Category Archives: Comedy

The X-Ray Robots

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During my lunch hour today, I took the bus up to Northwestern Memorial to get an x-ray. My knee is all kinds of messed up because apparently I turned 70 without noticing. Lately I’ll be walking along when I find myself crunching through gravel–except no, that is just the sound of my joints trying to grind out another step or two before giving up entirely. So physical therapy, x-ray, etc. Anyway, I gravelled my way over to the fancy Streeterville building and immediately stepped into another world.

The whole experience was just like all the science-fiction movie ships/office buildings I’ve seen coming together in one place–unnaturally quiet, antiseptically clean, strangely devoid of other people. Possibly filled with robots. Two receptionists sat at a long counter; one took my x-ray order while the other did something on her computer that caused an alarm to go off several times, the kind you hear when someone has broken into the vault–an insistent, metallic sound. No one seemed concerned. There was a juice bar in the corner, unattended except for a cleaning woman wiping down its counter over and over. I started to worry these robots would sense my suspicions, raise their heads slowly, their laser beam eyes zeroed in on me, and advance in a menacing matter. I was relieved when a man popped out from behind a wall and said, “Lisa?”

But was he an x-ray technician? No, he was a client services robot, his settings on “rakish smile” and “European accent,” clearly intended to lower the defenses of patients passing through the muted gray doors of this place. I maintained a healthy sense of wariness, however, especially when he led me down a corridor of slatted brown doors and opened one near the end. “Please remove your jeans and put on a gown, and leave all your belongings in this locker,” he said, giving me a key and gesturing into the airless room. “Then you will wait over here,” he pointed to an antechamber next door. I did as I was instructed and shuffled out to the antechamber, which had a huge bank of windows looking onto a busy street just one floor below, and another woman in a hospital gown watching the soap opera blaring from the TV. Sure, that’s not a super exposed situation to find oneself in.

As I sat and waited, I went through possible procedures in my head. DNA testing like in Gattaca? Damn, I’d already touched a million things for them to swab and see how inadequately prepared I was for space travel. Immediate cloning like in that Doctor Who episode? No, that didn’t require the removal of clothes. Maybe I was going to be tested for precog abilities like in Minority Report? Doubtful, those precogs were noticeably weirder than me on even my most sleep-deprived day.

Eventually a woman came in and called my name, and after having me sign off on paying for the procedure, she led me down another hall to a large room containing the x-ray machine. She had me lie down on my back and she positioned my leg just the way she wanted it for the picture. She pressed some buttons and the table I was lying on moved smoothly back, forth, side to side. She went behind the glass to take the picture, and I looked up at the various ducts and wires of the machine, all gleaming white and doing nothing to lessen my sense that I’d accidentally stepped into a Philip K. Dick story or a Star Trek episode.

A few minutes later, the technician informed me I was all done. I changed back into my clothes in the airless room and walked through the gray doors into the lobby. It was transformed. A line of people formed behind the long reception desk, no alarms were sounding, a couple kids were playing tag. There was even a ray of sunshine breaking through the fluorescent gloom. Maybe all the robots were on break. Maybe they knew I was on to them and took their operation elsewhere. Maybe I was lightheaded and it was time for lunch.

An Open Letter to My 1996 Saturn, Which Has Taken on the Role of Life Coach, Despite Never Having Been Hired in This Capacity

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I’ve been reading some of the open letters over at McSweeney’s lately, and decided to try my hand at writing one. You can write to anyone or anything (generally not someone or something you are expecting a response from), but it must be nonfiction; that is, it has to be prompted by an actual event in your life.

An Open Letter to My 1996 Saturn, Which Has Taken on the Role of Life Coach, Despite Never Having Been Hired in This Capacity

Dear Madame Sunroof,

We’ve known each other for a good many years. You’d already completed one career track as my dad’s car for his sales trips by the time my sisters and I got to use you in high school, and you were a healthy 8 years old when I purchased you from my parents after college. You moved with me to a new state and settled in pretty well, becoming casual acquaintances with the Naperville Saturn dealership and its garage, and moving me around the suburbs of Chicago with ease.

