Funny is serious business.

I started writing out of desperation. 

I was working with a little theatre group that was always strapped for cash.  Great ideas and low cash flow is the nature of the small theatre beast.  I’d never written a play, but I knew how they worked.  I wrote a play, a comedy, and it worked like a charm.  The audience loved it and it made money for the theatre.  I wrote another play but the theatre closed before they produced the second.  A friend, John Burkhart, stepped in and he needed a script for a theatre he’d started at Eugene T. Mahoney State Park in southeastern Nebraska. 

Then he needed another script. 

Then he expanded the season and needed a two more.

For the show we did in the fall I acted and directed and a fine time was had by all.

Over the course of seven years I’d written sixteen shows and seen a lot of people laughing.  Even sweeter was the fact I was actually getting paid to write, and direct, and act.  It

Then I got the idea that I wanted to try something new.  Move on to bigger things as a writer.  My sixteenth show had just opened and we were getting great audience response.  Kids from the ages of five to seventy-five were laughing and howling at the jokes.  For a writer there is nothing more satisfying than the immediate feedback of hearing a large group of people laughing at the jokes you’ve written.

We opened the show in late August 2001 and were scheduled to perform Friday, Saturday, and Sundays.  On Sunday, September 9^th, we finished our matinee, patted ourselves on the back for a great show, and said our goodbyes until we got together again for our Friday night show.

On Tuesday, September 11^th we were pretty sure our season had finished.

The towers were gone.

Flight 93 was gone.

There was a large hole in the Pentagon.

By that evening there were no planes in the sky.  There were very few cars on the streets.  We were all waiting for the next shoe to drop.  I was still waiting with my wife and daughter for final causality figures, but it was changing by the hour … by the minute.  Our daughter was four years old and wanted to know what was going on.

I’d lost my words.  Mom stepped in and said, “Some very bad people did something very bad and hurt a lot of people.”  I thought those were the most eloquent words I’d heard on the matter. 

By Thursday, after a few phone calls between cast members, we decided to do the show again on Friday.  We had no idea if anybody would show up and frankly we didn’t really care.  Performing the show would be an escape.  The show would be a little time we could spend away from the news.

We started the show on time and had about two thirds of the house full.  I wondered if it was going to be possible for us to be funny.  The script we were performing was funny.  How funny would we seem to a large group of people in mourning?

And then it happened.

The people sitting out there in the dark started laughing.

They started having fun.

After each show we would meet with the audience in the lobby of the theatre to shake hands and say hello.  This time it was different for us.  We were shaking hands and hearing the audience thank us for doing the show for them.  Some of them were driving back home because their flight back home had been canceled.  Some of them thanked us for being there and doing the show.  Thanks for making them laugh.  To show them that it was still possible to laugh. 

For a brief time we took our audiences on a guided tour of premeditated silliness.  During that brief time they were able to forget the horrors they had seen, and lightened the load they were carrying.  The rest of our season went on the same way.

That is when I gave up my plans for retirement from the funny business.

Writing funny is serious business.

You're best friend may be a cat. Seriously!

It’s not that I don’t like dogs. 

I just rather not have to live with one, or having one jumping on me, or licking me in inappropriate places at inappropriate times.  I prefer cats to dogs.  Cats are more compact, more independent, and more of a challenge than dogs. 

I realize there are small and independent breeds of dog but small dogs scare me.

Small dogs freaking get away with murder! 

When you see a child rampaging and yelping through the highways and byways of life you see disapproving glares and hear comments about how some people should learn how to control their children. 

Small dogs can leap at your face and use their sharp little teeth to rip out your throat and you’re the bad guy if you even try gently to swat them away.       

Most dogs are just too easy.  

They’re like the unpopular kid in school who agreed to anything just to be liked.

I still taste plastic every time I see a Frisbee.

Why else would any animal consent to be dressed up for Halloween or a matching outfit for family pictures. Don’t try to tell me people don’t do this twisted stuff.  I’ve seen pictures.

If you want a better view into the nature of the universe and the human condition you need to live with a cat.  If you’d like to have a successful relationship with another human being you need to be trained by a cat. 

Cats usually leave you alone until they need something.

Cats enjoy closeness but only on their schedule.

Once they are curled up with you they can either be content to keep you pinned down for hours or decide you are intruding on their space and demand you go somewhere else. 

If a cat somehow does something ungraceful that you happen to witness the cat will somehow make it your fault.   

Cats will arbitrarily decide you’ve done something wrong and punish you for it at their convenience.

Not only will living with a cat give you extraordinary insight into the way we treat each other but, if you’re a guy, they can help you find romance.  If a woman sees that a man can successfully and happily live with a cat they may get the idea you can successfully live with them.

When my wife and I started dating she and my cat circled each other for a while.  The cat took a swing at me in an attempt to discover how deep she could cut me without requiring me to have stitches to seal the wound.  My wife to be stayed as far away from the cat as possible claiming to be allergic.

To get ready to nail me the cat needed to sharpen her claws and used the back of the couch. I yelled at her, charged across the room and grabbed her from the back of the couch. Alicia, who would be my wife, thought she was going to witness extreme human on feline violence. After I had the cat in hand I held her against my chest and softy said, “We’ve talked about this. Please don’t scratch the couch.”

Having seen this Alicia realized the cat had already whipped me and that the hard work was done.  The joke was on Alicia though because she didn’t know the cat hadn’t successfully housebroken me. 

Fresh and new ideas in fall televsion line up

I’m really excited about this fall television line up.  Everything is so fresh and new?  The Count of Monte Cristo is on ABC only it’s called Revenge and the count is now a countess.  Person of Interest, on CBS, was fantastic when it was called 1984.  Unforgettable, also on CBS, was tons of fun when it was called Psych and The Mentalist.  Grim and Once Upon a Time were great as bedtime stories by the brothers Grim.  It’s nice to see Fame back on television but when did they change the name of the show to Glee.  I looked but I didn’t see Noel Coward get a credit for the new CBS show A Gifted Man and I could have sworn he wrote it when it was called Blythe Spirit.  And of course we have Charlie’s Angels back with us which were fun when it was Charlie’s Angels.  The  Angels were also fun when they were the three weird sisters in Macbeth.  New and different exciting!