I'll be able to generate some reasonably useful commissions."
Some candid attorney wrote a book not too long ago called The Terrible Truth About Lawyers, or something like that. I had sense enough not to buy it. Unfortunately, I don't have sense enough not to need an attorney's services now and then. I enjoyed hearing about my lawyer's hunting trip during my divorce manage a trois. He shot a prize elk out on the Olympic Peninsula while our second court date was postponed and my ex wife was costing me two or three hundred dollars per day. He shot the big bull with a bow and arrow--not me, the elk--and had to call a helicopter to haul him out of the high country. I think he paid for the helicopter service in the few minutes he spent telling me about his adventure at a hundred twenty dollars per hour. He was a good guy really, a Swede who grew up along the ship canal here in Ballard. He chewed Copenhagen and spit it in a coffee can, or--only if he had to--on the floor of the Vega he drove back and forth to the court house. I got to know him pretty well over the three years it took to get unmarried. It wasn't all his fault, but what used to bother me was starting over again every time I went into the office.
He had the yellowed papers from my file on his desk, right there in front of him, and I would have to dredge up every pertinent fact again from the bottom of Shilshole Bay.
Finally we got all the parties together. I guess I should have called the affair a quartet, not a manage a trois. Since my adversary was only sober for an hour or so every morning, she needed her own attorney. My man went to work with the interrogation. I was quite satisfied with all the things he was able to get on the record--most of which in a no-fault state was only useful to gorge my famished sense of justice. Still we made headway. I said afterward I had some idea now what I was paying for. He was sort of surprised and remarked, "It was all off the top of my head." The man was a comedian, and he hadn't even read my book. The Carl Grant technique was still being forged in our friend Judy's living room as the half-time relief during recitals featuring her singing students.
So finally our act--our quartet, not Carl--appeared before Judge Windsor in District Court. The audience was laughing before I even made any jokes, and I was in no mood to sing. The judge cleverly identified everybody from the notarized documents we handed him. Then he started being funny. "Is the settlement fair to all parties?" I looked up surprised. He seemed to be asking me. I thought about it long enough to start to smile. Why isn't everybody laughing? My bemused expression rather worried the honorable presence in black robes before me. My attorney looked at her attorney, a rather nice looking, if astonished, woman in brown tweeds. The judge really wanted somebody to say it was fair. The ex-wife's counsel said that it was. Good enough for the judge. OK. That's it.
After all the years, Erik and I parted reluctantly from Karen and my ex. We were all on first name basis by this time. In front of the elevators we malingered as if the end was not yet upon us. It was. We went down separate elevators. Out on the street I thanked Erik for everything. He looked at me, as I had looked at the judge a few minutes ago. He sort of smirked and shrugged. His bill was thousands of dollars. It took me years to pay it. He had such a good sense of humor that he once threatened legal action because he hadn't heard from me for three months.
Am I verging on cynicism, or can we still call my carping about lawyers candor? In fact, attorney jokes are the lighter side of divorce. I haven't even mentioned the wrenching emotions that initiated and sustained the rift between two people whose lives had been united for better or worse. The funny thing about it--and here I do mean funny--is how much that woman and I laughed together over the years. The good years took care of themselves, but we were mismatched by temperament and by the structure of our value systems. We played by different rules. Part of her alcoholism was the denial of the pain of being married to a man she had thought would change after he settled down. Artistic types are incurable as far as I know. They never want to get down to business and mow the lawn. God knows they can seldom afford to hire anybody else to do it. It didn't seem to matter that she was the kind of woman who would fold my underwear, I still wouldn't go out and get a real job.
When things started to go to hell, we both tried heroically to laugh it off. We made up marvelously from our fights. We probably could have made it if alcohol hadn't entered the picture. Jokes about drunks are not funny to me anymore.
When I finally refused to come home, and I set up housekeeping in the back of my bookshop, she could only cry pitifully into the phone, "Bring back the popcorn popper."
We often met at Green Lake for negotiations. She liked to feed the ducks. I read in the Times that the Parks Department was rounding up the hybrid ducks because they were drowning the wild Mallards in their mating attempts. I wrote a poem that seemed appropriate to the later contortions of our relationship.
Now that we have both remarried, and she has been sober long enough to have three kids, I'm glad I kept my sense of humor. I had a friend--another artistic type--recently released from the state penitentiary. He offered the services of a fellow out on parole whom he brought along to my shop one evening. The guy was big and dangerous looking. He had the conscienceless eyes of a long termer at the big house, no sense of humor. None. A hit man. "He's a hell of a lot cheaper than your attorney," Scott reasoned. Funny, I guess. But the other guy wasn't, so I declined.
There is still a lot more to be said about candor as a method for making people laugh. It may be considered the cornerstone of an edifice we're calling the Carl Grant technique. You might think of it as a certain high regard for the truth. Jesus and Socrates were both superb humorists. Truth is so uncommon, it gives people a rush of emotion that can be arrestingly similar to laughter. But there is more than one way to tell the truth, a commodity that doesn't have to be cold and hard. I know a one person who reads Greek who will back up at least some of my paraphrases of Jesus. I might try this one on him: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you cynical." That brings us back to the question of a paragraph or two ago: Am I being cynical?
Life is a bitch, and then you die. That's cynical. But it's funny. If this were all there is to it, we might as well punt. Punt?! We might as well walk off the playing field and wait for everybody else to see the futility of the game. Disband the league. Who cares? Something about good humor gives us a glimpse of truth greater than the absurdity jumping on us from every high-rise along the street.
A few years back somebody made a film using Erma Bombeck's home-and-family-style humor. Sister Erma has taught us such timeless truths as, "The grass is always greener over the septic tank." The frightening thing about this film was that it came on so strong. It reminded me of Strindberg's plays--cold, hard. The same thing happened with Keasey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The harsh realism of the film was no fun at all. Keasey's book was whimsical and cartoon-like. I left in the middle of Jack Nicholson's serious rendition of Randall Patrick McMurphy. The real tragedy is that Keasey went beyond the veil with drugs instead of using his gifts as a humorist to see through it. Same problem as my alcoholic ex-wife. She was as funny as Keasey in her own way, but she found a quick fix. When it let her down she became a realist, Erma Bombeck in gritty black and white.
Why am I wandering off on your time? You hired me to make beer, not go on a serious quest for the Holy Grail. Don't get riled up, you can buy ordinary beer in any supermarket. If you want the malty stuff brew meisters come up with, you have to let it percolate for a while. Chunks of sediment are going to settle in the bottom of the keg. When you tap it, an evil foam will hiss on top of the cool bronze syrup beneath it. What I was getting around to saying is that humor may be the truth getting out in plain sight where everybody can see it in a way that proves--yes proves--that people like Socrates and Jesus were right.
In Plato's dialogues, Socrates comes across sounding like a very good political satirist. He was admired by a group of bright young men who enjoyed seeing him trap their elders in contradictions. For this entertainment, he wasn't paid a hundred dollars per minute. Too many powerful people couldn't see the humor in it. He was condemned to death for corrupting the youth. The record says he drank his draught of hemlock cheerfully. He wasn't a cynic. Though he made a sport of demonstrating to the Athenians their ignorance about things they claimed to know, and though he said he knew nothing, he remained convinced of the reality of human goodness. As sunset approached on his last day, he argued cogently for the immortality of the soul. It's a potent mixture to make a career of exposing the flimsiness of most of what passes for knowledge, yet to find hope in human goodness even if it is in very short supply. Socrates' most compelling reason to believe in immortality was that if death ended everything, evildoers would escape the recompense due them.
Suggesting that Socrates was a humorist you might be able to follow, but Jesus? Without going into his disputes with the Pharisees, whose similarity to our Moral-Majority types is striking, it isn't hard to imagine Jesus being funny. It has often been pointed out that Jesus kept company with all the wrong people. If Jesus didn't have a sense of humor, we are in the dilemma of trying to imagine him as a scholarly man like Dietrich Bonhoeffer sitting around at the tavern, lecturing cab drivers, aluminum-siding salesmen, and vampish women on theology.
OK. So now we have Carl cast in the roles of philosopher and messiah. I've been avoiding this, but now I have to tell you, Carl's graduate work was in philosophy. Don't get upset. If you have read this far, you have gotten past the kind of thing I'll be likely to go into. All our metaphysical speculation will be for the fun of it. You won't be left with unanswered questions on Plato's Timeaus. It's just that when something is funny, really funny, not just a gross out or shocking, the ecstasy is something akin to revelation. Candor is very powerful, especially when it is tempered by a will that says, I'm going through with this no matter how crazy it gets. No kidding, I'm going to tell you what I really think. Seems kind of wild, doesn't it?
Carl has done enough shows in pricey private clubs to know how boring rich people are. It's one thing to be born rich. That, I might like to try sometime. Not that I believe in reincarnation (Here comes another digression). You can skip this if you have heard Carl's bit about the man who told him he was an Egyptian Pharaoh in an earlier incarnation--and Sir Walter Raleigh in another. Carl asked him what he was doing this time around on the Great Mandala. He's the night manager at Chuckie Cheese's twenty six-variety Pizza Parlor. Anyway, as I was saying about rich folks, it's fun to spend money, but you can end up doing some pretty tedious things if you're really in earnest about making a lot of it yourself.
A lot of things that sell very well on the mass market are no fun at all. The actors who do detergent advertisements all must have wanted to play Hamlet--or at least be on the Mary Tyler Moore show. But, hey, the royalties from those commercials! Every time the tube flashes that smiling face at several million people, you get paid for it. It's like having lots of residuals if you're an insurance salesman. And salesmen! Have you ever tried to read C. Clement Stone's The Success System that Never Fails? Stone made billions with insurance. He was one of those people who had to do it himself, too. How did he manage? Persistence. He kept calling on prospects until that smile on his face, and his razor-honed little mustache were shellacked on like the plasticised food that restaurants in Tokyo display out front to show you what they've got. That's what he recommends in his book. Of course, the book was written for people who sold his line of insurance products. He must have believed it, though. But, then, he also believed Richard Nixon. Stone poured millions into Nixon's last campaign. They won...
Again, you think I'm being cynical. But I'm not saying insurance is deadly dull, or Richard Nixon for that matter. Remember, I tried to read Stone's book. I've been a salesman, and I was surprised at how much I liked it. Selling advertising for a magazine was quite enjoyable. I met a lot of business people who had fun at what they did. But now and then I'd consider what I would have to do to really make money as a writer. There is a name for it. A very ancient business, it's even mentioned in the Bible.
I don't know about you, but I feel better now about going back to my dumb job. I know you thought I was doing my job. Now you're being funny. If a writer makes more money than the average cocktail waitress, chances are about a million to one he\she is turning out formula romances or pot-boiling thrillers, the kind of stuff you see on television. I'd rather move pianos. It's like a lot of other things. Back to Richard Nixon. Carl reminds us, to our extreme embarrassment, that Nixon's sensational victory before Watergate was the biggest landslide in the history of the presidential race. Will anybody admit to having voted for him now? Two or three guys in Alabama, maybe. It's like a lot of products people get rich selling. If you try to understand the marketplace, you can probably figure out what people are buying and give yourself ulcers trying to meet them with truckloads of it. Keep smiling even when it's no fun anymore. Remember, the one who has the most toys at the end wins.
REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM
This device works something like candor. Lots of things people do begin to look pretty silly when you watch them long enough or try to imagine what they would be like in their simplest unadorned form. Living in Seattle, Carl and I cross the border into Canada fairly often. It's tempting to buy things in Vancouver B.C.. Their budget balancing act is even more out of control than the one in Washington D.C., and American dollars go a long way. You can sometimes buy things in American funds and get back more Canadian bills in change than you paid for your authentic Kowitchan Indian sweater or whatever. Their money is prettier, too. Some interesting things happen at the border.
Last time I went through the customs interrogation it was fairly lightweight. The sergeant on duty looked in at my passengers, not a pretty lot. After all, they're my friends. He shined his light through the window, apparently to see what this carload of deadbeats were hiding on the floor. "Where are you from? How long were you in Canada?" That sort of thing. "Did you buy anything?" Even as bad as we looked--like a group from the Baptist Church on a Sunday outing--that was about it.
Carl suggests the border-inspection routine gets a little sketchy because it would be impossible to search every car and every suitcase and bag in everybody's trunk. If you don't make any stupid remarks, it's easy to get through. If what they're looking for is contraband merchandise or drugs, they may as well just ask if you're carrying any. But this may not be a very effective way to catch criminals...
"Good evening. Where are you traveling from? Are you smuggling any drugs? Firearms? Any liquor on board on which the taxes haven't bean paid. OK. Thanks very much. Have a nice trip, aye."
In Nevada where wedding chapels look like fast-food joints, the same kind of abbreviated ritual could be implemented: "Greetings, blessings, etc.. All three of us are gathered here to join the party of the first part to the party of the second part for all the purposes stipulated or unstipulated herein and hereinafter. Is she OK with you? And you, Sister, you like the guy? Right, Gideon. Pay as you leave. May the Force be with you."
Telephone solicitors could cover a lot more ground if they tightened up their pitch a little and consolidated several products into one abbreviated assault. "Good evening. Don't hang up, this call will save you hours of frustration in shopping malls and traffic jams if you just listen. Music: `You can get anything that you want at Alice's Restaurant.' Think hard now, we're here to help. Have you noticed any advertising lately? Anything you've noticed, we'll sell it to you. Is there anything you don't want? We'll have a truck on your street to pick it up. How about some storm windows? Is the roof all right? More music: `Ain't gonna need this house no longer, ain't gonna need this house no more.' Have you got a burial plot and a funeral director? Flowers? While you're thinking about it, I have a short survey... ."
This may seem a bit artless, but it can't be much worse than the methods now being used.
Some of the exercise machines recently unleashed on consumers are using this same principle. Computer-driven, motorized equipment will stretch and jiggle every fiber of your body. For a few more bucks you should be able to get this bothersome regimen over with while you sleep: "The Incredible Programmable Aerobic Bed. It lets you adjust your position to read until you fall asleep. Once you've drifted off, the rigors begin. Blitz and bomb your abdominals from every conceivable angle. Torture your triceps. Pump your pectorals. All effortlessly! The workout is over by morning. Your brain's alpha frequencies are amplified through a biofeedback technology developed by Russian cosmonauts in long term experiments in space. Recorded sound lets you wake to the cries of gulls and a soothing wash of tropical surf."
I don't know why anybody who doesn't enjoy exercise (it's a perverse, abstract pleasure, I realize) should bother to work out. To have a perfect body and the sex appeal of a rock star, all you have to do is buy the right soft drinks. Cola kingpins take advertising in the reverse direction of Carl's reductio ad absurdum. There is no reason to believe anybody can tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke according to research done by Consumer Reports Magazine. So, if you want to get your share of this business bonanza of the century, you're going to have to distinguish your product by using ball bashers of various sorts--football, baseball, basketball star endorsements. Or convince people sex goes better with Coke. Far be it from me to fight the trend toward healthier pastimes than smoking and boozing, but on a regression from the glamor and sex show--now only in print media--to get people to smoke and drink alcoholic beverages, the soft-drink fix is just another of Madison Avenue's products that nobody really needs. Would it be taking things to a ridiculous extreme to suggest that sex can be had with orange juice or water? Sure, you have to drink something, but carbonated drinks are going to make you belch. It comes down to this: That slinky Pepsi model is going to have fizz up her nose, just like you do, when you try to kiss her. Make mine, sex and water. And keep the glitz-crammed party out of my bedroom.
