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COMIC RELIEF, PLEASE
When it absolutely, positively ain't funny
I was forced to go to the FedEx Holding Station this past weekend in order to claim a package they were unable to deliver. This package followed on the vanished heels of three packages of mine that FedEx "misdelivered," costing me most of my clothes, my books, my entire video collection, and my pictures from hiking in Alaska.
That story, one of bilious ranting, will not be repeated here, but let us acknowledge, Gentle Reader, that my opinion of FedEx employees ranks them as Idiots, which is perhaps unkind and unfair to Idiots everywhere. Regardless, I found myself on 33rd and 10th, a part of town depressing and low and mean and dirty. It had been cold and rainy, and I ended up walking all the way there as the E Train was apparently running on the G track, so I was already a bit grumpy.
I was half expecting to find a woman named Mona working there. I had talked with Mona several times on the phone regarding the three aforementioned and currently unrelated missing packages, and I was actually hoping to see her face so that I might strike it. However, this operation was much smaller than I thought. One guy behind the counter in this small storefront (much like a car rental office -- bleh), and his name was Elias. Could've been Earl or Marvin, but it was actually Elias. Elias wants to be a stand-up comedian. No, I am not conjecturing based upon his comportment, I know this because he told us -- us being myself and the other lady waiting for service. Why did he tell us? Well, you see, he was talking to cover the embarrassing silence with which he had been met after trying some jokes out on us. Here are the jokes that burned themselves on that angry part of my brain which produces blinding rage and gives me the power of looking at someone from across the room dead in the eye with the straightest of faces, sending such a look as to make the other person realize that he is in the most mortal of dangers and a terrifyingly painful and cold destruction awaits him:
Thinking the woman was a flight attendant, as she had brought along a wheeled suitcase, he said as he took her package:
"Attention, Passengers, please take your seats and fasten your seat belts, as the next package is about to depart."
She was not a flight attendant. So he took the flat package from her and said:
"You wanted pepperoni on this pizza?"
She did not. There was no response. No reaction from me or from her. Thus stymied, he said that New Yorkers were a tough crowd and perhaps he should just excuse himself from the area. So saying, he:
Pretended to go downstairs by walking behind the counter, squatting more with each step and moving his arms cartoonishly.
The most pain I ever recall feeling in my life would either be when I had a broken wrist reset, or when I had pericarditis, which is an inflammation of the heart sac. Somehow, the pain I felt this rainy morning in Manhattan is in a class all of its own. I had not even the strength to call out, "Keep your day job," which has never seen more apropos.
After the lady left, I was obliged to show my license in order to claim my parcel. Elias noticed that I am originally from Cincinnati. He continued to force the friendly banter by telling me his brother lives there, near a huge exotic grocery store (to which I have never been), and he spoke in glowing terms of this market, as it had an animatronic Elvis and an animatronic Italian Chef that greeted customers (a store to which I now shall never go).
True, Elias's jokes are of the caliber of most comics performing today. But that is exactly the problem. Elias, sort of a poor man's Ray Romano in the same way that Gary Busey is a poor man's Nick Nolte, was trotting out jokes that were not funny even in their original inception. Stand ups have not been funny for years. Eons. How many cabbie jokes can there be -- "Anyone here from L.A.? I took a cab from the airport, and what is with these cabbies, huh? For twenty dollars he offered to speak English!" Or jokes about guys having sex -- "Did you ever see a guy's face when he's having really great sex? It's the same as when he's having really terrible sex!" Or jokes about PMS, speech differences among races, presidential peccadilloes, and anything at all to do with mothers-in-law. Garbage. Regurgitated garbage.
What is my point? I implore each and every reader to avoid supporting this trend of comedy. I still get queasy remembering those days of adolescence when I feel asleep before Saturday Night Live and woke up to "The Comic Strip," (or whatever the hell it was called) or fell asleep during SNL and woke up to "Showtime at the Apollo," and these cookie cutter comics in their oversized pea green sport coats and Miami Vice-ish dress ware would embarrass themselves as well as the culture of American Comedy.
Do not go to the clubs. Do not let the five drink minimum fool you. These "people" are not funny -- in fact quite the opposite -- and there is no value in pretending that you saw someone before they hit it big, as even most successful comics are, at best, one trick apes (was Kevin Nealon ever actually funny? Gilbert Gottfried? Bob Saget?). Most comics come from a background in service industry; keep in mind that they would not have landed even those jobs were it not for some sort of personable charm. By keeping them in those jobs rather than in the spotlight, we make it more difficult for the next baser level of comedian -- the Eliases of the world -- to even support themselves waiting tables. If the only thing you ever do in life is starve a would-be stand up to death, then you have made this world immeasurably richer. Do your part to keep our senses of humor fresh and intact.
And don't use FedEx, either.
By Brady Richards
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