Tuesday, July 9, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
And now for something completely different
When they sow the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind. Cast away your calf, O Samaria!
I don’t remember jokes very well. Our grandson Miles remembers them. When I was seven, as he is now, did I remember jokes then? Our family didn’t tell jokes much, not at the dinner table or otherwise … I do remember that. We milked cows and mowed weeds and Mom taught me how to read when I was four or so.
But Garrison Keillor has the knack. Not only can he create limericks appropriate to the situation out of seemingly thin air, he has told jokes his whole life. At least his whole radio life, which dates back to 1974. He’s 81 now, and still telling jokes. And I still laugh.
He filled a column last month, and here is part of his offering.
It’s a revelation of delight, of our Creator’s delight in His creation, and though we’re brought up to be skeptical, wary of big hopes, prepared to deal with the injustices of life, still the dawn light argues with stoicism and you see the beauty of the ordinary. And then a distant leaf blower starts up, an angry drone like an air raid siren and we’re back in comedy. What was wrong with the old-fashioned hand-operated rake? Why does anyone need this monster that puts you in mind of the German Luftwaffe, the electric chair, the cruel dentistry of my youth? But eventually it goes away. This is true of most aggravations.
Being a professional entertainer means I am obliged to amuse my family. Someone reads the front page of the paper and is incredulous about some Prominent Person and says, “I just cannot believe that — blah blah blah” and I say, “So —.” (I’m from Minnesota so I begin every joke with “So.”) “So a Unitarian lifesaver was on duty at the lake where Jesus walked on water to rescue a ship and the lifeguard told his friends, ‘Can you believe it? The guy says he’s the Son of God and he can’t even swim.’”
When they ask for a joke, I try to have one ready. For little kids: “Why do gorillas have big fingers? Because they have big nostrils.” Or “What is the problem with living on M Street? You have to go three blocks to P.” I love dumb jokes, the profundity of them. “Did you hear about the dyslexic man who walked into a bra?”
There is a wealth of Man Walked Into A Bar jokes, all of them good, plus Dog Walked Into A Bar, and Pickle Walked Into A Bar. The bartender said, “What are you doing here? You’re only a pickle.” The pickle said, “I’m celebrating the fact that I can walk. Give me a drink.” So the bartender made him a Manhattan with a little leaf in the middle. The pickle said, “What’s that?” The bartender said, “Central Park.”
I tell jokes because I remember a time in my life when I crowded into a booth at a bar with eight other guys and some guys leaning over us and we told jokes and now I don’t see people doing that anymore. It’s a guy responsibility — women are worriers, men are kidders — and I remember one afternoon, over rounds of beer and bumps, that we told 75 different How Many Whatsis Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb jokes — we kept a list (Irishmen, therapists, optimists, agnostics, Russians, English majors) and all of them were reasonably funny. No more.
So naturally I wonder if AA and rehab and treatment centers are responsible for the disappearance of the joke circle, and instead of pickles walking into a bar, we have a circle of men on folding chairs talking about their emotionally distant fathers who failed to validate them. So a man talked about his father who was a magician who cut people in half. “Did he work in a carnival or circus?” “No, he worked from home. I have a half-brother and a half-sister.”
But it was my abandonment of alcohol twenty years ago that made early morning beautiful again. So it takes just one therapist to change a light bulb but the light bulb has to really want to change. And in the same vein the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish funeral is that at the funeral there’s one less drunk. That’s me. Have a nice day.
Keillor’s family fundamentally belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, stricter even than Missouri Synod Lutherans, so I doubt if many jokes were told at their dinner table either. Garrison always described himself as an outlier.
The harvest is abundant and the laborers are few.
But I do wish I remembered more laughter and more outright, outlandish joke-telling at our Lincoln dairy farmer-teacher table. I’ve tried to make up for it in various ways, most of which aren’t all that funny to others. But I’ve enjoyed some or even most of it.
And when Gary Johnson drove us to St. Louis for a Bible banquet in 1987, he did introduce us to Prairie Home Companion and Garrison Keillor. Gary, that Christian Church pastor, could tell a good joke too.
(Amos 2, Psalm 50, Psalm 95, Matthew 8)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