"Now, class," Carl might say, when I've let up for a minute, "He's not getting it quite right. Nobody likes a smart-mouth, unless you happen to be running for vice president and debating Dan Quale. Reductio ad absurdum is a form of argumentation used in Aristotelian logic... ."
"Now cut that out, Carl."
"You're just being cute. Illustrate the device. Furthermore, you could make more of the Cola pushers' subliminal message. Sure, sex and virility are blatant, but they're working the clean-cut angle. The kids at Canyonville Bible College and people who work at Safeco are sexual, too. What makes this such a dynamite pitch is that there are a lot more modest folks out there who work for a living than Humphrey Bogart types with a drink and a drag.
"I thought the bit about sex and water was nice."
"That's not reductio ad absurdum. And who's going to follow the subtlety of what you were trying to do there at the end? Writers!"
"You don't have to make me look silly in front of all these people. Our deal was, you supply the techniques, I try to illustrate them. Sorry. I got carried away. We can always cut that part out if you want to." Heh, heh. Too late now.
IRONY & OVERSTATEMENT/ UNDERSTATEMENT
How do you like that Carl? I get the audience worked into a frenzy, and he starts quibbling about technique. I'm trying to make him famous... . He's already rich. I'd be happy to settle for either, but we better get on with this. It isn't as though I have all the time in the world. Some of the biggest publishers in New York are sending me rejection slips. If Carl doesn't like my routine about sex, I could resort to violence. It takes no effort at all to obliterate him from this computer disk.
Maybe the supermarket tabloids could use an expose on mild-mannered Carl Grant who verbally abuses his students. There are a few things we could work in about his gambling and pool-room hustling. How do you think he was able to stay in school so long? Photographs wouldn't be hard to get.
All kidding aside, Carl is a great teacher. Throngs of students pack his seminars at the Experimental College. I bet there were twenty or twenty five people there the week he let me in without paying the registration fee. But, he really is widely acclaimed. The last time he was in London somebody recognized him. I think it was the cab driver he had tipped a generous two percent on his last visit. And around here, he's the top comedian--all the way from Holly Park to Tukwila.
OK. You see who's in charge here. Now that we have things in perspective again, let's return to the Carl Grant Show. He does an intermittent radio talk show, and once he was even interviewed by Jean Enerson--one of the West's most respected newspersons, or so they say on Channel 4. It's funny just to hear him talk about the interview. Jean (Most Respected Newsperson) ignored him completely, up until the moment the camera lit up. Then, so did she. It sort of startled him, but he reved up to her animation until the commercial break. She went back into neutral, ignoring all signs of life in her vicinity until the lights-and-camera reaction kicked in again.
Safely out of the lime light in our living room, Carl did a dead pan routine, for my wife and me, of what he would like to have done on camera--all for the purposes of illustration, of course. Dead pan is a form of understatement, which is a form of irony.
Expressionless, he says, "I'm just thrilled to be here, Jean. For at least a week, I've wanted to appear on your show." Who set this up anyway? Looks at his watch. "Your studios are marvelous. What a technology! Didn't this used to be the MarQueen Garage? ...Yes, I do have a busy schedule. As soon as we're finished with this ordeal, I'll be jetting off to the airport. Oh, no, I not going anywhere. A few of the guys at United are getting up a card game."
You got the idea? Overstatement is over statement. Understatement is under statement. Replace the body-language and emotion that normally goes with an appearance at Madison Square Garden with the weary indifference of a parking-lot attendant, when any idiot would be excited, and you have dead pan. Turn it around, and you have an irritating parking-lot attendant and a form of overstatement.
"Good evening! This is Madison Street Garage. Live! I'm Don Pardo. Thanks for joining us tonight. Believe me, we have quite an evening ahead of us. We're going to be parking cars, yes, placing them in stalls, until the stars are bright in the East. Here's an Oldsmobile eighty eight coming in now. Good evening, sir! The driver is reaching for his ticket at the vending machine; he almost has it; yes, he has the ticket. He's going up the ramp. When he comes back out, we'll be talking top dollar. But right now our lovely spokes model has a message from our sponsors, The Generals' Motors and Oil Behemoth Conglomerates. She'll be knocking public transportation for her sugar daddy at GM. This is no time to go get a sandwich."
You can imagine drivers' eyeballs rolling back when they meet this guy talking to himself in his battered, cashier's booth.
I know, I'm getting carried away again. Irony is, simply, saying one thing when you mean the opposite. It has to be transparent enough that it isn't just lying. It's supposed to be funny, sort of, but this technique is often used when you are just being mean. "I can't think of anything I'd rather do than have dinner with you. Unfortunately, I have a frozen dinner waiting for me at home." That's funny in a way. Some people think Phyllis Diller is funny. You can even put yourself down with this device. When you bomb say, "I had the audience worked up to a frenzy." Or if the book doesn't cut it, "Bernard Shaw doesn't hold a candle to me." Sometimes it can be funny without being intentionally mean. "Jean Enerson, most respected newsperson." Somebody at Channel 4 can say that with a straight face. When I repeat it with irony, I'm just noting my astonishment at the things people take seriously. "Arnold Schwarzenegger's new film is a testament to the cinematic art."
You were probably carried away during the early virtuosic lines of my illustrations of the overstatement/understatement devices, so let's spell them out a little more clearly. Overstatement can be simple exaggeration. David Brenner says, "The freeways in Los Angeles can be impossible; I missed my exit, and ended up in Guam." Carl has some fun at the expense of the Rock Music crowd when he relates a scenario that seems plausible enough. "Around here the rock music tabloid is called, The Rocket. This is an interesting exercise in futility: people who can't talk, being interviewed by people who can't write, for people who can't read."
Understatement is the reverse ploy. "They say Stephen Spielberg made 365 million last year, a million dollars a day. At that rate he can afford to spend a couple of hundred thousand for breakfast. You might say he is doing all right." When I was picking on Carl, earlier, I tried everything in the book (this book). Overstatement/understatement and irony got used and confused. He might get even with me. He does swing a lot of weight around our town. He's the toast of Toastmasters. At the last meeting down at Cyndy's Pancake House they let him go on for half an hour or so.
INCONGRUITY & CONNECTING UNRELATED IDEAS
These new convenience stores are terrific, everything under one roof. Gas, groceries, pizza, a drug store. Open twenty four hours a day, they're a regular one-stop robbery center.
Carl plays cards with all kinds of people, anybody who has money to lose. One guy, filthy rich, shows up around the card room frequently. He never buys anything. Coffee is cheaper at home. One night he had skipped dinner for a meeting before showing up at Carl's table. Comes the time when things are breaking up. He and Carl go out for something to eat. No place is quite right. If this guy sees a tablecloth, he knows the menu is too pricey. They end up at Kentucky Fried Chicken, a dingy one at that, one of the Colonel's first franchises. Anyway, Diamond Jim starts to dicker with the proprietor of this establishment. "It's after midnight, you must be about ready to close up." ...Right. "So what do you do with the leftover chicken?" ...Right. They throw it away. "Then we shouldn't have to pay full price. How about sixty cents on the dollar?"
The connection between all-night convenience stores and robberies is clear to any writer. Most of us have worked graveyard in one of these places. In the middle of the night, half the people who come in are dangerous. A friend of mine, talented, not a writer, an opera singer, told me about a big dude who came in one night at 7-11 while he was working. The guy had no taste, interrupted Steve in the middle of Forza del Destino on cassette. "Just give me the money," says the big dude. "I've got a gun... ."
"That's all right, you don't have to show it to me," Steve cut in as he opened the cash drawer. "I want this to go as smoothly as you do."
So, that's what it's like out there at night. Your average computer programmer with a wife and kids doesn't think about it. He can see the connection, once you point it out to him, and often it's another revelation. He laughs, probably at the thought of what it takes to find this stuff out. Thank God, he doesn't have to work the night shift in one of those florescent fishbowls.
The incongruity of a man with money to burn haggling to get a couple of bucks off the price of his midnight lunch is funny because most of us are too shamelessly decent to even think of something like that. That people like him get rich is what what used to turn college kids into communists. Now they're getting the idea that you can be ruthless and still have good taste.
Another singer I know was living in a fly-trap apartment in San Francisco with her year-old son. She said the hookers and thieves who circulated in and out of the building were very protective. She even let some of the gang babysit for her sometimes. If anybody dangerous was around the building, she was the first to hear about it, from people who knew very well what to watch out for. Here you have the material for some strange incongruities. What happens when Mrs. Magnum Opus from the opera guild calls to schedule Susan in an opera preview at the Shorewood Library or someplace like that, and gets Huey the pimp sitting around Susan's pad with a couple of his girls minding the baby.
"Huh? Uh... Nawh, she ain't here right now. ...Oprah?...We watch the Oprah Show sometimes." Then to the girls, "Got any paper around here." The dish watery sleaze in the tank-top shoves a coffee-stained napkin across the table toward Huey. He doesn't have a pencil, so he gets up with the phone and scrounges around Susan's bookshelf to find one.
Ready with the napkin. "OK. Lay it on me, Babe. ...You beg you pardon, fugging right. ...Hey, bitch, I ain't got all day. ...Send him over, my girls can handle him."
Susan calls back when she gets a load of the previous conversation, to see how many bridges have been burned. "I've been out all morning." Maybe she thought it was a wrong number. ...Nope. "...Uh, no, the baby sitter. ...Down to the market. ...Market Street!? No, the grocery! ...Shorewood Library on the twenty seventh? Who's the accompanist? ...Beth? Fine, I know Beth. ...I'm just fine, really. I could use about ten more AGMA engagements per year."
Huey hollers from the other side of the table, "I'll give you all the engagements you can handle, Susie. You just call 'em up and go maul 'em."
This is the way movie scripts get written. With very little effort, and no talent, you can make a script about an opera singer who becomes a high class hooker, but is discovered before her son is old enough to know why everybody laughs when Huey says, "Sing him to sleep, Susie." You might call it a new-fashioned heart warmer. Use a pseudonym. Take the money and run. Then do a story about a writer who becomes a high-class hacker.
But you get the idea. When you have the Opera Guild on one end of the line, and Huey on the other, you are connecting unrelated worlds. The juxtaposition can be funny.
Monte Python's Quest for the Holy Grail is medieval in several senses of the word, but in the final scene he uses this device. A policeman puts his hand over the lens of the motion picture camera through which we have been watching the action. We are suddenly in the late twentieth century and somebody is putting a lens cap on the absurdities.
In Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, black rail workers of yesteryear are slaving in the sun when somebody asks, "Why ain't you niggers singin?" Oh yeah. Instantaneously, we get a minstrel show in four part harmony along the railroad tracks. Brooks has also treated us to a penetrating satire of Broadway called, "The Producers." The "plot" hinges on trying to make a bundle by producing a play that flops. A musical comedy about Adolph Hitler, you'd think, would be a sure loser. Try choreographing Nazi parade drills for incongruity. Keep them singing.
Some interesting, if seemingly unrelated, ideas turn up in a bit Carl does on license plate slogans. New Hampshire takes a fairly hard line: Live free or die. Just think about the guys who have to make those plates!
DOUBLE MEANINGS, PUNS, & OTHER WORD PLAY
Most of the jokes I heard before I had gotten through puberty used double meaning in the punch line. In polite company, we can't rehearse Bluebells of Scotland or any of the stories about the farmer's daughter. Anyway, people get that kind of stuff on television nowadays. All you have to do is figure out what you want to make fun of and think up some double meanings.
Breakfast foods are so full of zap, sizzle, and crack, they're surreal. Sugar is still cheaper than cocaine, even after you've paid the dentist. When it lets your kid down, he can always get another fix from a pusher on the playground.
Evangelism is good for a few laughs. How about the gospel in graffiti: Jesus shaves. Do you want to end up like the bums in the subway?
My wife gardens in her bikini; what a tomato!
You really ought to get a cat. Show a little hair. When you chase him off your pillow to retire for the night, he'll have made a nice impression. You can face it. Haven't you always wanted to look down on someone? Take my word for it; I married a cat. That is, my wife had him before she had me. He's been fair about it; I still get to live in the house with him.
Carl is glowering at me. He's too stingy to let me put much of his material in the book, so you're stuck with what I can come up with most of the time. Puns can be a little dumb dumb. Usually, you have to deal with groans. A little corn is all right.
There are other ways, lots of them, to play around with words and their logic. I'll only mention a couple more. I can't give away my material, either. My unique style is a blend of Gonzo Journalism techniques honed by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and something out of The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. But I was talking about something pertinent.
Reversal is a device where you get into stride going one direction, then are abruptly set back on your heel. Bob Hope, perhaps dealing with a pugnacious heckler, says, "No, I don't want to fight. I'm a gentleman, a scholar, and a coward. Ta dah, ta dah, whamo! You see how it works.
Inference, for our purposes, is logic turned into malfeasance. When we've been set up by the bit about the rock-music tabloid, (People who can't talk, being interviewed by people who can't write, for people who can't read) Carl can follow up with an inference. "I don't mean to deride rock music... . For those of you who like rock music, `deride' means to criticise or make fun of."
DEVELOPING A STYLE
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, aka Lew Alcindor, six times most valuable player in the NBA, holder of the career record for most points scored (38,787), and originator of the Sky Hook, one of the the most unblockable basketball shots ever, was self-conscious about his height as an adolescent. Poor guy. Who is a seven-foot tall high schooler supposed to dance with? Lew found a way to adapt to his "disadvantage." Like everybody, he had to figure out what he had to work with. Would it be an understatement to say he made the best of it?
When you are built like Woody Allen, sports isn't going to be your forte. But Woody turned out to be a great jazz clarinetist. (He is.) And a film maker. And a comedian. Some people are just born with all the right stuff.
Can you imagine the identity crisis of a Bette Midler, or Steve Martin? What is a Bette Midler anyway? You thought you had a lot to cope with! And Barbara Streisand was a little too good as Fanny Brice to have us believe her interpretation was not partly autobiographical.
The thing that seems to make some people such a knock out is that they find out who they are, and learn to enjoy it. Carl is no exception. His performances are dry whimsy because he has a flare for modest appraisal of hazards and absurdities that seem threatening to the most of us.
Carl's father was a lifer in the Navy, so Carl grew up in Tokyo and San Francisco, among other port cities. A bit reluctant to talk about himself, Carl does convey information about his past in the hair-raising tales he tells about travel, card-room personalities, high school atrocities in San Francisco, and the psychological and scientific novelties that turn up in his extensive reading. The apartment he and his cats occupy in one of his buildings is mainly a place for his books. They do pile up. And they get stored in any available space--like the oven, Judy claims.
