January 2017 – HUMOR IS NO FUN UNLESS YOU LAUGH

Save and be Safe

I thought I was seeing a ghost. There was Charlie Hunter, sitting on the bench in the bus stop kiosk. We had been neighbors some years ago. No, it couldn’t be Charlie. Impossible. I had just read his obituary in the Sunday Courier. A brief write-up. Died peacefully in his sleep, the paragraph had concluded.
“You aren’t Charlie Hunter, aren’t you?” I addressed the man. I mean, people do look alike sometimes.
“Oh Hi, Elmer!” he said as he turned his face up to see me. “Haven’t seen you in a while. How are you?”
For a moment I felt a little woozy. This was nothing if not eerie.
“What brings you to these parts?” I finally managed to say. Could not think of anything else to say to a person who, I had just read, isn’t any more.
“I’m just on my way home from the cardiologist,” he said. “The old ticker, you know, needs a little boost now and then. Get my checkup every six months.”
I was still not quite sure if I was dreaming, losing my mind, or what.
“So,” — I was fishing for suitable words — “So what was the good doctor’s verdict today?”
“Good news, actually. He does not want to see me until a year from now.”
“You are quite well, then, it seems?”
“Oh yes”, he smiled. “I am still up on the world. Gave up smoking, you know. Clears the mind and the pipes, I tell you. Sometimes I do feel my age, though, especially when I have to fight the computer. I swear there lurks a dybbuk in that machine. Can’t tell you how many emails and things I have lost because I forgot to save, or send, or click on some other confounded button.”
This was no time for chit-chat, I felt. I mean, how weird can you let a situation get? So I told him straight out that I had read his obituary in the paper, enumerating all his accomplishments, how his children respected him, and all the nice comments his co-workers had left.
I was not prepared for his reply.
“Yea, I read it too”, he said. “I get the e-version of the paper. Made me feel really good about myself. I had no idea people liked me that much.”
“But don’t you understand? It said that you had died!”
“It said what?” he turned with a start. “Where did you see that?”
“Way down below, on the last line.”
There was a long pause. Neither of us moved. Then he burst out laughing: “Oh for God’s sake, I done it again.”
“What? What did you do?”
“I hit ‘close’ but didn’t scroll down first”.

De-Frosting America

We are finally getting it right. The country is waking up. The first step is a big step, maybe not Moon shaking but certainly big. We are updating our poets! Because this is what Robert Frost really meant to say: “Something there is that does love a wall”. And we now join Cole Porter and Robert Fletcher as we sing “Do fence me in!” And we remember, of course, our own Ronald Reagan’s powerful speech: “Mister Gorbachev, do keep up that wall!”
The Chinese love their wall, too. “Nice tourist attraction”, as they say in Mandarin. And Hadrian was also happy with his. Kept the British out of Londinium, as we know. Oh yes, and the Roman Limes, the 500 km wall that kept the Germans out of Frankfurt. Those, of course, were bigger projects. But at least we are getting started.

Grock

When I was a child growing up in Germany in the Thirties the highest paid entertainer in the world, they say, was Grock the clown. “The king of clowns” they called him. Everybody loved him but nobody, as far as I can remember, ever suggested to turn the government over to him. But then, of course, we already had a Reichskanzler.

I must talk to my physician. Could one of the medications he prescribed for me be causing those frightful hallucinations and nightmares I keep having?

The Medium is the Message

I have seen TV programs that developed something like this: The Master of Ceremonies walks out on stage. The audience breaks out in wild shrieks. The man has not said anything yet.

“Welcome to the show on this hot evening”, he now says. Again, the audience shrieks wildly.

It is indeed hot in the auditorium. Had he said ‘Welcome to this icebox’ that would have been ironic and thus funny and the shrieks would have been justified, proof that the audience “got” the joke. As it was in this hypothetical case there was no joke. So why did the audience shriek?

