Have you ever known someone who was truly funny without ever trying to be? I don’t mean tragically funny, or a dry sardonic wit. I mean someone who could break up an entire room without trying, and often without realizing what they had said was funny.
I was thinking about this after watching some clips of Tommy Newsom, the fill-in bandleader on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. When Doc Severinson would be away Tommy would step up, and he was a very different personality than Doc, who was flashy and funny and bantered with Johnny. Newsom was, by all accounts, a talented musician and a nice guy, but with a very quiet and unexciting demeanor. And when Johnny would occasionally engage with him he would sometimes say something so hilarious that it would stop the whole show.
Another famous instance which I can’t find on YouTube was when Johnny remarked that he and Newsom were wearing very similar jackets. He asked where Tommy got his. Newsom hesitated and said, “Uh, it was in my closet at home, Johnny.” Upstaged Carson’s whole monologue. I’m convinced these moments were not set up previously, because if Newsom were that good a comedian he’d have done it for a living.
I’ve only known one person like this. He was a professor of mine in college, a Chinese emigre. He was known as a brilliant mind, very kind and very soft spoken. And he would sometimes make a benign observation or comment in class that brought down the house, then look puzzled at everyone falling on the floor. Didn’t happen often, but enough that I remember. I was told he had that effect in staff meetings too.
Tell me some stories about people like this. I’m guessing they’re quite rare.
When I was in college, we die a production of Art Buchwald’s “Sheep on the Runway.” There’s a exchange:
Advisor 1: There’s no time like the present.
Advisor 2: Strike while the iron is hot!
Advisor 3: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush!
Prince: But if I accept your aid . . . (pauses, looks at Advisor 3) A bird in the hand?
Brought the house down every night. But the actor playing the prince (he was from the UK) never could understand why it was funny at all. We couldn’t explain it to him.
The delightful Madeline Khan was notorious for this. She never understood why people would die laughing at the more ordinary line she spoke. She used that in her work, especially the movies with Mel Brooks, but she never could figure out what she was doing to make people laugh.
Same thing withMargaret Dumont, the statuesque ‘straight woman’ in many of the Groucho Marx movies. He claimed that she never understood any of the risque comments he made, and would ask him what that meant after the scene was filmed.
My sister is a classical Mrs. Malapops. She calls the TV weatherman a Meteorite, and former Packer head coach was Mike Hologram. She still thinks we spent a week last year at San Padre Island. But she is good matured about it and laughs when everyone else does.
I have a reputation of being a funny person, but I swear, 50% of the time people laugh because I said something that came out wrong. That’s balanced by the 50% of the time I’m trying to be deliberately funny and no one even smiles.
That’s the key. Because it’s 100% inadvertent, it’s delivered 100% straight. Despite being wacky.
And because it’s from a slipped gear in your head, it’s quickly understood by the audience whose brains work mostly like yours does. IOW, the goof isn’t just some random vocabulary word like a senile person or a chatterbot might say. It’s a word that’s close, for some oddball but comprehendible definition of close.
At work last week we were playing Hangman and the answer was something like “R___H T A T___H S____NE” and I had everything except he last word and, thinking out loud, I said “Reach out and touch … something?” which was hilarious because I used the word as a placeholder not knowing that the word was actually “someone”.
I once put forth a diatribe about the economics of the shortcomings of “El Machino” at a Mexican restaurant that was overheard by a few tables and had everybody laughing either out loud or under their breath.
My wife nearly chocked to death on a corn chip, laughing.
I’m from the UK and don’t get it either.
(The expression means that having possession of something is more valuable than not having it.)
Is the joke that in the US ‘bush’ means vagina?
The point was that “A bird in the hand” was a completely nonsensical cliche in the situation (note the other two were about taking action, but “a bird in the hand” is not). The joke was that it was said, the prince started to continue discussing the situation, then stopped and did a verbal doubletake calling out just how irrelevant it was. The line calls this to the audience’s attention and the laugh comes from realizing it was a very stupid thing to say – and that they hadn’t realized that themselves.
Like I said, it brought down the house every performance. Part of that was the delivery, but the actor never understood why it worked.
Our office assistant. During a meeting I asked her about her recent vacation and if they had the time to stop in Cascade Locks at the ice cream place I had told her about. She said yes, and then proceeded to demonstrate how hard it was to “suck the blackberry milk shake” she got. We were in a room full of men, they were laughing their heads off, my face was burning, and she sat there with a puzzled look on her face.
That wasn’t a one off, I started calling her Gracie from the George Burns show because she said the funniest things and couldn’t figure out why we thought she was silly.