Like sailors and railroad trainmen who have time to sit 'n bull, Carl and his friends--including the ones who overlap with ours--are story tellers. On one evening, Carl might tell you about the time at a pro-basketball game when the crowd was verging on riot. At the half he was supposed to play an exhibition ping pong match. (I guess I haven't mentioned he can hustle you at ping pong as well as cards or pool. You learn a lot of things when you're a kid with time on your hands at a Navy base in Tokyo.) Anyway, you have this very angry crowd. The referees had made some bad calls to add desultoryness to injury in a close and important game for the Seattle Supersonics. People were throwing things out on the court, but the crew at the colosseum starts rolling out tables for ping pong. Right! Who wants to go out there for any reason? Well, Carl does it, and it actually seems to help calm the Romans with their cries for blood.
I think we mentioned that Carl was a school teacher, if briefly. In all those months of hazardous duty, he never once had to shoot anybody. Inner city schools are not so intimidating for teachers who have been students in similar institutions. Carl has dealt with the whole ordeal from both sides. He has speculations about how very bad things get started and carried out to the appalling extremes we worry about. Social psychology can often be reduced to a few pathological cases who seem born to burn, and the other kids who go along to prove they can handle mayhem as well as the sick ones.
If you can keep your sense of humor as a fifteen-year-old when a Boys'-Room brawler has cornered you in front of a lot of other young studs, you may be on your way to a career like Carl's. The tough kid turned out to be a lot tougher than Carl had sized him up to be. With the thug on top of him, and getting ready to do real damage, Carl quipped, "I guess I should let you off this time." This irony gets a few laughs from onlookers who start to rib the punk on top. The punk on the bottom sees his chance and is soon out of his predicament and back on his beat.
Carl knows all kinds of people. His story about a young hot-shot attorney with Ivy League credentials and a wife who loved him in spite of his money and success--a noble woman--is a case study worthy of a novel. Carl observed the man as he started to unravel. He started skipping court dates with clients, got involved with another woman whose personality was that of a Pit Bull. She called him up once to meet for negotiations, then ran into his car with hers in the parking lot. You know the type. The man's life has come apart at the seams to the point where he now keeps his dishwasher's job only through the charm of what remains of his winning personality. Even at a stainless steel sink his performance is substandard.
So what else is Carl going to do with material like this? Be a priest? His method for keeping his sanity is an approach equivalent to ping pong when the colosseum is teeming with angry basketball fanatics. He could throw in the kind of thing he has learned about human nature as the proprietor of moderately priced real estate rentals, but he doesn't. Middle-class morality is just too bleak. Better to joke about a new restaurant in the International District that combines German and Chinese cuisines. It goes under the name of the Deutsch Dragon. The food is pretty good, but it doesn't stay with you. An hour or so after you eat, you get hungry for power."
As I mentioned, Carl's style is both dry and whimsical. It's dry enough to manage with a tough audience at McChord Air Force base, and whimsical enough for a wedding. I don't mean the reception. Right. The wedding. And to make it harder, the couple who put him on their program disallowed mother-in-law jokes and baby jokes. My wife and I didn't want to make it too easy.
You get some idea of what Carl is like from the foregoing information. He finds an inobtrusive perspective and can fit in anywhere. He plays many roles, and sometimes gets big fees for impersonating a high corporate official at a convention or an Army Major at the Officers Club. Managing very well under these varied circumstances grows out of his light-hearted survivor's personality. He's been around enough to know when to keep his eyes open and his wry mouth shut. Sometimes it's just better to stay home and read to the cat. He's too smart to carry on Saturday-Night-Live style. Since he doesn't have to do this at all if he doesn't want to, I guess he figures he might as well have his own kind of fun at it. To each his or her own. Stan Kenison makes much of his anger--at almost everybody and everything. If you enjoy life in spite of everything, why rant and rage?
Finding a style seems to boil down to being yourself. Remember the year Jean Claude Killy beat everybody in the world with skiing technique nobody could figure out? When Killy was asked about it, he said, "Don't ski like me, ski like you." Carl is an interesting guy and makes good use of his endowment as a performer. Who are you? Answer that in some depth and you'll be great. After all, there is nobody like you. Real originality isn't being innovative; it's being you. An unusual idea.
If you make a living doing something you like, this part should be easier for you than for the rest of us. I know architects and engineers who would be designing and building on their own time if they weren't doing it professionally. But, even for them there are some projects that get a little tedious. Designing the third bulkhead of a Boeing 767 may not be what you had in mind for the next two or three years. Keep in mind that there are lots of important things in life that don't ever make anybody any money. Shocking though it may seem, when this finally dawns on you, new possibilities open up.
If what you really want to do is make money, and how you do it doesn't matter that much to you, I may be able to help you have more fun at it. Other than that, don't look at me. Why are you wasting time reading? Get out there and make it big. But remember, the love of evil is the root of all money. Of course, that may just be sour-grapes thinking on my part. I do what I have to do as a responsible person to keep from ending up in the safety net, or hammock, depending on how you look at government programs. Then I try to do the important stuff--joke around, sing along with Domingo, hike into the Enchantment Lakes Wilderness, and, of course, keep working on my place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person with the longest transcript of graduate and undergraduate intercollegiate courses in history. It isn't all that simple. I run out of life force as much as anybody else and have to go back to the source. But we're talking about technique. This digression leads in the direction of the nearest church. The fellow who gets quoted there may end up having the ultimate last laugh. It's too deep a subject to go into. Some folks seem to think it's as simple as betting on the right horse.
If you have had trouble finding work that both satisfies you and delivers the goods, we can talk. I've been having midlife crisis since I was about seventeen. If you're at all like me, there are three or four prongs of this dilemma. It's like a pitch fork in the hand of the New England Puritan in American Gothic. That old codger pinned me down for years with one prong, like a rat on the floor of his barn. Most of us have a trace of the Puritan in us. You've got to be careful either way you go with this one.
You can fight it. The work ethic doesn't seem like a very direct route to anything desirable. In school there are always teachers who can't or don't explain why we keep pushing faster and faster on to the next section of the book. Work becomes an end in itself. Shutdown or rebellion are common results. You drift for a while. Or run wild. But skateboarding isn't as much fun when you're thirty five.
If you have some idea that work is for your own good, you might dig in and get to enjoy the math problems and English lit. Someday it all pays off. You graduate with honors from the right college and get a stimulating job with a good company. The way you got there is the way to keep climbing. Nose to the old grindstone. It could be worse, and they're paying you well for it. There are accoutrements that make it seem like you have made the right choice. When you see the wife and kids, everything looks good. Then you run into the skateboard flake, and he's made a bundle selling posters--he calls it wall decor--to college kids. He has reps all over the country. A screw off for twenty years, he's suddenly got a going concern. He hasn't even cut his hair. And the women he's stringing along!
But the Puritan who is prodding both of these guys doesn't want either kind of success. He doesn't want you to find satisfying work. He wants to make you suffer, and he knows how--win, lose, or draw. If you're running well, you must be in the wrong race--the rat race. Self indulgence, pride, avarice. When things go to hell, it was to be expected. It's that kind of world. Either way you live with guilt and shame. And squirm pitifully on the floor of the barn.
But, the most disgusting Puritan rat can be killed. There are ways to walk out into the fresh air. And meet new problems. If you can find something that motivates you, try to uncover the reason why. Do you live to sing, or sing for your supper? Is your real motive getting into Zeffirelli's Imperial Chinese Restaurant to feast on your fame? If you're a real singer, you can happily live, eat, and sing at the YMCA.
If you're lucky enough to have few passions and some marketable skills you probably can keep one foot in the doorway of ordinary human discourse. Your passion won't break you completely. If you are crazy enough to try to make your passion a marketable commodity, better get real good at it. Learning to sing or to write computer programs that sing isn't impossible. It's just horrendous frustration and madness. There's no humiliation you won't suffer. While everybody else seems to be enjoying life, you're busy trying to learn how to live in an unfashionable way.
Nobody seems willing to pay you to do what you have to do. That's understandable enough. At least you know what you want to build. It makes life interesting when everything you put up is falling down. Now you know what the engineers who designed the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge felt like after that windy day when it collapsed into Hood Canal. Well, it's kind of similar. But when you can't even get into any of the engineering schools from which these people graduated... .
At least they got paid for their fiascos, and there were enough of them to rationalize. "Unpredictable resonance in the frequency of oscillation." Oh, yeah, any idiot should have known. It's easier when lots of people are involved. The trillions of dollars that disappeared into Savings and Loan malpractice and fraud doesn't seem to have bothered the foxes who were supposed to be guarding the henhouse. Nothing seems to stick to you when what matters is your career, not doing legitimate work.
But we're interested in businesses that render a reasonable service and make profits. Bridges that stay up don't make political careers. It's getting the credit for the successful project that counts in that league. There must be a legitimate way up, some way. Find it. Salvage something out of all the years of struggle.
There are other ways up the mountain than the recommended ones in the guide books. Maybe you can get that MBA even though you have to mortgage the farm and the family. To make ends meet, you might have to work nights at a job that lets you get in some study. Rob Peter to pay Paul. When there is hell to pay, offer the devil MasterCard. Then move in with your mom and dad for a while. Weren't they delighted when you made them grandparents? Now they'll get to see the kids more often.
It gets more interesting all the time. You guard every spare minute for your wife and kids, but now your old friend Jack calls because he really needs somebody to talk to. It's been a long time. You should be home for dinner or your son's music recital or your daughter's soccer game. But you take the bus downtown. (You got hard up and sold your car to another friend who needed a clunker for fishing trips.)
Old Jack doesn't look too bad. He's been off drugs for at least six months, and none of his lovers has beat up on him lately. You have a good heart-to-heart conversation down at the Dog House Restaurant while people sing along with Harriett in the bar. The voices drift in and mingle with the smoke from Jack's cigarette.
The remarkable thing about this flea-bitten dog of a restaurant is that, now and then, a real singer turns up and sets his drink on Harriett's piano bar. When he cuts loose his horses, you can hardly believe it. The baritone singing in the other room while Jack speaks his mind has a voice like a stampede. At that restaurant! The equivalent of animal control for stray people.
Interestingly enough, good old Jack gives you a lead on a job that makes the difference for you. You wouldn't want to make a career of it, but it's a living, and you can study on the job. There isn't any excuse anymore. You have the time and the will. Do you have the talent? After quite a few years it sure as hell doesn't look like it.
But somehow you learn. By some miracle that old hog you've been driving to market--like Moses pushing a lot of bitching former slaves through the wilderness for forty years--that screaming hog starts to sing like Pavarotti. There are still some irritating complications. Perfect legato technique and the ability to sing high C are a not skills in great demand just now. There are a few aficionados, but the crowd pleasers grunt and squeal like pop singers you hear on the radio. It's possible to get so good you become offensive to people. Can't believe it? Wait and see. You can believe it? Yeah. Right. Now what?
The opera world is caught in the grip of an iron fist, one with a limp wrist. A gay mafia is like any other old-boy network. You're in or you ain't. If you ain't, can you compete with the National Endowment for the Arts? The pop music culture and Hollywood scene is almost as bad as the banking industry--drug money, dirty money, government money. You can't make your own kind of music in that show, unless you can afford to start your own network and have enough attorneys to deal with the FCC regulations. The business end of a passion for art, or whatever it is for you, gets real messy.
Now it starts to get good. It's an upside-down mad world. You're working nights at 7-11 again, even though you're pretty hot stuff at the YMCA. That voice! Rich bronzed horseflesh. You're better than the guy you heard at Harriett's piano bar ten years ago. What was the name of that flea trap?
It's the middle of the night. Verdi's Otello is in the cassette player. Sing along. Why not! The last customer who came in wanted chocolate covered peanuts to mix with a Daiquiri. You brought down the house at the beginning of Act II. Your interpretation of Iago's Credo scared the spots off the leopard-skin bikini the twitch on the cover of Hot Rod Magazine was almost wearing. "Credo in un Dio crudel." "I believe in a cruel God who has made me in his own image, whom I name in my rage... ." Shakespeare didn't write that, but then, at the Globe Theatre, he didn't have a soundtrack like Verdi's score, either.
Well into the second act and still singing, you turn with a flourish toward the glass doors, and in walks the stick-up artist. For crying out loud, another interruption! This crook is a bit nervous under the stage lights. Obviously, he's inexperienced. But, this two-bit 7-11 store should be an easy job to add to his short resume. Preoccupied, he is ignoring Verdi's music.
"Give me the money."
"If you come back later there'll be more. Just let me get through the second act."
"You're joking, of course."
"It's been a slow night. Can you settle for about forty dollars and a couple of six-packs?"
"Well, certainly, I'll take whatever you can offer." A very courteous thief. "Throw in some corn flakes and a gallon of milk, and it's a deal."
"How about a pastrami sandwich for the road?"
"How do you expect me to carry all this stuff? I'm walking, man! Aren't you being awfully generous with your boss's merchandise?"
"Why fight the system? He's insured. I was a hero with the first crook who came in here, even more inexperienced than you. I told him I wouldn't call the police for at least an hour if he would take subscriptions to six magazines of his choice. The guy looked like a pervert. It was two in the afternoon, and customers were crouched behind every gum ball machine and cooler. He was real unsteady with the gun. The boss said I should have just given him the money. `You want to get somebody killed?' He said. `I'm insured.' But, I'm holding you up, holding me up." This should be good for a few chuckles, but try not to let it interfere with the rhythm of the work. "So, what'll be? The pastrami, or the corn flakes and milk?"
"I'll take the milk, for sure. Got a kid at home." He's finally calmed down enough so maybe we can get this over with before Si pel ciel. But now he's listening to the music. He notices the recording package on the countertop. "The Domingo/ Diaz duet is coming up," he says.
"Yeah, take a box of animal crackers for the kid. I'd like to stay in character. If I turn this thing off, I have to start my Stanislavski exercises all over again."
"You use Stanislavski? They taught us method acting at Eastman."
"Well it works for me. You know this music, eh?"
"We did a concert version at Eastman." He looks like an Otello. Black. Big. With that kind of high-pitched big-man voice, he's a dramatic tenor if there ever was one.
"I sang most of Iago at the University of Washington in an opera workshop. Piano accompaniment only. With a faculty tenor. I was older than he was, I think."
"I'll be darned. You're a singer. Something told me you weren't the business school type one usually finds in these places."
"I'm a little underqualified. I had the right connections to get the job."
Verdi's brass ensemble rattles the loose trim on the edge of the counter. The lights burn down from their tracking. Neither of these corralled horses is going to miss his cue. Here it comes.
""Si pel ciel marmoreo giuro... ."" Vengeance! Vengeance, by God! Vengeance!
THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
Am I being clear? Is my mercurial prose making you wish that Carl would get back from Canada? That card-shark will be back in a week or so--if he can stand the rigorous interrogation at the boarder. For a little longer you're going to have to swim with this word-shark. I'll try to stop roaming around in the depths riling up the water. You're wondering how we got from engineering and business to an operatic duet with a stick-up artist at the 7-11 store. It's a complicated analogy, and if you didn't get it, we'll have to move along. I can already hear what my wife is going to say about the last chapter. She's very literal minded, but she likes opera, and me, basically.
