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.