By Jim Hagarty
2018
I envy people who are not funny or, at the very least, are pretty sure they aren’t. Life is easier for them. For those who are funny, or think they are, the entire world outside is one big stage from which to deliver their lines and every outing is cause for a performance.
So those who are funny, or who have been told they are (a fellow university student 45 years ago said the only career that would make any sense for you would be as a stand-up comedian) must take their show on the road every single time they leave home.
The audience members are plenty and varied but the best ones to entertain are the captive people who have no escape. I refer, of course, to cash register jockeys in stores. They can’t tell you to shut up and so, as they finger through the till trying to find some nickels and dimes, they have to listen to you.
Seeing the store is not busy, you try this old clanger out on a nice young man who did nothing to deserve it. And to simplify things, you leave out names and make up characters.
“My grandfather died,” you announce, and the young man’s face falls. “And at the funeral, my grandmother was asked if grandpa had any last words. Grandma says yes, his final words were, ‘Mary, put down that gun.'”
Now the poor young man is filled with emotions, sorry your grandpa died and horrified that your grandma killed him. Another customer approaches the till and you have no time to deconstruct the story, so you flee.
At another store, a short time later, another checkout line on a very snowy day, you say to the young woman behind the counter, “So, are you coming over to shovel out my driveway?” This, in your mind, is just a friendly comment on the extreme weather outside. Immediately, on the clerk’s face, you read her mind wondering why a 66-year-old man is asking a 25-year-old woman to come over to his place.
This time you try to extricate yourself and what better way to do that than to refer to your wife. “If I go out with a snowshovel, I could shovel all day without even one neighbour looking in my direction. So I send out my wife with a shovel and five minutes later, three neighbours with snowblowers are on the scene.”
You think you’ve successfully cleaned up in Aisle 5, but the look on the clerk’s face say she is now dealing with a man who forces his wife to go out and shovel the driveway. She looks like she is about to push that button under the counter that every clerk must surely push when she wants to summon security.
So this is the plight of the funny man, or at least one who believes he is funny. It is his mission, he thinks, to cheer up the world but his feeble efforts cause only fear, alarm and expressed regrets on the sudden death of an ancestor.
He thinks about all this as he shovels his driveway alone, his wife knitting with the dog on her lap in their nice warm house. And he vows to never leave home again.
(Hey, this is my first original, new story of 2018. Woo hoo!)
