Monday, January 30, 2012

Heroic columnist sacrifices morning donuts to spread wisdom

Sometimes I'm just walking down the street on the way from the office to the courthouse to see if any of the county office holders have donuts this morning and I'm stopped by a total stranger who recognizes me as the guy who writes that seldom-understandable but totally hilarious column in the local newspaper.

"Hey," the person says. "You're that guy in the hat."

I don't always realize right away that the person is talking about the mug shot in the newspaper which shows me in a hat.

"Yeah," I say. "I'm the guy in the pants and shirt, too. But then, so are you. Have a great day."

Sometimes the person looks down at himself, nods in new understanding, and allows me to continue on. On those occasions, it's likely the person really is just acknowledging that I am wearing a hat when the person sees me on the street. It's helpful on those days during which I have forgotten how I am dressed.

Other times, however, I am detained further. "No, I mean in the newspaper. You're that guy with the hat in the newspaper."

When the person says that, it's difficult to confuse the source of the recognition. Of all the guys whose faces appear in the newspaper, I am the only one in a hat.

Bill O'Reilly, Kirk Pearce, David Sirota, Bob Clark, Fines Massey, Francis Skalicky -- All those guys shamelessly flaunt their full heads of hair in their mug shots in their respective columns. To them, I just want to say, get over yourselves.

So you've got hair. I lived only 26 miles from Cincinnati when the Big Red Machine won the Series back-to-back in '75 and '76. Who would you rather be?

Book reviewer Roberta Page looks pretty good in that sombrero she usually wears when she comes into the office, but she doesn't wear it in her mug shot. So I'm the only hatted head in the newspaper.

When people on the street say I'm the guy in the newspaper with a hat, I know they must have seen my column. I immediately check their hands for weapons.

"Oh," I say nervously. "Well, thanks for reading, or at least for looking at the pictures. And I'm not going to pick on Indi-- I mean, Native Americans any more. I'm unarmed, by the way, and the sheriff's only two blocks that way."

"No, no, no, it's good," the person says sometimes without pulling a knife. "You're really funny. How do you come up with that stuff?"

(Editor's note: We suspect everything up to this point in this column has been a lie, kind of a long-winded introduction to whatever is coming. We apologize, but this columnist works Saturdays, so it's more trouble than it's worth to fire him.)

"How do I come up with this stuff? I'm glad you asked," I say. Motioning, I entice my companion to join me, sitting on the curb with our feet in the gutter, and I explain how humor works.

Jokes are written backwards, I explain. You start with a punch line and build a path to it. The easiest is the venerable knock-knock joke. About anything that ends with an "oo" sound can be made into a knock-knock joke easily.

Take, for example, "shoe." With the "oo" sound, all you have to do is come up with something that ends in the "shuh" sound for the name of the person knocking.

It doesn't have to be funny. The funny part is that you trick the person into saying something like, "Have you see my shoe?"

But don't do it like this: "Knock-knock."

"Who's there?"

"Have you seen my shuh."

This doesn't work because the door-answerer can guess it and doesn't get tricked. But if you substitute "Ahviyah Seenmush" as the knocker's name, the result can be glorious!

"Knock-knock."

"Who's there?"

"Ahviyah Seenmush."

"Ahviyah Seenmush who?"

"Yeah, it's right there on your foot, you stupid moron!"

(c. 1974 Ken York. All rights reserved.)

That one has cracked up generations of third graders throughout the U.S., and several fifth and sixth graders in Arkansas and South Dakota.

(Editor's note: The opinions expressed by columnists absolutely do not reflect the opinions of the newspaper. We love and respect our four Arkansas subscribers. We don't know anyone from South Dakota, but we're sure they're fine people who eventually might become readers if we REFRAIN FROM INSULTING THEM.)

Another standard form is the "What do you call a ..." joke. My best joke of all time is, "What do you call a dandelion climbing up a rope?" The answer is, " A self-rising flower."

Get it? Flower? Like, self-rising flour? Get it?

I came up with that one when I was a teenager, watching Mom bread some unidentifiable pork pieces for frying. The flour is kind of bland-tasting until it's been fried in lard, by the way, and no one knows why. It's weird because lard by itself is also bland-tasting, but when you combine the two and add meat -- magic!

Any word you can change to sound like something else is the nucleus of a joke. "Lunch meat" becomes "launch meat," which is the punch line to every astronaut's sandwich joke I have ever told, and there have been many.

As I explain the science of humor to these people, often I see the light of comprehension dawning in their eyes. Some of those folks have gone on to have brilliant careers, using the tools I gave them.

In their younger days, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Ellen Degeneris, Larry the Cable Guy, Bob Hope, Jeff Dunham and countless others all have sat beside me on that curb to glean what they could and take it out into the world.

I guess I'm kind of like a humor guru, like an aescetic old man in a cave on a mountain who sits, Native-American-style before a blazing fire, waiting for young grasshoppers to make that climb to attain wisdom. Figuratively speaking, I mean, since we're really just sitting on the side of Commercial Street with wet feet if it's been raining.

(Editor's note: We can't prove it, but we're pretty sure Bob Hope never came to Lebanon, God rest him. The rest of it could be true, though.)

Humbly, I don't try to blackmail those guys into giving me a bunch of their money because I taught them everything they know, at least not since Larry stomped on my kidneys and Ellen threatened to marry my sister.

My reward is just feeling good for being able to make the world a little funnier place.

(Editor's note: Funnier? We didn't realize this was supposed to be a humor column. Cancel the assignments for the articles on the aliens and Bigfoots. This guy's full of crap.)