Road Apples by Tim Sanders
May 21, 2012

Talking to myself again

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The other day I was having a conversation with myself. I sometimes have conversations with myself when nobody else will talk to me.

“Tim,” I said to myself. “Why is it that you almost never watch the Comedy Channel on TV? It is just chock full of humor, and you do claim to be a humor columnist, after all.” You’d think that since I asked myself the question, myself would have had a quick answer, but myself didn’t. Myself and I had to think about it for awhile. We (me, myself, and the tapeworm) finally agreed on an answer. The answer had to do with repetition. Repetition and boredom.

Imagine that you have a friend with a two-year-old. That toddler, little Wilberforce, is very cute and quite verbal. There’s nothing not to like about little Wilberforce. Your friend asks you if you’d like to hear little Wilberforce sing a song he’s just learned. You say “sure.” So little Wilberforce launches into “Take me out to the Ball Game” with admirable gusto, and finishes with a very animated “ONE, TWO, THREE STRIKES AND YOU’RE OUT AT THE OLD BALL GAME!” You applaud, because you genuinely admire little Wilberforce’s performance. He pronounced his words well, and never hit a single clinker. This kid is really good, you tell yourself. I can’t wait to hear what he comes up with next. But a couple days later, your friend and little Wilberforce are back, and he’s singing the same old song. It’s still a fine rendition, but a lot of the magic is gone. Since you liked it so well the first time, he sings it three more times. You are beginning to realize that you never really cared for that song, much. Your friend stays to talk for an hour or two, but the conversation never seems to go anywhere because every few minutes little Wilberforce feels compelled to interrupt and sing “ONE, TWO, THREE STRIKES” at you again. You finally realize that little Wilberforce, who was a precious child just a few days ago, has turned into a real pain in the neck. You actually consider asking your friend to please take precious little Screech Owl to a stinking ball game, where you have no doubt that at some point during the seventh-inning stretch somebody will offer the child’s mother a genuine, autographed major league catcher’s mitt and some duct tape. Things that are entertaining on occasion wear very thin when repeated incessantly.

There are a lot of words like that. Take “awesome,” for example. “Awesome” was traditionally used to describe things like magnificent sunsets, the Grand Canyon, and Niagara Falls. Now people under 30 (and some even older) use it to describe Helen’s potato salad or Jason’s newest facial decorations. “Wow, dude, them tongue studs is awesome!” The word is so overused it has lost its meaning. When I was a kid the catch word was “cool.” Initially the word meant “moderately cold,” but by the time I was ten, a sweaty teenager wearing a very heavy leather jacket on a blistering hot August day sitting atop a Harley Davidson with exhaust pipes you could fry eggs on was still “cool.”

And if regular words become boring with overuse, they can’t hold a candle to curse words. I am not easily offended by bad language. A number of the kids I grew up with practiced cursing, and some were quite good at it. But most of us outgrew it, and realized that adults addicted to cursing were not the brightest lights in the harbor. Foulmouthed adults were generally the kind who never actually drank from the fountain of knowledge, only washed their socks in it. Cursing can be effective, but only when rarely used. And there are some words that really don’t need to be used at all. Which brings us back to that original question I asked myself about why I seldom watch the Comedy Channel.

When the late Richard Pryor used to appear on the Tonight Show, he was hilarious. His ideas were fresh and clever, and his delivery and timing were top notch. In the late 70s, some friends and I went to the theater to watch a movie which I believe was called “Richard Pryor in Concert.” I had high expectations. But unfortunately he had dumbed down his delivery for what he must have counted on being a dumbed down audience. The three favorite words in his repertoire were ... well, let’s just say they were quite similar to “motor,” “scooter,” and of course the final Coupe de Ville, “jive motor scooter.” He used them over and over and over again, so as to show his audience that he was “cool.” After the movie I realized that if all of the “motor scooters” were extracted from his monologue, the film would have only lasted for ten minutes, tops. Gratuitous cursing might have amused prepubescent teens, but it ruined Pryor’s act for the adults in that movie theater. We’d heard it all before.

A good percentage of today’s comedians rely too heavily on their ability to curse. Their monologues consist of “motor scooter” this and “motor scooter” that, all obviously meant to show their audience that they are grown up and perfectly capable of using “adult language,” which, ironically, most of the actual adults in their audience had quit using by the time they were thirteen.

So myself told me that it’s not that there’s nothing funny on that Comedy Channel, it’s just that I don’t want to waste my time sifting through all the repetitive verbal garbage tossed about by the likes of Andrew Dice Clay and Chris Rock to find those few kernels of humor. When I need a humor fix, I usually go to YouTube and watch old timers like Laurel and Hardy, The Marx Brothers, and W.C. Fields. George Burns and Gracie Allen do a hilarious bit about Gracie’s Uncle Otis and his political career, and after you watch it you don’t feel like you need a two hour shower. Those guys were funny, and original, and had better sense than to bore their audience with childish, gratuitous vulgarity.

Of course, maybe that was because their audiences were a bit brighter back then.