But something changed when I moved us to Chicago proper. You were no longer the carefree car of my youth, eager for whatever adventure lay ahead. No, now you were a delicate old machine, approaching each trip farther than the grocery store with trepidation and squeaky brakes. I thought you were just aging, and I tried to ease the transition as best I could, with sporadic trips to the mechanic and a constant stream of verbal encouragement when we were riding around town together. I thought this would help and you’d cheer up.

Instead, I find that you’ve chosen a new career path in your twilight years. You’ve taken it upon yourself to be my life coach, though I never asked you to take on that role and certainly don’t consider myself in need of one. Once I figured out that each new ailment was trying to teach me a life lesson, I saw your plan coming together.

Going from 0 to 35 is a bit shaky, but it’s the crucial going from 35 to 55 when entering the highway that really makes you shudder and nearly shut down completely? Easy does it, tortoise and hare, etc.!

When it rains, the water comes in through a mysterious hole that no mechanic has been able to find and soaks the foot space of both the driver and front passenger seats? Bad things happen unexpectedly, and the best you can do is be prepared with some towels to sop up the mess!

The horn starts blowing in the middle of the night for no reason and I have to drive you around for 30 minutes til it shuts itself off? Get ready, because babies are way worse!

The rear suspension rod has lost all lubricant and makes a horrible creaking noise heard two blocks away every time I turn a corner? Loud music still solves most woes!

The rear windows won’t go back up once lowered (sometimes you can only go forward!), closing the door too hard turns the overhead light on or off (you never know when a ray of sunshine will burst through!), the floor of the backseat is literally rusting out (there’s nothing quite like a breath of fresh air!), and so on.

I guess I appreciate all these lessons you’re sharing with me, ol’ Saturn. But in a couple weeks I plan to drive us up to visit some friends in northern Michigan, and I’m counting on you to make that six-hour journey there and back. We’ve been a lot of places and covered a lot of miles, and I’m awfully fond of you. I’m sure that you can go the distance. Whaddya say, how about we make this lesson “if you’re well-loved, you can still go far,” and not “at the end of it all, go out in a blaze of glory”?

Truly yours,
Lisa

By the Way

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I figured out how to embed non-YouTube videos, so if you read Tuesday’s post, you can now play that video right in the post.

Also a little late, I figured out how to insert animated gifs too! So the awesomeness of the Jump Back! gif can now be seen in the original post.

Just figuring out all this new-fangled media that the kids today are talking about. Someday I’ll ride in a flying machine too!

Have a great weekend.

The Genius of Falling Down

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Ladies and gentleman, I have uncovered one of the great secrets of that dark and twisted world we know as comedy. Lengthy treatises have been written on just what makes people laugh, and entire tomes are devoted to the debate over whether high-brow or low-brow humor is funnier. The answer to the latter is both, obviously, but for my money, nothing makes me laugh so instinctively and delightedly as a well-executed pratfall.

What makes a pratfall well-executed, you may ask. (As I hope you might, since this is the great secret I promised to share with you. If you did not ask, then you probably already know the secret but shh, don’t ruin it for the rest of the class.) I’m glad you asked! A pratfall can take many forms, but its basic definition is someone taking a fall in a way that makes people laugh. Someone falling down the stairs in a Lifetime movie = not funny. Someone falling down the stairs in a Three Stooges movie = funny. You hear “pratfall,” you think “banana peel.”

And that’s funny, of course it is. People falling down is inherently funny. I don’t know if it appeals to me so much because my natural grace and style manifests in tripping over invisible objects and walking into doorframes, but I love it when a casual conversation or stroll down the street on stage or in film is interrupted by a sudden slip-n-slide. Much of the humor comes from the unexpectedness of the fall (at least unexpected to the person falling), but even when we in the audience know it’s coming, we love watching the norm literally upended.

pratfall!