I forgot what I was going to say. It'll come to me. That crook was a better singer than he was a crook. Inexperience, you know. Oh, yeah. Carl and I implied in the subtitle of this book that the technique would get you onto a fast track to success. So, if we're going to succeed--you and me both, brothers and sisters--we should probably swim a little closer to the shore. We want to stop thrashing around beyond the surf and start hob nobbing with the folks you see on TV, on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Now... I have only watched that program once or twice, but I remember a guy who got rich on Chung King Chow Mein--selling it, not eating it. It seems likely that this Chung King shogun--an Italian!--helped foot the bill for that Met telecast of Zeffirelli's Imperial-Chow-Yuk opera. He learned about spices and cooking from his mother. It just goes to show that things aren't all that different around the "global village" and, furthermore, that Kierkegaard and Nietche were wrong. Essence preceeds existence after all, and there are absolutes. If an Italian can get rich selling Chow Mein, cultural relativism is bunk. It's probably just an excuse for the orgy that started back in the sixties.
There must be something we can depend on. The trouble with absolutes is that it's so darn hard to decide which one applies in a given situation. Take something like, "Look before you leap." This sounds pretty good by itself, but put it next to, "He who hesitates is lost," and you begin to understand my psychological turmoil as revealed in the last chapter. Are either of these quaint aphorisms absolute? They're contradictory!
How about? "Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut." Reasonable enough. Judicious. But I'm already in a lot of trouble here. I'll have to keep talking, especially since you've come this far. We aren't lost. We're on our way to a goal. Once we find out what the goal is, we can get down to business.
In the conventional wisdom, having a goal is mandatory. You can't get there from here unless you know where there is. I was probably about fifteen years old when somebody suggested I start setting goals. Fine. You win a few and you lose a few, but goal-directed effort is effective. Effective at what? Well, obtaining your goal, of course. Which goal? Getting a degree in electrical engineering, say. But why do you want a degree in electrical engineering? To get a job at Boeing, or General Electric. ...Why? Fifty or sixty thousand a year! How's that? Well, if money the goal, why not go straight for it? There are lots of ways to make money. And some of them conflict with other goals. We haven't hit bedrock yet.
"Happiness is the goal." This one is really flimsy. Some days you just wake up feeling good. Even on the way to work, you enjoy everything. Sunshine, sky, that smoke that goes straight up from an industrial stack for several thousand feet until an air current finds it. How do you go after more of that feeling? Get plenty of sleep? If it's the job to which you are on your way that makes you happy, we're back in the last paragraph again. Maybe engineering was an end in itself.
But if you're happy because it's Friday, something else is going on. What's going to happen now? If you're off to Mt. Rainier for a skiing trip tomorrow, then it's skiing that really makes you happy. Or do you just want to sleep in? You can do that on Saturday. You just want to lay around and then have something sweet for breakfast, you sugar-fiend slug. Pleasure is what really makes you happy. A cushy bed, the cat to stroke on the pillow. Don't get up at all if you feel like lounging around all day. Creature comfort. That's what makes you happy.
No way. I want to get up and do something. What? Why? Now this goal setting crap has gotten out of hand. How am I supposed to evaluate all the contradictory objectives clamoring for my time and attention?
I'm not sure there is an answer to that one. Right now I need something to eat. I'll be back after lunch. You think about B. F. Skinner and his trained rats, if you still think that Harvard circus act helps.
Well, what did you come up with? Are basic physiological needs the driver in this sports car we want to get whining down the fast-track toward success? And is money the universal motivator because it can buy most anything anybody wants anytime they want it? If the Harvard-educated rats are right, success is just finding out how to make as much money as possible--oops, I mean--learning which lever to press to keep getting the food pellets. Or to get the juice turned off on the electrified grid. That's why you're interested in electrical engineering! You can tell how much help I think this line of reasoning is going to be. I'm having a little trouble swallowing any more of it, especially now that I've had lunch.
The conventional wisdom that comes out of Harvard nowadays doesn't seem to be much better than that of the Puritans who founded the institution. We know what the Puritans thought success was. Worldly asceticism was the only "lifestyle" they could come up with that seemed to prove they were among the elect. Money was part of it for them, too, but it was more as evidence of God's favor. But no self-respecting yuppy pagan is going to be satisfied with being among the elect.
Maybe if we tried going a little farther back... . To Lao-tsu or the Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali. Lao-tsu begins, "The way that can be spoken of is not the way." How does this help us? He goes on to make a book about the way that cannot be spoken of. Right. "While carrying on your head your perplexed bodily soul, can you embrace in your arms the One, and not let go?" Something must be getting lost in translation. We should probably let the Puritans go back to the founding of Harvard in 1638, and Lao-tsu back to the time of Confucius--circa 500 B.C.E..
The conventional wisdom is getting murkier all the time. And this shark is still circling as he scrounges for somebody to eat. Carl is playing cards somewhere in British Columbia. He has a dangerous grin on his face--sharks teeth. It's the middle of the afternoon, and I'm here trying to get out of this mess. How are we going to succeed when we don't know what success is or how to go about finding out?
Whatever is intrinsically meaningful here and now might lead to something. Right. That's how we ended up working nights at 7-11. I guess it's better than being respectably employed at something we don't want to do. Studying on the job is all right. More engineering. Right now we couldn't fix the coin return on the Pac Man video machine if it broke down again, and the kids that come in here are more dangerous than the crooks when the machines are on the fritz. But this problem in the textbook is interesting.
Everything is so specialized. Conventional wisdom in the information age suggests working in one small area of technology until you are an authority. Now that you know enough about computer technology to be good at it, you want to do more than just keep the cash-register inventory system functioning at Sears or Nordstroms. You aren't just any night shifter at 7-11. You're in graduate school, again. Now the math is really elegant. And fun. Maybe we are getting someplace.
THE ABSOLUTES
I am absolutely exhausted. For about twenty five years--ever since somebody told me I had to have goals--I've been compulsive about attaining them. There are so many of them that some are absolutely contradictory. Besides I have to take care of my rat in the Skinner box--ever since he got out from under the Puritan's pitch fork. This is a state of affairs brought about by the first absolute: Time. You don't have to read Stephen Hawking to understand this one. Just think about all the things you have to accomplish in the next twelve hours or so.
When the alarm clock goes off in the morning, charge out of bed for the track. Never mind it's raining. Get those miles in. We're not doing this for our health. It's a moral duty. If you die before the mortgage is paid off, your wife and kids will start answering ads in magazines. Do you want them starting a Dive-for-a-Pearl shop in the garage? Taking correspondence courses? Signing up for real-estate seminars? Kind of nice out here. It's not too bad, once you get in shape. Don't spit on the lady with the Walt Disney shaggy dog. Ugh! Here comes another wave of sleet. Is this the Poseidon adventure, or what?
Fruit for breakfast. This is a pseudo-absolute. The best-seller with the food combining rules got you started on this one. The real absolute is this: Sugar is a drug. Avoid it. Read the lables on everything. Not one grain of sugar should get past your lips needlessly in foods like cereals, soda, ketchup, spaghetti sauce, coffee sweetener, or candy. We're saving ourselves for chocolate decadence. Only once a month, with no regrets. The withdrawals are manageable that way. Sure you'll have cravings for a couple of days. Bite the bullet.
Now it gets serious. In any city with an opera company and good bookstores, you are going to have to live with traffic. I can afford a nice car, now. I told you it was a Toyota. I didn't mention that it was top of the line. A Cressida. It's got a few miles on it now. None of your business how many miles. This leads to the first road-and-track absolute: A car is a car, not an technological incarnation of God. I have free will, and I will not get on my knees to polish chrome or scrape off dead insects. Maybe to put chains on in the mountains. Give me half a chance, and I'll sell the car, top-of-the-line or not, and stop going to work. I won't miss 7-11, and I'll get to the point faster. I know the singing crook well enough now that I can invite him--Otello--over for our soirees. You guessed it: You don't have to own a car. This is absolute moral bedrock. Don't let anybody seduce you into believing the luxury sedan, sports car, or pigskin-upholstered statusmobile is an end in itself. You can get pigskin upholstery on briefcases or footballs. And your sex drive won't go away without something to drive. Don't fall for it when they tell you the woman in the ad goes with the car.
Driving on the freeway, if you want to do it, (remember you don't have to) requires sophisticated ethical reasoning. This is where Lao-tsu might be right, or Jesus. The way people drive around here, I have regular conversations with the latter. There are rules for everything about driving. Thou shalt not exceed fifty five miles per hour. This is only relatively absolute. What's absolute is: Exercise the judgement God gave a jack rabbit. Get your tail out of the way when you are driving fifty five MPH in the fast lane and somebody going seventy shows up in your rear-view mirror. You might have to exceed the speed limit to save your ass, or bunny tail, to keep the metaphor consistent.
Another absolute that is important in driving is: There is no justice. When you know you're right, you're probably in trouble. Ok, in the fast lane at fifty five MPH you are technically in the right. The guy behind you with the gun doesn't care. At a four-way stop when it's your turn, and somebody else is edging over the line with their tachometer needle in the red, be a Christian about it. Turn the other cheek. There are people out there who will attack you with a spike heel in the middle of an intersection. The basic rule is absolute: Always drive in such a way as to avoid an accident. In the vernacular this means, drive as if you are Woody Allen in the ring with Mike Tyson.
Now the basics of office intrigue. The first absolute is: The boss may not always be right, but he/she is always the boss. Somebody up the corporate totem is managing by objectives. They don't know how crazy this is. At the meeting of the board, some goals are set down. Everybody down line is expected to work toward these objectives. Sometimes they even tell everybody what the objectives are. If you can't live with the boss' interpretation of the objectives, go back to school. Most of these people wouldn't be where they are if they were reasonable. They're going for the goals, no matter what. They want to have careers, not amount to something.
Upward mobility is neither. You exchange one set of objectives for another and the problems associated with them. You make more money, and have to spend more. If you don't have a reason to cross the road, why get run down like a chicken on the pavement?
Winning through intimidation (this used to be known as pretense and ostentation) is a good way to get yourself a job you don't like, can't handle, are paranoid about keeping, and want to quit so you can go back to school. When you realize you have to keep it because you're mortgaged to the hilt, you are likely to start looking at the secretary. If she feels the same way about her job, you're in trouble.
To be dressed for success is another another name for being a stuffed shirt. Or a chicken in Gourmet Magazine.
At work the basic rule is: Some things really need doing, and some people need your cooperation. If you do what really needs to be done, and cooperate, work might start to be meaningful, in spite of everything. What really needs to be done? How would I know? That's what they're paying you to figure out. It isn't always impossible. Sometimes it's easy, if you're not busy trying to have a career.
Going back to school doesn't help. This is absolute. It's like upward mobility. It doesn't change anything.
I've been a little sketchy with the absolutes that apply to being an employee because they are only a dim reflection of the absolutes for entrepreneurs, the people who put up with the real trouble in the business world. The first absolute is: Your employees may not always be right, but they are always your employees. When they screw up, you have to pay the bill. Most of these people wouldn't be here if they had any initiative. They want to have careers, not amount to something.
Just think of the most expensive mistake you have ever made. Now multiply this by the number of people working for you. Square the product to allow for the fact that your employees know you pay the tab for their mistakes. This is called organizational inefficiency. Divide by the number of government agencies that regulate your business. The figure you end up with is called the slop value. If it doesn't make you start looking at the help wanted ads, you have entrepreneureal potential.
The reason entrepreneurs aren't intimidated by the risks of owning a business is that they understand and respect another widely misunderstood absolute, namely: You are not in business to make money. The main thing is to keep people off the streets and out of the bars--yourself included. Liberals and other ideologues make a lot of noise about the bottom-line mentality of business people. It's mostly hot air. Anybody with enough capital to invest in a business knows it would be a lot easier to just let the money earn interest. Put it in bonds or mortgages. Bury it in the back yard. Anything is safer and more respectable than going into business.
Still, there are some compulsive gamblers who think they might be able to produce a useful product or perform a service that keeps a lot of their employees from wasting their time going back to school. And there are thousands of government jobs at stake. What would the regulators regulate without wildcat entrepreneurs? Therefore, when an employee of yours sends a boxcar full of merchandise--all perishable--to the wrong destination, and you see two weeks' profits rotting on a railroad siding someplace, just keep in mind that it's only money.
By now Carl has done his half hour of work for the day and gotten paid as much as your run-of-the-mill politician gets paid for eating lunch with a contributor. At least Carl's speeches make some kind of sense. He does a little better than politicians because he works evenings and gets dinner out of the deal. By now he's no doubt found a comfortable card game. He's an entrepreneur of sorts. He knows when to hold and when to fold--in the real estate business, show business, or in cards. There is a rule, you know. Maybe it isn't absolute, but it's pretty good. When do you hold and when do you fold? If you want to know when a business is profitable, one you have been slaving over for too many years already, the truth is not in the bottom line, friend. There is a simple test: If you offer to sell your business to the employees--whether outright or by profit sharing and stock options--and they turn you down for a raise, you know you've got a loser. The people on the front lines know what kind of damage is really being incurred out there. They know where the hot spots are. If they want a piece of the action it's definitely a good sign, no matter what the bottom line might suggest. These people know how much slop there is in the system. They know how much they're stealing. If they're enthusiastic about buying the business, while you're depressed and losing sleep about what's happening in the books, go to work yourself on the delivery truck, and find out why money is falling out the back door onto the freeway. At the very least, you will know where the action is. It can be very useful. You might, in fact, be able to sell the business to the very same people who have been taking you to the cleaners. When they're losing sleep about somebody doing to them what they have been doing to you, you'll have your revenge.
HUMAN NATURE
If you're like my wife, by now you must be saying it again--I'm extremely cynical. It's not all that bad, is it? Didn't I say this was going to be fun? I admit I'm a rat. I don't know how I ever got out from under that Puritan's pitchfork. I suppose, it's time to try again to get a few things out in the open.
I believe for every drop of rain that falls, there's a mud hole someplace. I believe that somewhere in the darkest night, that there's a hooker out under a red light. I believe for everyone who goes astray, someone will come to haul them away. Think about it. This really is a Sunday-school picnic. Carl doesn't like to get into middle-class morality in his act, but he'll admit how bad things have gotten, if you press him.
How honest do you think the average Joe/JoAnne is? If they say something like, I'll meet you at four o'clock to look at the apartment you have advertised, do you think they mean it? Carl has some experience along this line. He estimates one in ten will show up. Allow for a couple of driving casualties. That's understandable. And somebody else got called unexpectedly because they won the lottery. Maybe another one couldn't find your phone number to call and cancel. That leaves six double crossers who apparently think that because you are the landlord, you're so rich that driving across town in your cadillac is sport to you. What does an hour of your time matter? You have lots of it.
Ok, so we have six of these lying frauds. Square the number to allow for the other lies these deadbeats are telling every day. Multiply by 365 and by 0.6 times the population of the city in which you pay taxes. You have a gross annual pointless deception index of 7884. They could have called.