Next, the MC introduces a performer by name. The audience shrieks, of course, as they should because they all know the performer and show their eager anticipation. At the end of the performance there are more shrieks, signifying applause, the reward for a good performance. So far, so good.

The MC comes on stage again. Wild shrieks. He says “Our next performer…” The audience interrupts with wild shrieks. “Has broken his collar bone during rehearsals and …” The audience shrieks wildly. “And we have asked this young lady in the audience…” Wild shrieks. “To sing for us the Star Spangled Banner”. Wild shrieks from the audience.

Are these screams the applause, the reward for a performance well done? But she has not sung yet. That cannot be it, then. My guess and fervent hope is that none of this hilarity has anything to do with the broken bone. Apparently these are just emotional outbursts in anticipation of a performance, any performance. They express the fun of being there, the thrill of being on TV, and thus of being part of the medium.

Perhaps that is what Professor Marshall McLuhan of Toronto was driving at, years ago, when he coined the phrase “The Medium is the Message”. The shrieks and screams are an essential part of the show, a part of the medium. The performance, the speech, the joke, the song, whatever, are meant to be the message but it really does not matter. There needn’t even be a message as long as there is an audience prepared to make a lot of noise. It is at this point, I think, that we become aware that medium and message have in deed become the same thing, that applause, namely the reward for a performance, is actually the performance!

Had McLuhan been an Ashkenazi he could have said it even simpler: A shriek is a Shrek!

Picture credits: Printapattern Blog

On Whitman

Come March it will be 125 years since he died. If there ever was a poet, American or otherwise, who painted his words with a broad brush, to mix a few metaphors, it was Walt Whitman. Just listen to that enthusiasm: “Exult, O shores! and ring, O bells!” “I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon!” “And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self.” “Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?”
He heard America singing. He heard the mechanic, the carpenter, the mason, the boatman, the shoemaker, the wood cutter, and the young mother. He would probably have heard the banker too, the realtor, the stock broker, and the IT specialist. “For you (O Democracy, he would have said) I am trilling these songs”.
He left us with an indisputable dictum: to have great poets, there must be great audiences. We introduce our children, or should, to great poetry in the expectation that the outlook thus gained by the next generation will help us to remain a civilized nation.
Unfortunately, inspiring as he might be, Whitman was not into humor. Great poets, I think, are seldom funny, a serious shortcoming. Good thing he had friends like Dorothy Parker. “This isn’t my head I’ve got on now,” she writes in one of her books. “I think this is something that used to belong to Walt Whitman.”
Cheer up, Walt. We are still a great audience!
(c)2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman

Picture credits: Biography.com

On Shakespeare and Sanity

You must hand it to the Bard: he always finds the right words. Here is an excerpt from Act III of Midsummer-Night’s Dream, slightly brought up to date. Quince is the speaker:

“Then there is another thing: we must have a wall … Some man or other must present Wall: and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some roughcut about him. And let him hold his fingers thus (just so) for Pyramus to whisper through that cranny and tell those on the other side how much they owe”.
(c)2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman
Picture credits: Shrek franchise (Paramount Pictures and Dreamworks Animation)

