Funny
Anne Fleming
There’s a point at which, when you’re
funny, you think about stand-up. I mean, not me. Not seriously. Not for real.
This isn’t
totally related, but there was a time in high school when the fourth or fifth
person after antics or goofiness of mine said I should try out for the school
play that I did. You had to sing. That was one thing. I had no imagination: all
my troubles seemed so far away. Then you did a monologue. That was another. True,
true, very nervous I have been and am. But why will you say I am mad?
The play that
year was one of those school plays where the students make it up and it’s
about, like, high school. So after I shrieked, Villains! Dissemble no more!
‘Tis the beating of his hideous heart! I had to improvise, Jesus Christ, improvise, a classroom scene. With me as
the teacher. The students are acting up. What do I do? I don’t know how to
improvise. I don’t know how to begin to improvise. Cheech and Chong is what I
do. Cla-aass, through my nose.
I tanked. It scared
me off the stage for years.
But a few years
later, I had a friend who was funny, who wanted to do stand-up, who worked at
the Olde Spaghetti Factory with some guys who performed at the open mic nights
at Yuk-Yuks. We started work on a routine. “On a queer day, you can see
forever.” That was the opening line. We liked Kate
Clinton. We could recite all her routines. I thought the pope was on a
catheter!
I forget my
point.
Oh. I know.
To make my
friends laugh. When I started writing it was to make my friends laugh.
I still think
that’s a good reason.
It still pretty
much is my reason, only now I hope to reach more people than just my friends,
and I hope to make something happen that is more than just laughter. Although,
“just laughter.” Why did I say that? See, that’s a problem. “Just laughter” is
almost never “just laughter.” Because if you laugh at something because you
recognize it, it’s about our common humanity, and if you laugh at something
because it’s absurd, it’s a criticism or an observation about what we find
meaningful or relevant, and if you laugh at it because you’re shocked and can’t
believe a person would say that, it’s about what limits we set ourselves and
why, and if you laugh because it’s clever, it’s about human ingenuity, and if
you laugh and then can’t believe you just laughed, then it’s about how we use
humour to deal with pain. And so on.
I struggle more
and more with wondering if it matters, writing. Whether my writing matters. But
I never question whether making people laugh matters. Weird, eh?
At the book
launch for Gay Dwarves of America in
Kelowna, I was lucky and happy to share the launch with Nancy Holmes, for her
book, The Flicker Tree, which has its
share of funny poems. So Nancy got the crowd laughing, and then it was my turn
and they kept laughing. I stepped down from the mic and had that feeling: I
killed.
Yeah. Those
words: I killed. Comedy jargon. Stand-up jargon.
And then this little
thought bubble. Hey. Maybe I could do
stand-up. Maybe I’ve been thinking about it wrong all this time. I thought you had to be funny, that that was
the goal. But it’s not. The goal is something else. The goal is to tell a
story. Make a point. Convey a character. Funniness is a side-effect.
We never
finished that routine, my friend and I. We didn’t really know what we wanted to
say. We didn’t have a point. We didn’t have a story. We didn’t have characters.
We kept looking for good lines, for punchlines. We found some, sure, but they
didn’t make up a routine. Not even five minutes. What we needed was a
throughline.
I feel like I
learn this same lesson over and over: don’t do it their way, do it your way.
Yesterday I
heard a baby laugh. Kind of amazing when you think about it. It’s one of the
first things babies do. They cry. And they laugh. And that’s pretty much it for
the rest of our lives.
I don’t know.
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