Car salesmen are honest compared to most people. How do you think used car lots stay in business? There are thousands of cars advertised for sale by their owners in the newspaper every day. Does the average car buyer want to risk dealing with liar who wants to sell his own car? No way! Take him down to Nice Guy Charlie's repainted, repedaled, steam-cleaned, demolition-derby used car lot. There, at least, he knows what he's up against. Charlie. "I've got some little honeys, and there's a fanny for every seat."
Your run-of-the-street mugger will tell you plainly and simply what he wants. It's the money, or you get a slash with his knife. Or maybe he'll just walk over you to take your wallet or your purse. That's a crime. But the stone-faced lie the insurance company tells you every year, if you let them, is going to cost you a lot more than the mugger got. Be a loyal auto-insurance customer, and in a few years you are paying more than somebody who walks in off the street, somebody who knows human nature and who is suspicious enough to shop around. You have to watch those nice folks at Safety Co as closely as the mechanic under the hood of your car. The insurance rates on the car good old Charlie sold you will get jacked up every year until the bill shocks you into getting on the phone to the competition.
There are big lies in the paperwork of government agencies. Since Carl is out of town, I can use this story. You remember Special Agent 007, a civil servant with a license to kill. That's how it is with agencies. If they can tax it, and run paperwork on it, they're satisfied. If the mugger kills you, the policeman on the beat says, "All right, hold it, let's see your license.... . Well, everything looks all right. Ok. Write it up for the people at the court house, Fred."
You probably think the Utilities & Transportation Commission is out checking to see if the brakes work on those thousands of tractor-trailer rigs that go over their scales. Are they making the freeways safe for law-evading citizens like you and me? Ha! If you want to know what they really do, just try to start a little week-end hauling business to make the payments on your pick-up.
"All right, hold it, you got a license?"
"To move Mrs. Murphey's furniture fifteen blocks?"
"Yup. If you want to do that in this state, you have to get a carrier's license. The fine is one hundred dollars per violation." I'm not making this up.
So, you figure you'll go get the license. Now you find out what the Utilities & Transportation Commission really does. It's the competition-elimination long arm of the trucking industry. You can't get a license to move Mrs. Murphey's furniture in your pick-up unless you can prove that your services are needed above and beyond what is available from the companies already in business, at the price specified by the commission--$87.50 per hour. In other words, if there is any competition, it's too much. But I'm not cynical. You could go hire a lawyer!
With all the big lies built into the system, you'd think people would be a little wary of information proffered in three-page fold-out splashes in magazines, or the advertising glitz on TV. Instead, they rely on the Consumer Protection Agency and truth-in-advertising laws. Truth in advertising is, of course, the original oxymoron. What automobile manufacturer is going to tell you the truth about their product, a veritable time bomb of precision-engineered breakdowns. "The starter and the alternator are set to fail at eighty thousand miles. If you change the oil every week, you might get a hundred thousand before the valves go. But isn't she pretty! No, not the blonde. Of course she doesn't go with the car? What kind of business do you think we're running. But hey, boy, you can go out and get your own when you hit the bright-light spots in this chassis. Though, if you're stupid enough to take a woman who is sizing up your car home with you, you deserve what you're going to get."
No, they won't say anything like that. It's too close to the truth. What is utterly amazing is that the kind of thing they do say seems to be working. The mailbox wouldn't be full of defective hyperbole every day if somebody wasn't reading that junk. Any businessman has the sense not to believe his advertising agency's figures, so lots of people must be buying more of what they get blitzed with. This astonishing conclusion should tell you something about human nature. Shocking, isn't it!
THE CAREER TRACK & OTHER HAZARDS
Men and women on their way up are probably out of control. We tried to warn you about upward mobility. Many of those who are most likely to succeed comprise a group of people who from another perspective are recognizable as the earliest deceived. Maybe you already have the sports car, and the fuel injection is still working. You're in the fast lane on the career track. Before you pass that Corvette, think about who laid out this course, and why they think it's such great sport. Where the hell are we going?
Motivation is an elusive quality. This is going to take us back--unfortunately--to Skinner's Harvard-educated rats. When corporate executives interview prospective employees, what do you think they're looking for? Is it your grade point average and degrees that will impress them? Your new shoes and pin-striped suit? Do they care if you are an engineering wizard? Just think about it from the company's perspective. Talent is no good to them if you aren't going to use it. That chemical engineering master's degree is no good to them if you don't want to use it to come up with a better car polish. Research types can get interested in all kinds of things.
They want to know what motivates you. If they can find a rat who is hungry enough for what they have to offer, they can train him to do anything and neglect his family to work weekends at it. Skinnerian psychology fails in predictive value when the rat starts taking philosophy courses at Harvard instead of the usual courses in prestige orientation and management. What these guys really want to know about you is whether the advertising has been working on you.
My overly-generous analysis of avertising may have lulled you into assuming I meant that the advertisers' main objective is to get you to buy something. Naivete! The truth is comparable to the logic of smoking advertising. The dozens of different brands are all made by the same two or three companies. As in the trucking industry, there is no competition. If you sell a man a package of cigarettes, you get his money for a day. Get him hooked on smoking, and you've got his money for a lifetime--albeit a short one. The monstrous proportions of advertising psychology should now start to dawn on you.
If the advertising is working, you walk into the employment interview so greedy for success on the track they've laid out for you, that your engine is cranking high RPM just talking about it. If you want the job put your motive motor in overdrive. So, you're a chemical engineer. Show them you want the house in Hartford so bad you'll ride the subway home at eleven oclock at night. Tell them about your expensive foreign sports car. They're interested in these things. If you have a family, don't talk about the girl's soccer league or the boy's music lessons. Mention the tuition at the prep school that promises to turn them into superior being types by age twelve. Let them see you fondling the pigskin briefcase you paid two hundred dollars for. If the heaviest thing your wife reads is the Victoria's Secret catalogue, let them know she doesn't plan to do anything for the next ten or fifteen years except spend money. They will be paying you. They don't care how much, if it will keep you out of the bars. They aren't in business to make money, but you should be working with that simple minded objective. All they want out of the deal is the sense of altruistic pride in knowing that the image that gets projected on eight hundred million minds through the mass media they dominate will lead to decisive action on the owner/operators of those minds to fashionably comply with their every casual whim. Here at Proctor and Grumble we just love young upwardly mobile race car drivers to pieces. For breakfast.
From all this are you beginning to suspect that the fast track to real success is one on which not too many people are driving? Are you still eager to pick up your mail everyday to feast on the glossy paper and look for a letter that tells you how your interview went? A lot of rubber seems to get burned onto the pavement in places that shape the contours of success. Drive cautiously, but go fast. Never forget that this is a race.
But wait a minute. A lot of things made by Proctor and Grumble are really necessary. Even if we could get along without the sports car, we would still need polish for something. What would all those guys do on Sunday afternoons when the sun shines? I mean, they can't just stand out there and listen to the radio while they even up their suntans. That's quality time, when they should be enjoying the sweet fruits of their success.
Where there's a will, there's a way to keep it in the safe deposit box. We might be able to find a method by which a job won't be able to run you into an early grave--or pit stop, if you still believe in reincarnation. You might get a job. It's hard not to be interested in having a house of some kind, somewhere. Everything costs money. No doubt everybody demonstrates the basic human need for things like dacron pillowcases and hardwood floors. Even counterculture decor is expensive nowadays.
Don't start getting discouraged. Even with my flakey resume and bad attitude I was able to get on at 7-11. I've even been promoted to the day shift. My hard bartering with the crooks wasn't necessarily costing the company too much money. They just wanted to keep an eye on me. If they think they see management potential, I've got news for them. It's the kiss of death as far as I'm concerned. They tried that on me at McDonald's. If they once get the little cap on you that says assistant manager, your opera subscription might as well go out the hand-out window with an order of Big Macs.
The assistant manager they were grooming me to replace was a Mormon. Those people have high ideals about family and getting together at church for pot lucks. How do you think he felt coming in late at the social hall with day-old hamburgers and cherry pies? The stuff was old when they scraped it out from under the bun-warmer lights. By the time he got off work and to the festivities, the food table was as barren as the Utah salt flats. I remember, because he took me along. He said the program that night included selections from two operas. Fine. I can't always afford the Met, even on television. There was a duet from Trovatore, that the baritone hadn't bothered to memorize. He looked at the book through his big moment with Leonora. The Dance of the Priestesses of Dagon from Samson and Delilah left something to be desired. Well, a lot to be desired. This ballet is supposed to start seducing you during the interlude before Delilah coaxes the secret of Samson's strength out of him. At the LDS church it was interpreted smilingly by women who might have been seven of Brigham Young's original wives. But, I enjoyed it. I didn't have to be to work at eight in the morning. The poor manager was sacrificing everything. And for what? Chocolatey chip cookies! Ice creamish cones. Simulated-meat-product burgers. I'd sooner eat the glossy paper the advertising is printed on than that "food."
I suppose I'm raving again. I can't help it if I have strong feelings about food. Mr. Skinner could have explained it, in his hayday. When life gets reduced to basics, as mine has been, the difference between real chocolate and a "chocolatey chip" cookie is important.
THE FAST TRACK
Without any buildup, I'll just say it. If you want to throw the book down in disgust, that's the way it goes. Maybe it's still just a typewritten manuscript, anyway. You are probably the first reader at a New York publishing house, and, honestly, I'm surprised that you have come along with me this far. The fast track is the one we were on at seven thirty this morning in the rain--the Ballard High School track where I run three days per week, on alternate days with my weight training. This track is fast because there are only two or three people on it at any one time. Oh, once in a while the high school has a track meet or a baseball game here. But, I often have it all to myself.
The reason it is a fast track to success is that it goes around in a circle. You don't have any illusions about upward mobility or nonsense like having finally arrived. What's the point of pounding around in the rain, half the year in the dark? Rather than take on that rhetorical question bare handed, I'll just ask you one. What's the point of going to your office? If you answer, "Fifty thousand dollars a year," we've already been through that routine. And, wait a minute, first readers don't make that kind of money. As Yogi Berra used to say, "This is deja vu all over again." It just goes to show that a even a Yankee catcher had to have a sense of humor to make it through the day. And you know he was making big bucks squatting behind home plate for a few months during baseball season.
It's all in your definition of success. I don't have one, so it's all in yours. And I'm not going to argue about how fast I'm moving on this track. It's a fast track if you're running with Chariots of Fire. I'm fast compared to the lady with her shaggy dog. There are a few women runners who train here occasionally who are absolutely terrifying. Speed is not absolute unless we're talking about the speed of light, the limiting velocity in the universe. I can't speak with any authority about whatever else there is. But I won't let that stop me. We still have to get to the last laugh.
It isn't always raining out here, either, but don't take that as an invitation. There are enough of you New Yorkers out here already. What I'm going to say isn't a Northwest tourism promotion. Going around in circles is all right, if you still feel the exhilaration of the chase. So, I'm not chasing anything, anymore. I run just for the sport of it. When I kick in for each of the two hundred twenty yard intervals of my five-mile routine, I could be going for a gold medal. I'm not. I just want to feel my muscles respond and get around the curve and onto a straight stretch of track that leads down past the baseball backstop to where I can slow down again.
Some mornings I hear the nymphs singing in the Garden of Hesperides. The Golden Apples of the Sun are within my reach. They will vanish if I so much as imagine what it would mean to possess them. It's enough to trot around here in the morning glow, and think about where we're headed while going around in circles. I might be able to make this easier.
Nobody has taken care of the rusty football-practice sled or the odd assortment of hurdles on the track. Graffiti is sprawling over the concrete retaining wall along the north curve. Kick it again for two hundred twenty yards. Huhh huhh huhh! It may be a perverse abstract kind of activity, but I need it. When you have everything and nothing on your resume, the kind of work available can leave you cold. You have to start a fire to keep the equipment from seizing up.
Nothing is so calming as having gotten out from under the weight of objectives, some of them planned out by members of a board of directors I've never met, some in the nature of my beast--or rat, depending on the magnitude of my cravings at the moment. Enough of them have gone unsatisfied--no matter how hard I've tried. Isn't it a novel idea that I don't have to satisfy them? I can just let some of them gnaw away at my insides. Some of them are going to anyway. Why shouldn't I be in control? The board of directors haven't given me the whole agenda, anyway.
This track is faster all the time. I guess I'm getting is shape. But we can't run around in circles here all day. Got to get back for breakfast and head for the shop. I want to be sharp. And I have to get my wife to work. She has a fast-track part-time job too. You don't think I could make the payments on this mortgage alone do you? On minimum wage!
"Hi, Sweetie. What's for breakfast?"
"Well, I'm having waffles with blueberries. But, of course, that would be improper. Do you want the melon balls or the usual watery assortment of fruits I feed you while we driving across the Aurora Bridge?"
"Let's get rid of the melon balls."
"How was your run? You're so sexy when you're covered with sweat, but don't touch me!"
"How much time do we have?"
"I'll call and cancel my meeting."
"Now, Mr. Cat, you see who's got what it takes around here."
"He does look up to you."
"He's not saying much. Speak up, Fuzz Face, cat got your tongue? Having your usual for breakfast? Nice smelly liver! Mmmmmm. Eat up, you little carnivore; you've got a big day ahead of you. Sleep on the deck for a while. Move to the shade under the cedar tree when it gets hot. It's going to be grueling. It's a jungle out there."
GET SERIOUS
By now perhaps you've noticed, while you're able to lighten things up a bit with humor, that not everbody is amused. There are a lot of people, the majority of people, who are taking things very seriously. Joke with a bank teller, and she might just step on the alarm button and have you hauled away. If you try it with the young vice president of the bank she/he may not get mad, but people in power suits have ways of getting even. That hold on your account might not come off until your check to IRS has bounced. Tax collectors joke about locking people up. They will have a sense of humor when they put you away, but your wife and kids are going to start looking at those correspondence courses in the backs of magazines before you get out to explain it was all a misunderstanding. All you said to that bank officer was that your employees were holding your wife hostage until their paychecks cleared the bank.
Try to be kind to people with no sense of humor. Everything is harder for them. They still think there is hope. They tend to speak in the tone of voice you hear on recorded messages. "Please hold. The number you have dialed will be busy for three or four hours. Find yourself a good book, and try to be patient."
What are you going to do, when you try to have a little fun with daily absurdities and people start getting rough with you? "All right, Wise Guy! You want your refund `sometime before you retire'. Start filling out this form."
It's the cold stares that are hardest to take. As you lightheartedly explain the problem in tedious detail for twenty minutes to an assistant manager, his disdain gets more and more obvious. Finally he says, "Ok, that's out of my department. You'll have to talk to Jane Seymore in Purchasing."
"Couldn't you have told me that before I started quoting from my memoirs?"
"Listen, Smart Ass, Ms. Seymore may have an opening on Friday. Would you like to make an appointment?"
"This stuff is all perishable! It's been on a railroad siding for two days already"
"Two o'clock or three o'clock? After that it would have to be Monday."
Give me a break. I don't joke with people who are subjecting my luggage and my person to dangerous X-rays. Plastic-machine-gun jokes are not going to impress them, I realize. I don't want the doctor to be frivolous with me while he does my bypass operation--unless of course I'm unconscious. Otherwise, couldn't we all lighten up a little?