The Apps and Downs of Contemporary Speech

“Alas, the brain is a receptacle for nonsense”. So says Dr. Fishelson, a character in one of Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories. “This earth belongs to the mad”. It often feels that way. Scholars used to study their texts. Now they text about their studies. And they do that on IPHONES and TABLETS and ANDROID devices that are also capable of ASR and that have PHOTO APPS in case PIX are needed. It is all done in a mysteriously abbreviated language accessible only to the elect. The acronymns alone can tax your memory. Granted, some we readily understand. If invited to a meeting we expect an RSVP, but not necessarily an ASAP or a FYI.
Who would have thought that we ever get used to EBOOKS and GAME on PADS or rest our brains in front of BLU-RAY compatible HDTV sets with 3D capability and connectivity to a variety of CDs and DVDs, DV AVIs, or even VINYLs, if we have kept them. Clearly this sort of R&R activity requires a special mix of DNA which no SAT scores will ever reveal, and it all depends on your DOB anyway, as any AARP member will attest.
Recently a lady friend of ours tried to call her new doctor. She could reach only his PA, however. We asked her if the new doctor was a GI. No, she said, he was actually an OB, but certainly an MD, not an OD, a member of AMA with a Ph.D. to boot. Thank God not a VET as well, I thought. She had seen him before, she said. He was up on EHR and had her EMR in hand. He had ordered some LAB work, an EKG, and a CAT scan. (She actually likes dogs better but she let that go). Luckily, she did not need an MRI, nor any ENDO-, ANO-, SIGMOIDO-, RHINOLARYNGO-, or other SCOPES. What is the DOS on your last EOB?, I asked her, tongue in cheekly. Shouldn’t have said that. She was in no mood for any kind of humor. Apparently she was also found to have AFIB and possibly DC and early signs of HCM, things you cannot cure with OTC pills. We saw her in the ER later, even though we were not NOK.
Yesterday, Thursday, the UPS man rang the door bell. Turns out that it was not UPS but the USPS with a letter from the IRS. The tax man has been a VIP since antiquity, or at least since the beginning of the CE, a person feared but not loved. The messenger wanted my ID and my SOCIAL. FIFO or LIFO? Irrelevant in my life and I should not have been afraid as any CPA would have told me. I support the ASPCA, UNICEF, USO, and the VFW, after all, and I keep all my W2’s and my SSA 1099’s. But I had a feeling, an attack of ESP I suppose, and went straight to the ATM and MAXED out my account. But that was yesterday, and the FMS found that all my YTD numbers were A-OK. ROGER, what a relief.
TGIF.
(Gesundheit!)
(c)2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman

Free May Cost You

One often hears it said that there is “no free lunch”. Tell that to your neighborhood hippie. He (or she) will probably be surprised that you do not know that “food just is”.
In the world, however, especially the world of commerce, nothing “just is”. Everything has to be made, grown, processed, and sold. Farmers who give their crops away at cost will soon stop being farmers. Many already did.

An ad in a certain newspaper I saw promised readers an irresistible deal, acronyms slightly changed: FREE XTM GUMSTER TOT WITH ACTIVATION OF A CHUPA X DRAMP (a $99.99 value). I assume that the readers of this ad knew what it was all about. The ad did not say what the item costs but the word “free” was there in big white letters on red background. The maker, it seems, was trying to slip us the hippie thing: merchandise “just is”. Caveat emptor!

But the little word “free” is so soothing in the shopper’s ear. Merchants use it all the time. “Buy one get one free”, you see it on every other ad. Often this message is followed by an amendmend in smaller print: “with card”. Occasionally there are further restrictions marked by a symbol like *. Such a footnote then leads the shopper to the bottom of the page where it says in even smaller print: “clip coupon to card”. And at this point you still do not know what each item actually costs. Never mind, just stay in line. You will find out. But you can be sure it is not free.

Complete and blatant untruths in advertising are of course banned by law. The little half truths described above are the only ones that vendors and manufacturers can use and get away with. But there is also a more subtle way to use deception in advertising: splitting the message into two parts, one manifestly true, the other somewhat murky. The Tesla Motors Company, for example, displays a proud sign on all new cars. It says in bold letters “NO EMISSIONS”. The Company is free to say this with a straight face by law because it is true: a Tesla car ejects no emissions. It has no fuel burning engine. It does not even have an exhaust pipe. This is the first part of the ploy. The second part is the virtual grin and wink that emanates from the sign on the car. It is Elon Musk’s little secret of which we are all aware, of course, but which we conveniently forget, namely that the power the car runs on is generated somewhere else, and power generation still produces plenty of emissions. The advertiser does not deny that and thus is home free.

Donald Trump would probably explain that this is called business and that the advertisers are just smart. As for the rest of us, we are still the same hippies. We pretend to believe that electricity “just is”.