Chevy Chase takes a fall for the president

Which brings me to Chevy Chase, whose weekly (and therefore very expected) cold open pratfalls on SNL elevated the act to a whole new level. His genius? He never stopped falling down. He didn’t just trip and land on his butt. He tripped, windmilled his arms, fell on his knees, reached wildly for support from whatever was handy, took down an entire bookshelf in the process, and landed on his butt. He could fall from any height and still find something to destroy on his way down, all with the most dignified look on his face, like, “I am not falling, I am momentarily off-balance.” The dignified look is part of it; he was playing straight man to the funny man of the fall, almost making the few moments of falling into a double act starring himself and gravity.

This insight struck me as I was watching Season 1 of “Community,” in which Chevy gets to perform a couple of his patented Neverending Pratfalls(TM). He trips over an instrument in a band room, and sure enough, the entire jazz combo setup comes crashing down in a glorious rain of cymbals and drums. He trips in a dorm room with a giant bowl of popcorn in his hands, and next thing you know, he’s grasping at the door handle, the desk, anything, while popcorn rains down on him and his friends laugh hysterically. He’s still got it!

SNL and NBC in general keep a tight grip on their video content, so I was unable to find either of those “Community” clips online or some of Chevy’s more classic how-are-you-still-falling moments from the ’70s. But this clip below is still excellent, with a festive fall as performed by Gerald Ford. (For the young kids in the audience, President Ford was portrayed in the media as clumsy and kinda dim, and Chase regularly played Ford as a bumbling buffoon on SNL. This clip is no exception; we don’t get the fall til the end of the 2:30 minute video, but all the record playing and tree trimming before it is wonderful to see as set-up.)

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/christmas-eve-at-the-white-house/29163/

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Image.

Heckling the Hecklers

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When someone’s an asshole to you, what kind of asshole do you get to be back at them? Can you find enough in the situation to destroy their position without destroying their personhood? Such are the weighty questions I pondered after watching some videos on a comedy site. Like ya do.

The premise of Splitsider’s “Eight Types of Hecklers and the Comedians Who Shut Them Up” by Megh Wright is great–what are the different types of people who interrupt stand-up comedy routines and how do comedians respond? But too many of the comedians Wright chose as examples of great heckler shut-downs were unmitigated assholes. I don’t mean they were mean; most comedians have a scale of “a little to a lot” when it comes to being mean in their acts, and frankly that’s usually why we find them so funny. And especially if some jerk in the audience is going to interrupt your carefully crafted routine and your limited stage time with some inane comment or drunken insult, I say rip ’em to shreds. And then call security.

But there’s being mean and funny, and there’s being a bigoted asshole. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that so many comedians choose the latter, since I don’t watch a lot of stand-up precisely because they include terrible jokes in their acts, but it still got to me. With few exceptions, if the heckler was male, the comedian joked about his supposed homosexuality and also about fucking his mother, and if the heckler was female, the comedian called her a bitch/slut/whore and usually crazy too. Ugh. I went from being on the comedian’s side to wishing the video would end sooner so I wouldn’t have to hear the audience laugh at the awful attacks.

Here’s a sample [TW, definitely]: Joe Rogan called his female heckler a “fucking crazy bitch.” George Carlin said his male heckler was “a cocksucker in disguise” and that he only had his mouth open “because he wants someone to come in it.”  Bill Hicks, whose profanity is a normal part of his routine, went way too far when he screamed at his female heckler, “you fucking cunt, get the fuck out of here right now, you’re everything that America should be flushed down the toilet, get out you fucking drunk bitch.” But definitely the worst was Ari Shaffir, whose response to his female heckler was, “I wish upon you the greatest success in 2008 and hopefully you will get raped many times before you leave here tonight. But I don’t wanna give the rapist any VD that you have… what did they do? all they wanted to do was get laid, they didn’t know.”

Whew. That was a whole lotta ugly.

And there’s no need! Other comedians in the list had great comeback lines without once employing homophobia or misogyny.