The main thing you have to watch is any kind of levity about what people do for a living. I'm sensitive about this one myself. Not the crook, but another friend of mine who is an opera singer is also a part-time chef at the airport. He chops vegetables and prepares the goumet mixed nuts they give you on the plane so you will stop being a jerk with the stewardess. Anyway, his wife has a real job, so one night when he gets off work he stops at a Halloween party with some of her friends. The room is full of yuppies, thick as thieves, you might say. It's Halloween, and Steve figures he can get by as a chef. Checkered pants. Billowy white hat. First thing you know, "Oh, you're Gina's husband. What do you do for a living?"
"I work for United Airlines. When are you flying next? I'll see that your meal is poisoned and the landing gear on the airplane is sabotaged."
Of course, Mr. Young Hot Shot with Meyers, Stone, Jenkins, and Pierriewater, misses Steve's effort to dodge the question. He goes right back for the kill. "Ha ha. What do you really do?"
"I'm a musician."
"But what do you do for a living?"
"Like I said, I work for United Airlines."
Real suspicious now. "But what do you do?"
"I'm a chef."
"Oh ho ho. Do you wear that baker-boy outfit when you sing?"
"Only when I do the Flower Song from Carmen."
Mr. Career Track misses the pun, and he wanders off to find somebody worth talking to, somebody worthy of the attention of a man dressed as an Oscar Meyer wiener in a bun. When Steve bumps into him again, he asks, "By the way, what do you do?"
"I'm with Meyers, Stone, Jenkins, and Pierrie."
"What do they do? Are you just along for the ride?"
"Mr. Pillsbury Doughboy thinks he's a comedian. Why don't you go back to the kitchen, wise guy!"
What a wiener. Steve was just curious. He found out from his wife the guy was touchy because he's only the book keeper and Meyers, Stone, Jenkins, and Pierre--food distributors whose main account is Canadian Jumbo hot dogs.
Carl has to put up with these types, too. He tries not to rub it in that his fee for an hour's work is more than most of them make in a week. Imagine...
"Hi, I'm Ron Stanley with Alexi, Stanley, Calhoun, and Foglesby. Who are you with?"
"Well, I came in alone. Don't the rest of the boys let you go out without a chaperone?"
"Very funny!"
"Thanks. I'm the comedian on the program tonight. I just wanted to get you warmed up."
"But what do you really do?"
"I shoot a little pool. You look familiar to me. Didn't I take you for about a hundred bucks at the U/W Student Union a few years ago?"
"Are you a U/W alum?"
"I wouldn't exactly say that, but I did spend a lot of time there as a graduate student."
"Oh, which department?"
"It wasn't the business school."
"No, I'd remember you if it was. What are you doing now?" These people have one-track minds.
"I'm in real estate."
"Investment banking?"
"No. Real real estate. I have a few buildings in Seattle."
"Oh." It takes a while for the idea to sink in that real estate can be something besides mortgages and trusts management. "So what are you doing lately?"
"Besides comedy?"
"Ha ha. Yeah, besides comedy."
"Well, cards, ping pong, skateboarding... ."
"Ha ha. You are funny!"
If Carl can do it, why can't I?
While we're on that... Carl has talent. If I could do stand up comedy, two or three nights a week, I probably wouldn't have the patience to sit here and hammer this out. But you're still with me. Aren't you... ? Don't give up yet. I'll think of something. I know it's gotten a little serious at times for a book on humor. That's just my style. I'm following the advice we gave you about fifty pages ago. Don't hold it against me for being myself. Your stuff will be different. Maybe you won't rub bank officers the wrong way, and you'll stay out of jail.
There is an outside chance--maybe an inside chance--you won't read this, you or anybody else. Carl may not have any sense of humor about his textbook on humor being turned into a soap opera. This whole thing could end up in the bottom of my desk drawer with the rest of my collected works.
IDEALS
I've been giving young professionals such a hard time you probably think I'm envious or just plain bitter. It isn't that simple. Close though.
I had a friend who is now a neurosurgeon. He tried to keep in touch with me, but I couldn't stand going places where the rest of the crowd were all medical people. Talk about a hierarchy! I'd come into a tavern with my friend, Larry, so anybody in the group who knew him thought I must be a doctor as well. Some of those guys were kind of a pain, excuse the expression. Imagine a young resident physician wearing his stethoscope into a tavern. They say that fellow had worked his way up from very meager beginnings to become a doctor, and he had a right to be proud. Well, all right. But the women had no excuse for kissing his hands and washing his feet with their tears.
Of course, the first question anybody asked me was, "Are you a doctor." I'm such a schmuck, I always said no before the women started in on me. The other doctors would go find somebody worth talking to--other people who were wearing stethoscopes.
My old friend and I had gone to high school together, and at the University, we stayed in touch. We started climbing the big volcanoes in the Northwest. Back then, Mt. St Helens was two thousand feet higher. He studied a lot, but he liked to get out into the mountains. By the time he was a resident at the medical school, we had done Mt. Hood, St. Helens, Mt. Washington, and a couple of ascents of Mt. Shasta in northern California, including a midwinter freeze-out on the Bolam Glacier.
Once in a while he couldn't get his work out of his mind long enough to enjoy our trips. This isn't funny. I remember him grinding his teeth about a child who had just died after surgery. One or two years old, this child had the kind of problem that would have turned him into a freak before the advent of the surgical procedure that had been done. Larry had told the parents the operation was likely to be only a temporary solution, and they would have to keep bringing the kid back. The one thing he hadn't warned them of was that he might die. He did. Larry spent the weekend preoccupied with what they must be going through. What it was putting him through was bad enough.
Larry's father was a prominent surgeon in our area. The people whose lives he had kick started again could have populated a small town in Eastern Washington. He sewed a friend of mine back together after a car accident. Another friend of mine died after that accident. In a career like this a few mistakes are inevitably made. This doctor left a small surgical sponge inside a patient. A second incision had to be made to remove it. Big deal. Larry's father was invited to all the society parties. One night he walked into a group of people, and some drunk said, "Hey, Doc, lose any sponges lately?" I don't know how many people there were at that party who owed their lives to the doctor. A lot of people laughed. He got his hat and coat and went home.
Now, this man knew there was more to medicine than prestige. I think a life like his is worth living. His son, my friend, is no doubt practicing medicine in a similar worthy fashion. He was in San Francisco last I heard. You have to respect the real professional.
I had need of an attorney a few years ago, when I fought another messy ordeal over the sale of a business. The woman who handled my case had a very high regard for the truth. Any judge in town will tell you, if there is a problem with her client's case, she works with the problem instead of trying to cover it up. A schlock operation like I was running was easy to find fault with. After I sold it to the employees, they decided they had paid too much. They were making more money than I ever had, but it still bothered them to have to pay me. My attorney refered me to an accountant in the process of grinding this collection problem down. He demonstrated the same ethical approach in his business as she did. I learned a few things from those two.
A few people have shown me enough class to last a lifetime. Their rigor and professionalism was inspiring. Coming from a cynic like me, that should have some credibility, but Socrates will back me up. Human goodness is not an illusion.
So, why don't I just stop carping about the phonies? Once you know what the ideal is, it should be possible to live up to it. It's one thing to recognize virtue when you see it. Finding it for yourself is harder. I have a general idea of excellence. Put it next to most of what I see--in myself as much as in others--and you have the material for satire or suicide. Given that choice, we can get on with the show.
OVERRIPE FOR THE HARVEST
The inconvenience of working for a living can provide an abundance of material for humor. I've been griping about the inconvenience of earning a living, as if working in a convenience store is demeaning. Things could be worse. I could have to dress up like a jumbo hot dog to promote the product being handled by Meyers, Stone, Jenkins, and Pierrie.
On the way to my office one morning--that is, in the parking lot in front of the glass menagerie I preside over from eight AM to four PM--I was met by a couple of guys with hefty black Bibles and picket signs. Right. They weren't union organizers, not among the highly-skilled practitioners of my craft. A boycott of establishments like my place of employment was in progress because of the lurid sex magazines we display at about eye level for a ten-year-old.
Now when I was a boy, the girlie magazines down at Winston's Cigar Store were masterpieces of photojournalism. The women in those magazines looked back at you with enigmatic expressions reminiscent of da Vinci's Mona Lisa. A kid could walk away with an eyeful without feeling women were creatures on the level of featherless birds just hatched, and expendable--pull their heads off and throw them to the cat if you felt like it. The stuff on the racks now is as explicit as a gynecology textbook, and the death and dismemberment in the stories is going to leave you with a pretty foul stench in your nostrils if you read it.
So I'm somewhat in sympathy with the people who would like to cut the association, in their kids' minds, of sex with violence whenever they run down to my store for a gallon of milk. For a few days I followed the example of Oliver North and went about my work while the Vigilance Trolls were doing theirs. Who am I to criticize? Nearly everything we sell is detrimental in some way. Cigarettes, beer, and wine are just the tip of the iceberg in our sea of toxic substances. Just try to imagine what goes into those sausages floating in the bottle on the countertop. And who is going to protect people from the rest of the magazines on the rack, or the newspapers?
But it's hot out there, and the traffic in my place is pretty slight on some afternoons. You'd think people advertising a boycott would have enough sense to bring a thermos full of something cold to drink. Instead they come inside and anti up three quarters each for Pepsi Colas. So much for the principle of the thing.
"I thought you guys were on a campaign to boycott my porn parlor. And don't you know this stuff is bad for you? It's nothing but sugar water and caramel coloring." They looked at me like I was really a crank.
This goes on for a few days. They sweat and slurp Pepsi while I go on corrupting the youth with my magazines and opera tapes, until one of them realizes I'm gullible enough to maybe join up with their crusade. It shows all over me, apparently. Must be my body language. I like people, in spite of everything, and I will generally hear anybody out. Some of the things they say are pretty wild, but, you know, I come up with some crazy ideas too.
Some of their literature gets into my idle hands. From then on, my carefully protected cubicle of sanity is in jeopardy. I thought I was a Christian, but nobody asked me before they started the interrogation. Am I sure that I know that if I die tonight, I'll go to heaven? Have I asked the Lord into my heart?
Where I go to church we have a prayer book that gives you some idea of what you're in for if you join up for the duration. These guys seemed to think that was more trouble than it was worth. You have to go to the source. E.T. phone home, I guess, is the idea. I had to admire their sense of commitment. After all, they looked like management material, and they could have probably been on a career track with some good company.
They got me to the Revival Meeting on my usual weakness--free music. Maria Castinetta was singing and giving her testimonial. Would I just keep an open mind, and come along for the ride? This blonde prima donna was great on the old recordings available at the public library. At the Revival she came in wearing a leopard skin coat. In the middle of August! I admit, the air conditioning was on a little too high in the red-carpeted auditorium. When Ms. Castinetta got down to business, her singing was over amplified, and it wasn't what it used to be. The bloom of youth was gone from her top notes, and a wide wobble had developed in the voice. If what I had heard on the recordings was the bloom of youth, this was the last rose of summer. Too many seasons blooming on the battlefield at the Met had withered her.
I'm not saying that only has-beens end up at revivals. I was there, and, so far, thank God, I never have been. Over a thousand people must have been crammed into that auditorium for one grand fandango of everything gaudy and tasteless you can imagine. Besides the opera diva, there were a couple of ball bashers from the world of the sports arena. They were built like the Gladiators who used to massacre Christians. "Yeah, Mel, it'a a tough assignment, but somebody has to do it. To make a Christian out of a Dallas Cowboy or a Minnesota Viking you have to knock the wind out of him." Then the businessmen started hyping Jesus as if he were another contestant in the ring with the big cola contenders. You can see why these churches are growing; they outdo every hypester on the continent at his own game.
After Ms. Castinetta's heroineic exertions, the music got worse and worse. It was appalling. Grandioso e Pomposo doesn't come close to describing it. Electronic synthesizers flooded the room and half of outer space with god-awful noise--an argument against the existence of God if I ever heard one. Why does he permit it? If God is good! The monstrous spiral was winding down into some abysmal black hole. As the artistic holocaust came to an end, in a moment of blessed relief, a preacher's voice began to extend an invitation to all present who had not made a decision for Christ.
"Come all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and in me, you shall find rest for your souls." This is it! I thought. An invitation to the last laugh.
I had to take more medication for my nausea, but I got down there. In the heat of the press--thank God now for that air conditioning--I was found and ministered to by a couple of volunteers. Seriously wounded, I was dragged from the battlefield.
DELIVERY & PRESENCE
Knowing who you are is important, but in most situations it is also important to be able to express yourself in a way that communicates. Delivery is the process of being who you are in public. In fact, we often find out who we are in situations that require public committment, but usually there is some malice aforethought involved in our crimes. Whether we're plotting to assassinate a collegue or just lighten up the atmosphere around the office, there is the plan and then the execution.
Since I've started on this unfortunate analogy, it probably is as good a time as any to talk about motive in humor. Lady Macbeth wants to be Queen, an end she accomplishes in the fashion women have used before and since Shakespeare's time. Since she doesn't have the power to get rid of King Duncan herself, she conspires with her husband to accomplish the murder. Macbeth, the foot-dragging old Scot, is top general and successor to Duncan. Lady Macbeth gets to be Queen for a day. She is tormented by conscience, walks in her sleep, tries to wash the blood from her hands, and kills herself. Macduff, the executor of the witches' prophecy, kills Macbeth.
So? Well, it just seems important. If you want to use humor in win-win fashion to make things easier for everybody, that's one thing. If you are trying to be top dog, or Queen bee, it's better if you don't assassinate anybody to get there. You might accomplish your end, only to find out you have gone a little batty in the execution of the plan. A lot of funny people have gone over the edge. God knows what witches' prophecy torments Stan Kenison.
Humor, of course, should be delivered with a certain flair or elan. If you've got it, flaunt it. If you haven't, it sometimes can be developed. If you're learning to ski, you'll watch good skiiers to pick up the niceties of the sport. Eventually, you won't have to think about it, and people will be watching you. Just as there are release bindings to keep a skier's nose dive from resulting in a broken leg, there are ways to get safely out of humor that falls flat.
Sometimes it doesn't seem to matter to Carl if anybody laughs. Bob Hope stands there and reads his cue cards as if he could wander offstage any minute. When these guys are playing it safe, the beginner should take notes. See that expression. It says, "The pay is the same, laugh or don't laugh." But behind that is another motive. What are they doing here, if nobody cares? It's fun to be funny.
It doesn't have to be hilarious, at least not until you get warmed up. Dry wit is dry. The comedian's mouth may be dry, too. Sooner or later we'll have to get this show on the road. But don't rush me. I may be very dense, and it will take a while before I get the idea of what you're doing. Remember this is just as much for your benfit as mine. You're going to live longer because you enjoy this. A grouch like me may not be around long enough to write a bad review of your act.
