the crest
One evening we were in the pub waiting for our dinner to arrive and not saying very much. I was looking past her shoulder to the bar and watching the regulars, of which we were not. They were mostly men but also one woman. I suppose you would call her an ‘older’ woman but she could not have been much older than my mother. She was with one man but she was laughing with another man several stools down the bar from her. They’d had a joke and she and the other man were almost bent double into their drinks with the laughter. And I thought, when was the last time I laughed like that?
I never laugh like that, I said. I know, she said. I laugh all the time, I said, but not like that. Not that kind of full-body belly laugh. It’s not like I don’t laugh. I chuckle at jokes. I laugh at my own jokes more. I laugh at the TV the most. That Larry David. We’d been watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. I enjoyed the part where he tried to set up that muslim woman in the burqa with his blind friend. Did you know she was actually played by Frank Zappa’s daughter? Moon Unit Zappa. That’s her name. I looked this up. Moon Unit. She also did all that valley girl stuff on his song Valley Girl. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?
I don’t think I’m enough fun, I said. In person I am kind of stiff and inflexible. But I have these little daydreams sometimes. In my dreams I’m a popular guy. For example maybe I am having a party and playing some songs and everybody complements me on my choice of music. That’s awful, she said. So you only care about being perceived as a cool kind of guy because of what kind of music you like. Is that what you really want? No, I said, of course not. That’s why I’m not that kind of guy. But you are, she said, because you said that’s what you want. You just said. You want to have a party at your place and you want everybody to be invited and you want them all to say what a great taste in music you have.
What I’m trying to say, I said, is that I would really like to be seen as a fun kind of guy. Someone who laughs with his whole body. Not just a wry little chuckle now and again. Not just a begrudging giggle at some stupid sitcom. I want to entertain and be entertained by people. I mean real people. Ordinary people who sit at bars and laugh together through the shared joy of their experiences. I cannot go on laughing more at television than I laugh with real people.
Why not, she said. Maybe real life isn’t that funny. Maybe what you really want is to be liked and to be looked at. You find things just about as funny as you ever did, no matter how much you start twitching and convulsing as a byproduct. Laughing a lot is not the same as being a funny person. In fact I might go so far as to say that the funniest people do not themselves laugh very much at all.
You want to be a performer, she said. No, I said. Yes, she said: you know you have a stick up your backside, but you just don’t want everybody to see the sharpened edge poking out the crest of your spine. No, I said. Yes, she said: not that a stick is such a bad thing. You may be inflexible, but we all need something to lean on from time to time. I am finding this conversation increasingly less funny, I said.
Our food arrived. The chef bought it out himself and asked if there was anything we wanted. We wanted only ketchup. As we ate, I developed a silent determination to make her laugh as long and as hard as I possibly could. Immediately I began to develop a plan. It would not come about through a sequence of quick, dumb comic thrusts. It would not come through an elegant verbal riposte to some banal observation of hers. I had to hit her hard and fast when she was least expecting it with the greatest joke ever told. And when she heard it she would never be able to stop laughing.