Jacqueline Novak rolls right with her male heckler’s comment and explains just how wrong he is, while remaining in the same joke she had been setting up before she was so rudely interrupted. Steve Hofstetter similarly riffs on his male heckler’s stupid interruption without once making reference to the heckler’s sexuality or his mother’s sexual proclivities. Amy Schumer shut her female heckler down quickly, and then told her to be like the losing chess player in “Searching for Bobby Fischer” and “take the draw” if she felt like talking again. My favorite was Patton Oswalt, who went on a lovely long rant about what a douchebag his male heckler was and how his future was filled with douchebaggery.

Being a stand-up is hard work, I know that, but once you have an audience on your side, it’s real easy to get laughs out of them by dealing low blows to a heckler. Why be satisfied with that? Presumably you actually want to be funny, so skip the bigotry and go straight for the withering put-down.

Smokin’!

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What is the most dangerous part of living in the city? Random attacks on the street? Gang violence? Daley’s privatization schemes? No, as terrifying as those all are, I am here to tell you that the closest I’ve come to death in my three years of living in Chicago was last Wednesday, when I nearly killed myself with the self-clean option on my oven.

I’d had a dinner party the previous Friday, and I guess some of that tasty meal must’ve spilled over into the oven during cooking, because when I was baking a pumpkin pie on Sunday, smoke rushed out of the oven vent and the smoke alarm went off. I opened some windows and set up a fan, and the alarm went quiet. The pie cooked for another hour, and the oven continued to smoke slightly. (The pie was unharmed, you’ll be glad to know.) Obviously this problem needed more attention, so Thursday I scrubbed the oven til it seemed pretty clean, and then I decided to use the self-clean button to finish it up. HORRIBLE MISTAKE. Almost as bad as deciding to watch The Proposal.

It started out okay. I went back to the living room and started watching The Office on Hulu and going through my mail. About ten minutes later, just when I was thinking, “Gee, this show is terribly mediocre lately,” I heard the piercing cry of my smoke alarm. I ran to the hall and saw my ENTIRE kitchen and dining room full of smoke. Like, all I could see was dirty white smoke rushing at my eyeballs with malicious intent. After clambering on a chair to grab the smoke alarm and pull out the battery (yes, thank you, I am aware of my impending doom, now please be quiet), I ran around the house opening windows and turning on fans. It was only as I was gasping for breath at the window in my bathroom that I realized, “I am inhaling huge amounts of smoke and will likely die of suffocation or lung collapse,” and wrapped a bandana around my face. I looked like this:

my aunt gave me this bandana for hiking trips, but turns out it is also useful in those perilous "quiet night at home" situations

Smokey and the Bandit

I cowered in my bathroom, door shut and window open, freezing in the late December elements and figuring out a plan. I quickly ascertained the best plan of action was to not die, so I called up my friend Claire and begged to be sheltered from this fiery storm. Note that I did not turn off the self-clean function on the oven, oh no. It was scheduled to take 4 hours and 20 minutes and come hell or high water (or fire department), it would finish what it was scheduled to do. The smoke had cleared up so I could open my eyes without a burning sensation, and there wasn’t even any smoke coming from the oven anymore. Clearly it had burned through the mess I’d thought I’d mostly got rid of and had nothing left to destroy. I scurried down the stairs and out into the night, thinking that I sure would rather inhale the smoke promised by the scheduled clean time than the smoke currently circulating in my lungs.

After being fed and petted by the lovely Claire, I returned home a couple hours later to a stinky icebox. The oven was now clean, but my entire apartment stank of smoke and what smelled like burned plastic. It had got in my clothes, my furniture, my walls. Fearing I would need to fumigate the whole damn place, I left all the windows wide open for the night, but of course this is late November and it is decidedly Not Warm. I got ready for bed with the same grim determination seen in Arctic explorers: I will survive this night, I will survive this night. I piled on layers of socks and sweatshirts and my winter hat and added two blankets to the bed. With the sounds of city traffic blasting into my room on chilly currents of air, I shivered my way to sleep, mumbling to myself about the eternal hellfire awaiting self-cleaning ovens.

And that’s the story of how cleaning almost killed me. I will now return to my slovenly ways.