Another thing you can do to make humor more likely to succeed is to control or carefully choose an environment in which your roseate disposition can bloom. A salesman I know named Gary proposed marriage to his sweetheart only after he had reserved a private dining room, informed the waiter he didn't want any interruptions, and tipped the guy enough so he wouldn't forget. Even then he waited until she had finished desert. He didn't want to be upstaged by the chocolate mousse. This principle applies in many situations. Carl makes sure the busboys aren't going to be picking up dinner dishes when he starts his presentation. He makes sure that he is standing in good light and in a place people can see him without turning their chairs around. Even if you don't want to be a stand up comic, you still want people to listen when you talk. If you are planning a meeting, pay attention to the physical dimension of your presentation. Even a one-on-one planning session can be ruined by a jangling telephone. Any salesman knows these things. What if our friend Gary's pager had started beeping about the time he popped the question?
Once you have people's attention your presence is enhanced and dramatized. You are conspicuous. Now what? You have lots of material. The stuff you want to make fun of has been bugging you for months or years. You're going to stun them with your insights. Liberate them. You're going to be candid. The truth is so outrageous we're all going to have a good laugh and go home feeling better. The first thing to be candid about--whether this is a trial run at toastmasters or a meeting of prospective stockholders--is that you are a little nervous about being on the spot. Anything you say can be held against you. At this juncture nothing kills enthusiasm like enthusiasm. Don't fake it. What was it you were going to say? Oh, yeah. Now, how did that go over? Are they still listening? Be here now. If one slant on the material isn't working, try another. Don't just rattle the stuff off as if it were memorized. Maybe it is, but they don't want to know that.
A performance, whether it's Gary's marriage proposal or that of an opera diva, is going to be different from any rehearsal. The real thing changes many of the sensations involved in getting your stuff going. If you want it to get past the footlights, you're going to have to work at it now. After the first few minutes of your presentation you will be too busy to be nervous--until you have time to think again. Maybe you have won them over, and when you notice it, your concentration is interrupted momentarily. Whether you are winning or losing, go back to work. Give it the best you've got. Just do it.
Feedback during a performance has to be approximate. You can pick up some cues, but not everything is what it seems. A woman sitting sidesaddle in her chair and looking at the ceiling may be more involved than you think. An audience who doesn't laugh at the jokes might give you a standing ovation when you have finished. Generally speaking, you will have a feeling for how it's going. Trust your instincts for the duration. Evaluation comes later.
The kind of feedback that can be obtained later, you will be able to analyze in a more leisurely fashion. You can get more useful criticism from people who are in your corner by asking specific questions. Some things are clear to any objective observer. Could you hear me all right? How did the bit about Stan Kenison's demons go over? Did I rub them the wrong way with the philosophical digressions? A tape recorder can tell you things you never wanted to know about yourself. Some of it is not as bad or as good as it seems, however. Don't jump! Feedback is for the purpose of improvement. It was fun, wasn't it?
That reminds me of a story I've been threatening Carl with since I started this project. I keep telling him I'm going to put it in, even though it's sure to bomb. My wife is sure I'm the only living exponent of this fish story. My grandfather told it over and over again, and he always laughed through his snoose until he was red in the face. A few Norwegians who have slaved for years in the North Dakota sun might still get it. There's this guy with his fishing pole and bait. He is fishing in a pot hole of a lake. The better part of the day, he's just fishin'. A feller who's been watching for a while, walks up with a smirk to say, "There ain't no fish in this lake." Now Grandpa starts to grin. His laughter rumbles. A drop of tobacco juice dribbles from his mighty chin. Finally he'll say, "Who the hell wants to catch fish, anyway!"
ATTITUDE
Have you noticed how friends can insult one another and laugh about it? Carl pointed this out to me. He had just gone beyond any sense of judgement or propriety in criticism of my work. It's the attitude behind a putdown that makes the difference. Carl and my wife have limited capacities for literary nuance. They don't laugh at my fish story. Stunted development, I suppose. But, really, give me an audible groan any day over a lot of ingratiating "appreciation." Appreciation is for literature nobody can get through--that the critics rave about. Paintings that leave you feeling seasick are often appreciated for several pages in Time Magazine. When Joe Namath was playing for the New York Jets, everybody who was anybody took a shot at him--sportswriters, comedians, linebackers. Broadway Joe, they called him. He didn't mind being publicly loathed. Everybody insulted him, but they came to see him play football.
In show business there's an old saying about publicity: "I don't care what you write about me, just spell my name right." Is that what's behind the garish tabloids you have to look at as you pass the check stand at Safeway? If you get the tongue-in-cheek attitude behind that stuff, is it really comedy? Once in a while there is a lawsuit. Maybe that's more slapstick--Johnny Carson suing a company that manufactures portable toilets called "Here's Johnny." He couldn't lose on that one. Either way he got publicity, but he won a settlement of several million dollars as well. You can see why some people don't mind being insulted.
To be accused of having a bad attitude, you don't have to joke around. Whether you're serious or humorous, the content of many situations remains the same. It's all in how you look at it. This leaves lots of room for confusion. You may be misunderstood. I remember a story I wrote about climbing Nez Perce Spire in the Grand Tetons. There was one big-breasted woman in the party who tended--embarassingly--to get one of her breasts in the food while she was bending over to stir the stew pot. Some women read one line of my story in a way that suggested to them I meant, not a food stain on her sweater, but her breast in the stew. I could have better gotten into a sleeping bag with a grizzly bear than deal with the hostility cooking in that pot.
The thing about misunderstandings to remember is that they are like driving through mud. If you keep going, you can often slide through. If you give up and stop, you're going to sink. It's all over but the towing bill. When it gets too deep to steer, and you don't want to go down with the ship, try to remember the sun will eventually dry things out. Professionals in any game make mistakes. The winners get back to normal quicker after a bad play. Pros in the very serious business of comedy try to have a sense of humor about humor.
If you develop material that you like and deliver it with a positive attitude, you should hit the mark enough of the time to have some fun. Thirty percent of your audience laughing at thirty percent of your jokes can be a great success. That can be a whole room full of laughter if the percentages are moving around the room for each part of the routine. But Carl says he sometimes has material that he likes that isn't working enough of the time to persist with it. In the final analysis, humor, like a lot of things, just is. If it doesn't work, or goes over the heads of most audiences, Carl jettisons it before he starts to feel contemptuous.
A final word about attitude. Dealing with hecklers is part of a professional comedian's job. Everybody in the business gets their share of this treatment. There are ways to make it part of the act. Steve Martin quiped while being baited by one wise guy, "It's all right, I got wild after my first beer, too." Carl thinks of it as part of the deal, when he signs a contract, to make sure the audience has a good time. After all, they're paying for it. A heckler is a wet blanket on everybody's fun. If he can lure the heckler onto the stage, his dimise is swift and sure. You don't want to act too soon, though. If you humiliate a loud-mouth before he becomes obnoxious, he may get the sympathy of the crowd. That's no fun, either.
And sometimes the hecklers win. You can't get them up and out of the dark from where they're sniping at you, and you and the audience both get demoralized. Say something like, "We're really on a roll now. Nothing but frenzy out there. You don't think this is funny? I guess I'll be on my way before the lynch mob gets organized."
RANDOM THOUGHTS ON HUMOR
When a good line hits you, it's a jolt. To strike like a bolt out of the blue, your material must be high voltage, low amperage. I might be able to ramble around with my digressions. In the spotlight, Carl has to be concise. If he can use one word rather than several, he will. A facial expression may communicate something that would take me several pages.
Be descriptive. Language is abstract, so you have to use it to bring real sensations to mind. When Carl told us about ping pong at the colosseum, he said the crowd was hostile, but we really got the idea when he added that they were throwing things out on the basketball court. That could be developed even more. What were they throwing? Wadded up programs? Food? Beer bottles? Imagine their outrage. Like the roar of--now let's see, I can't use supersonic jet; that rings a wrong number with the name of the basketball team. Snoqualmie Falls? Too idyllic and picturesque. How about bloodthirsty Romans in the colosseum? Already used that. That crowd roared like the blades of a hog at the end of a logging slash conveyor. Not bad. This is the Northwest. Lots of those fans in wool shirts work for Weyerhaeuser. Terrifying connotations!
Be specific. You don't have to get yourself into a lawsuit. Just say Woody Allen instead of a that little guy making it with Mia Farrow in spite of he wears glasses and doesn't look like he could lift her, much less carry her off wildman style. Is it all right if Carl and I live in Seattle instead of some generic large metropolis? So what if he practiced his routine in Judy's living room! We thought he was funny. Isn't that more informative than saying, "Find an environment that offers exposure with limited risk from which your act can branch out--to the open microphone at Mozza Momma's deli-nightclub." I couldn't resist. "If one's a dramatist, one's a dramatist." But that's Shaw.
Try honesty. This is always a novel idea. Forget encounter groups, this is different. I once had a "performance" at a Christmas party of a bunch of investment bankers in The Highlands. You know the kind of old-money development I mean--guard at the gate, houses with enough square footage for three restaurants, a furniture store, and a couple of boutiques. Don't ask what I was doing there. At a table right under my notes sat a more dangerous looking blonde than I've ever seen in a James Bond movie. It gets to your concentration when every time you look up she's smirking at you. This is Christmas time, in Seattle, and she has a suntan that doesn't end as far up her dress as I can see. "Silent Night, Holy Cow!" You'd have to be brain dead not to notice. Now, If I'd had the money when encounter was in to get hip at Big Sur, or wherever, being completely honest, I could have gotten myself a ride to the police station that night. That's not what Carl means when he says there is a strong connection between humor and honesty.
Candor is a little safer, most of the time, than being real in the old fashioned sixties sense. I know you're dying to know what happened with that carnivorous blonde, and the truth is, of course, nothing. That's candor. I give you this big build up. It all really happened just as I have faithfully conveyed it. But I'm not James Bond. I don't have a license to kill, investment bankers or anybody else, and run off with their women to Acapulco. But she was eyeing me all right. There's hair on my chest under that tuxedo. This would be a perfect place to put in Carl's routine about having a license to kill, but he says I've been using too much of his stuff. You'll have to get it from him.
Carl also recommends being genuine, that is, true to yourself. It's like honesty, but it lets you show the good as well as the bad. You don't have to be awesome. You should be genuine. Woody is Woody. Kareem's Kareem. But who am I? I'm the guy who's hot enough to get the evil eye, but goes home with nothing more than a tuxedo pocket full of hors d'oeuvres. It's all right. Give me half a million dollars and a sports car, and I'd show her. I'd drag her off to be bored stiff at the opera. You see, the trouble is, I like opera. And mountain climbing in the middle of January up in Three Sisters Wilderness in Oregon. Whatever that stunner in the black dress talks about while she is on the beach sun tanning would probably wash over me same as my trying to explain to her why I like Verdi. Or Wagner. You want comedy that arises from my own personality. Imagine my trying to get that woman to accompany me to Seattle Center for about twenty hours of Wagner's ring cycle. Imagine me trying to get most anybody to do it.
Relax. That's the next thing on Carl's outline. So relax. I'm all worked up, too, just thinking about her teeth--like the cat in the Lincoln Continental advertising. But enough, I drive a Toyota. If I could get through my bit in front of the audience we're not talking about anymore, you can relax for your audience. One or one hundred people are still just people. They have a lot on their minds besides whatever you're up to. If you relax and do your thing, they'll be able to relax, too. Everybody can have a good time. Are you trying to sell them something? Be direct about it. A lot of back-slapping enthusiasm is a waste of their time and yours. Get involved in what you are doing. Pay attention to the feedback. I hate to even mentions this, but, be (ugh!) sensitive.
And, be an observer. Carl says, "Observe, recognize, and accept things as they are." Now who's being philosophical? To do any of the things recommended in this book requires an everyday commitment to plowing through "the things I cannot change," as they say in Alcoholics Anonomous. Some of the things I've learned, I would have preferred not to know. Now that I know, I'm not going to make a very good travel writer, or night bus driver on Empire Way South, or song leader at revival meetings. But at least I'll be able to enjoy Carl's observations. And I can give you some of my own.
Be original. We've already said that is easy if you know what you really think about things, no matter what is politically correct right now. What isn't so apparent is that a different perspective can make ordinary life more interesting. Remember Bill Cosby's early routines done from a child's perspective? Having your tonsils out. The characters you met in the old neighborhood. Robin Williams made a hit with his outer space alien's observations of the American scene, and his reports back to whomever it was out there (Oh Great Fuzzyness) he was talking to. For an interesting variation on that theme, consider E.T.: An unorthodox character comes down from heaven, overturns all the tables, heals people with a touch of his hand, walks on water (well, flys), dies and is resurrected from the dead, then goes back to heaven. Does any of this sounds familiar? I have to admit, the Gospel According to E.T. is more appealing than the version that turns up in a tract on the edge of the sink in the Men's Room.
A comic outlook can be conveyed through a gesture or an expression. But, one more time, What is comedy? A few literary definitions may be in order here. Tragedy: We know what this is. The good people are dead at the end of the story. Evil overcomes good. Realism, and/or Naturalism: Nobody is good or bad; everything just is. Romance: Good people survive their ordeal to reach a happy ending. The villain get his due. And comedy: Everybody is happy in the end, even if they don't deserve it.
Mozart's Magic Flute is superb comedy. The heroine and the hero pass through their trials. Like Job's Daughters and Demolay Boys at the Masonic Lodge they are steadfast, silent, and obedient. They endure and prosper in the end. But, so does Papageno, the coward who just wants a bottle of wine and his girlfriend. Papagena, who is little more than cute, wants a house full of little Papageni, and gets just that. Even the Queen of the Night, who is as near as the opera gets to malevolence, turns out to be redeemable with a little correction from ArchMason Zorastro. White male patriarch that he is, we know what Zorastro deserves. But, is that what he gets? No way! He ends up at the apex of the pyramid, Masonically speaking.
As E.T. has demonstrated, the Gospel story can be read as comedy. In this version, as in the original, children are idealized. And people who don't deserve it become apostles of the new cinematic Tao. In the original, Mary Magdelaine is as much a saint as Mary the mother of Jesus. The Pharisees are thoroughly discredited and embarassed. And of course, when the worst has happened, Jesus and E.T. come back from shadowland.
A survivor like Carl can end up as a stand-up comic. It couldn't have been all that much fun at times. He didn't always win at pool. Good judgement at cards comes from finding out what happens when you exercise bad judgement. And it was hard working his way through college. At the University of Washington students don't have much money to lose. You have to have a comic outlook on life when you've just hustled some poor jock out of gas money for his Thunderbird. Pitiless, that's what Carl is. But Smiling.
A couple more technical matters, and then, who knows what is going to happen! You can often get more milage out of your material if you use the premises that have been established by what you have already done. Jack Benny was a skinflint from way back. Even on the radio, Rochester and Dennis Day were making Dickensesque laments about how little he paid them. I remember a television rendition of a descent into the vault where old Scrooge Benny kept his money. As most people know, Jack Benny was a very generous man, but when you have so much material premised on being a chisler, you might as well use it.
Character development is part of any comedian's act. Dangerfield gets no respect. After Gilda Radner had done Rosanna Rosannadanna for a while, she was Rosanna. And her partner in crime, Belushi, was just Belushi. There was nobody quite like him. After a while you didn't believe he was acting. And now we know a lot of the Saturday-Night-Live drugged out antics were no joke. They weren't acting.
