08 June 2005

funny funny ha ha

His chuckling made her wince. Her dry delivery wasn't supposed to be taken as a dry delivery of her wit and humor. Her dry delivery was her rare attempt to be unveiled and unhappy. Could it be that he was never exposed to that well-known adage that clowns are the ones who are crying inside? Stand-up comics weren't comics simply because they knew how to creatively articulate the absurdities of life. They were comics who lived "in the raw" and faced pain more honestly and more directly than yes, "those fucking goths," she silently fumed with bitterness.

She didn't need to wear all black and think "dark" and "serious" thoughts. She could don khakis and sulk to the best of the walking dead electronic music. Looking morose didn't necessarily equate really having anything to be morose about.

"Those fucks with black lipstick probably have only to mourn the trauma of runny black eyeliner," she mentally hissed to herself.

She began to think about all the other well and poorly known funny people in the world. She wondered if people like Lucille Ball were the kind to spend their careers being the queens and kings of comedy on the big and little screens, all the while spending their nights alone popping barbiturates and gulping glasses of bourbon.

And what really was the motivation for all those balloonologists who pump and twist elongated balloons into the symbolic shapes of animals for kids?

The stark, naked, black-and-white image of Dustin Hoffman as "death-by-overdose" Lenny Bruce at the end of the movie, "Lenny," suddenly flashed in her mind.

"Not very attractive," she sadly thought.

"I'm not trying to make you laugh," she told him when she finally returned to the present. Instead, she wanted to cry. Cry because she wanted to cry and cry because she was so disappointed that he just called her "funny." She wondered if she should resort to elementary tactics of showing her feelings. She thought of drawing happy, sad and mad faces with crayons on construction paper and stringing them around her neck.

"That way," she decided, "I won't have to tell any more 'jokes' and he won't have to catch any of my 'drift.'"

But he was driving. Even if she wore a face on her chest to express her "feelings," he'd still need to keep his eyes on the road and he wouldn't notice, anyway. He'd just keep on laughing.