Humor hurts. Why do you think they call it a “punch line”?
True story. High winds contributed to a huge multi-vehicle pile-up on a major thoroughfare near our house during a big outdoor event with parades and pageantry. It was like this: An 18-wheeler jackknifed in gale-force winds, strewing its cargo of bananas, cream pies and pre-inflated whoopie cushions all over the road and into a crowd of bystanders.
Order instantly turns to chaos as dozens of people begin slipping on banana peels and falling butt-first onto the pre-inflated whoopie cushions. Pie fights break out randomly. The screams of pie victims are all but drowned out by the fart sound “raspberries” of the whoopie cushions. Fruit pie is everywhere. The carnage is horrific.
A quick-thinking bystander searches the faces in the throng around her, shouts imploringly, “Please… somebody… anyone… is there a humorist here?”
I had been watching the whole thing, expecting I would be needed. I calmly stepped out of the crowd. “Yes, ma’am, I’m licensed to commit humor.”
The woman’s shoulders slumped with relief. “Oh, thank God!” she said, her voice shaking. “Are you… are you funny?”
I smiled reassuringly. “Check this out. What do they call a boomerang that won’t come back? A stick.” BADA-BING!
Two muffins are in the oven. One says to the other “Boy it’s hot in here” The other one replies “Omigod, it’s a talking muffin!” BADA-BING!
“A dyslexic man walks into a bra…”
“Wonderful, you’ll do fine,” interrupts an overly buxom matron wearing a corseted 1890s dress and a grotesquely wide-brimmed, ostrich-plumed hat, as a golf cart filled with clowns wearing lapel squirt flowers rounds the corner.
The cart skids on the bananas, knocking the Boston-educated matriarch face-first into a cream pie held by a fussy British waiter wearing a monocle, top hat and formal wear. Both of them go sprawling at great force into a group of ballerinas carrying large bags of feathers. The ballerinas, in turn, are sent flying into a group of workers from the Acme Hot Wet Fertilizer Company who carry bags of fetid steaming manure, fresh from the cow.
Ballerinas and hot wet fertilizer workers collide like bowling pins. Bags fly into the air, split open and are whipped by the swirling wind into an enormous dark toxic cloud of hot, stinking, slimy cow shit, mixed with feathers. The viscous mass, stretching now from curb to curb and low to the ground, is quickly borne on the wind, hurling southward down the street at tremendous speed…
…as northward up the street comes the Annual Ku Klux Klan Pride Parade. Four hundred men and women, desperately superior, dressed in freshly laundered, pristine, bed sheets. Emblazoned on a banner at the head of the marchers is this year’s theme which reads, ironically as it turned out, “If You’re Brown Get Outta Town!”
This really happened.
Larry Moffitt
Oct 9, 2013