Besides the personality of the comedian, there are premises that get built into the material. One gag can be a set up for another that comes later. Like a vollyball setup, the first hit that puts the ball in the air is innocuous enough. But then the spike shot comes down and knocks the wind out of you. Stereotypes are set up to be exploited later in the presentation. Dilemmas left unresolved get another treatment. Using this technique unifies the program. Jokes resonate like the leitmotifs of Wagner's operas. Approximately.
To develop anecdotes using all these devices, Carl recommends writing the first line and the last line of your story. The first line has to get their attention. The last is often the punch line. Not always. From there you should analyze the premises that support your argument. If you do political satire, one of the premises can be that politicians speak in generalities and tell people what they want to hear. They use all the propaganda methods we were taught to reject in high school. Image building through media time-bytes is the current malpractice. We know what we're up against. The story can now be written with an idea which will be made concrete by examples and devices.
"I had an English teacher once who asked if I had considered going into politics." How's this for a first line? It's true, so I can be candid about my reactions, both then and since. I don't have a story yet, but if I come up with a kicker of a last line, let's see what happens. A last line...hummmm. I could use an implication of my teacher's remark that, now that I think of it, sort of bothers me: "You must have a pretty low opinion of my writing skills." OK. The premises we already have. Politicians are vague and general in all the ways Carl and I have been telling you not to be. They use propaganda devices, such as folksiness, stereotyping, ideological posturing and slogans, fear mongering, and so forth. Image building is the current stock in trade. I had reason to want to discredit politicians even as a college freshman when the teacher queried me with the first line of my story. Some of my friends were already in Vietnam.
I had an English teacher once who asked if I had considered going into politics. I had just written a story that was the equivalent of What I Did Last Summer. I was having mid life crisis even as a college freshman. Politics had never entered my head as a direction in life. If you had direction, principles, or even good intentions, that would be against you in public life. "Why politics?" I asked the instructor. "I don't even know the names of all my congressmen." This happened at the University of Oregon, so he talked a little about Wayne Morse. The old tiger was then shaking his fist, denouncing the war. I had been awake through enough of my history classes to think Morse and Lyndon Johnson, or Nixon for that matter, were pushing on opposite sides of a stone Sysiphus had gotten half way up his slope. The weight of history was going to send it back down the hill over Wayne Morse, especially since he had help from the likes of Jane Fonda and the tightly reasoned "arguments" being sold in the streets. So I'm going to walk into this arena and start a career! The avenues of advancement back then ran along Thirteeth Street with the peace marches. I have an honest face, so I should be able to say anything. Tell them what they want to hear. "A lot of people think we're in this war to stop aggression. It's cold-blooded imperialism." You're on your way, kid. Perfectly clear. But you need support from the philosophers on Greek row. Wear a tie. "It's cold blooded imperialism? A lot of people think we're in this war to stop aggression!" It's all in the attitude and delivery. Moving on up, run for the school board. Platform: Bring the troups home and send others in to replace them. This is a man who can be trusted. By the time I'm as old as Morse, I'll be able to tell the truth, if I know what it is anymore. I guess something like this ran through my mind. I looked at the teacher who had suggested politics, and said, "You must have a pretty low opinion of my writing skills."
But, why isn't this story funny? I seem to have established something contrary to my premises. Morse comes off looking all right. I don't. Interesting, what candor can do to you. How is it I chose one of the few politicians I've seen in twenty five years who wasn't very good material for satire? Carl's method must be the problem.
MY TURN
Carl is out of town for a couple of weeks doing his routines for Canadian audiences. I can run wild and write anything that comes into my head. One respectable politician ruined my merciless onslaught last time. There should be something I can say about politicians that skewers them good.
George Bush and Gorbachev are getting along famously since they realized they have a similar problem to deal with in their respective homelands. The economy is running amok in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Gorby has to convince his right-wing leftists that capitalism will increase production without a revolution. (These guys are Marxists?) And, of course, Bush has to persuade the right-wing leftists in this country (disillusioned Democrats) that increased production will cover the deficit if we just wait it out. Since Gorby is more popular here than any American politician, Bush could do worse than appointing him to his cabinet. The Politburo needs to know how the capitalists manage to produce and still keep the money in the hands of the same families decade after decade, so Bush would fit right in, there. Futhermore, he knows Billy Graham. While we're eliminating all traces of religion from our schools, the Russians are trying to get religion into theirs. They're going to need it. How does a country with a church older than dirt expect to come into the twentieth century and start making money without evangelists?
A nightmare I have about political conventions must be inspired by the conspicuous place Revivalism has in American history. It's only recently that religious activists have started aping political organizers. Politicians have been using revivalist techniques for generations. Just consider, for a moment, a Democratic Party Crusade, as the party of compassion proselytizes along the sawdust trail. The ideal setting for all kinds of revivals--religious, political, or rock and roll--is the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. The Democrats will need a few Hollywood celebratees and sports idols to please the crowd. Instead of organ music and a choir, bring in Willy Nelson and a couple of Heavy Metal bands. Make sure everybody who gets paid is in a union.
Billy Sunday, after he got warmed up with bodily contortions, furniture smashing, and partial undressing, would have unleashed his verbal dog pack on luke-warm church members. On the campaign trail the style is the same. "This country needs good-looking compassionate liberals in congress, not hog-jowled, weasel-eyed, mushy-fisted, jelly-spined, fat, four-flushing Republicans." Cheers. Applause. The rock bands start with their electronic fireworks, and people march around the arena waving flags and placards. This campaign is starting to roll. "If you think you're bad off now, just let big business soak you for another four years. Any red-blooded American would vote the blue-blooded money out of Washington.
"Now we know you all want to get Willie Nelson up here for a song, but first we have some special guests to introduce, all members of Veterans of Foreign-War Protest Demonstrations, VFWPD. These old radicals still haven't made enough money to be republicans." One of the bands plays Give Peace a Chance. It's a moment of deep solemnity as the veterans mount the podium. No, they don't have anything to say. It's enough just to remember. But no more symbolism; we want substance. Get this crowd clapping and shouting again. If these people don't have fire in their bellies, the juggernaut will never get moving. Start the altar call music. Blow your horns, and march around on the astroturf.
Well, why not? Mega evangelists don't do any worse accounting for their contributers' money than our elected representatives for ours. Big time is big time. If power tends to corrupt, absolute corruption must be powerful absolutely. But does everything have to go out the window with the pot Americans used to have to pee in?
Here in Washington state, we had a lifer senator who more or less lived in the Olympic Hotel coffee shop. Anybody who needed a favor knew where to find him. He was a good old boy. An attorney friend of his and mine--call him Deep Throat--indulged in remorseless binges of truth telling in his final years. He had known the senator since they were in law school together at the University of Washington. He saw the kid begin to work the system. He wasn't a bad kid either, but he got to be an Old Boy. Deep Throat saw how it worked, and anytime he needed a favor, he'd call on Old Boy. "You write the letter, and I'll sign it," was the unfailing reply.
Now I know our senator had too many friends to ask him to put on his glasses and read each of their letters before he signed them, but when you have a senator in every big hotel in the country, doing more or less the same thing to keep their names on the doors of offices in D.C., and they're signing checks out of our checkbooks with similar cheerful abandon, it seems as though something should be done. It might not be much, but I think it would send a message--to demonstrate an ethical principle--if we started making them pay for their own coffee. These guys sit around and spend several hundred million dollars a day. They should have to put three or four bucks per diem back into the the private-sector economy.
It wouldn't hurt them to have to put a stamp on the junk they send you in the mail either. If they want to send pictures of themselves every month or so, I can sympathize. Nothing they do makes them very memorable, and they do need name recognition every few years. But, if it's their face in the photograph, (I don't care who else they've gotten to pose with them) they should pay the postage to mail it to you.
It isn't as if you need the double talk that comes with the public relations pictures. Try to read that stuff, and you could end up talking to yourself. "It's a hard battle with the special interests here in Washington." (the people who pay them two thousand dollars to have lunch with them) "We're going to limit arms proliferation. Handguns should be sold only without any needless government paperwork to anybody who has the money to pay for them. We're on record against death and taxes except in cases of obvious abuse by rich corporate stockholders.
"It is clearly time to speak out." Period.
"Used to be only radicals could burn the flag. Now everybody's doing it. Back in my hometown we still thought White Lightning was the biggest thrill of all.
"Now I'm not saying we shouldn't give aid to our friends in the Politburo. It just seems--as Carl Grant quipped last night down at the Hilton--`We're going to have to stop supporting foreign dictators until we can take better care of the ones we have back home.'"
"Thank you, and may God bless me."
STIFF COMPETITION
That Carl! He keeps getting the last word, even when he isn't here to speak for himself. I know I'm supposed to be the student, but he could stop talking over my shoulder. This is still my book. I was all wound up to spin off something that makes your head dizzy, and he comes in with a punch line that stops the show. When you're hot, there is always somebody who is hotter.
It's the American way, I suppose. Competition, I mean. Forget about politics. Waiting for those cowboys to come to the rescue is like standing by Delta Dawn, all dressed up and sporting faded flowers, in front of what used to be the Mecca Tavern down on 1st Street. A high-rise has gone up and the bus fumes are thick in the air, but she's still looking for a guy on a horse.
The irony of competition is that the politicians you hear about are the winners. Along with the scoop on them, the latest on Bill Gates, Michael Jackson, the Kentucky Derby, and a bunch of sports stars, all you need are lurid crimes and disasters, and you can print most any newspaper. We must be interested. Do most of us still think we can win? Given the terms of the competition, do we really want to? Is the prize all that glorious, or are we just trying to keep from being eaten by those who believe there is something up there at the top of Trump Tower?
It just seems to be in us--that hunger. I counted the gold stars on my first workbook in elementary school to see if there were as many as my classmates, Douglas and Lester, had on theirs. Lester is now a doctor, and Doug is a brick mason. Obviously they both make more money than I do. But I know I've got what it takes. It was all there in the stars when I was six years old.
I revel in my conquests. My wife farmed out her dog when she moved in with me. Go ahead, hate me. Her cat and I are still in bitter earnest every night to see who sleeps in the basement and who ends up in her bed. I'm winning!
The girls who humiliated me at blackboard arithmetic are now deconstructionist scholars. They didn't like it when I surpassed them in calculus and physics. The ones who can't fathom deconstructionism are new-age mystics. It amounts to the same thing. They couldn't win fair and square, so they started making their own rules. These types will tell you an integral is an eggplant and calculus is a walrus if they think it will give them more power. Even Vince Lombardi wouldn't tell you a football was an eggplant, and God knows he was playing to win.
It's crazy out there. The last time I went looking for a job, my college degree didn't mean a thing. I'm not Ivy League enough for them. Not Phi Beta Crapa! Minit Mart and 7-11 are getting really picky. I took my wife out to impress her at the snooty Canlis Restaurant, and the parking valet wouldn't touch my Toyota. He said it was too small for their parking spaces. I don't have to take this from a guy who parks cars. Should I care he has an MBA from MIT? It's no BFD to me.
Show me a guy who writes down all his degrees every time he signs his name, and I'll show you a guy who doesn't know why he's doing what he's doing. Ok, so you have a Phd. in microbullology. What are you doing with it? Microbulls are already too small for most parking spaces. Every man wants to be bullish, every woman a snooty cow. If you've found something you like to do, just do it. Make your own kind of music. If you want to sing the lead in Tannhauser, and the local YMCA isn't doing grand opera this season, you've got a problem, but it doesn't mean you can't sing at all. They would probably be happy with a Schubert song cycle. Your friends would come.
Maybe I'm sounding a little snooty myself because I don't like the music they play on most radio stations. I admit it. I like operatic sopranos better than blondes who perform fellatio on microphones. Operatic sopranos sing better than the blondes with microphones in their mouths.
Let's try another approach. The Fred Meyer store in my neighborhood used to be real nice. Fifteen blocks from where I live, it used to have everything I needed to survive a nuclear holocaust or the ordeals I face as a homeowner. They may still have what I need. You know: shower thongs, parts to repair the sink or the toilet, cheap running shoes, toothpaste, sandpaper, paint, motor oil, a toy when some kid has a birthday, any of that kind of stuff. I say they may still have everything, because they are remodeling, and I can't find anything I want anymore. I used to like Freddy's even better than Woolworths. But, my neighborhood is going yuppy on me. The Fred Meyer store is too. First thing they do is put up a big facade. The red plastic sign of twelve-foot-high italics is gone forever. They're building a monstrosity that looks like Emperor Meji's shrine. Shinto, I think. If you like golden arches, you ought to get a load of this--concrete columns with simulated cross beams roped--yes, roped just like at the emperor's shrine--to the tops of the columns, so it looks like a freeway interchange held together with the phoney hausers from a waterfront restaurant.
If you're stupid enough to walk under this false front and go inside--remember, I'm a desperate man--it gets worse. Sure the magazines are still there. Greased up body builders greet you from the covers of Joe Weider magazines. Cosmopolitan women are hanging out all over. But try to find a salesgirl who knows if Freddy's still has a pan to catch the oil that's dripping on my driveway. Now they use up as much square footage as my house just to display sofa pillows. The tacky clothing department where I bought my Italian gangster hat is now thoroughly gentrified and tasteless. Instead of plastic thongs for a dollar ninty eight, you have thirtyfive dollar sandals. I used to find good Christmas presents at reasonable prices in here. Now it's a bonfire of vanities.
It's all because people want to stick out like a sore thumb. I had to put Freddy's demise in to prove I'm a decent guy, but back to my example of the opera singer. Did you ever suspect that good music doesn't need Franco Zeffirelli's gargantuine set designs to sound good. I watched Zeffirelli's Turandot on television--some people still call it Puccini's Turandot. New York was already crowded enough without half of Peking Province moving in at the Met. Domingo is six foot two, and Zeffirelli had dressed him like Sir Edmund Hillary on an Everest expedition, but you couldn't even see him most of the time, much less hear him sing. He bellowed until he was red in the face, but why fight it. Nobody was listening. The audience was watching the soprano to see how long she could balance Art Lee's Kwang-Chou Dynasty Restaurant on her head.
The art song recital at the YMCA is getting to be a better idea all the time. Of course, opera is for people of sensitve discriminating intelligence and refined taste. A dramatic soprano singing Madama Butterfly who weighs in at four hundred pounds is a little out of character. If her voice can last through the second-act atrocities it might have to be a little edgy. To soar over Puccini's brass ensemble takes a voice with the power of a whistle on a freighter leaving the harbor, but we tolerate these things. Compared to what Hollywood dreams up, opera is subtle. Hollywood is to the Metropolitan Opera what the Met is to our YMCA song concert.
Can you accept people who have degenerate artistic sensibilities? We have get-togethers at our house for art songs and readings. It isn't boring. You can hear a singer in my living room. The words can be understood. On a scale proportionate to human ear drums, Domingo wouldn't have to bellow to be exciting. Carl humors us so our blood pressure doesn't get dangerously high.
The last time my wife and I went to a movie could be the last time ever. We're probably brain damaged enough to do it again, but only on a Friday night when our jobs have pushed us to the point where we would commit a violent crime anyway. If this is what most people do for light entertainment, you can see why the arms race continues and terrorists fly the friendly skies.
