No, I am not going to write about violent ways to acquire a trophy wife. Dewey’s courtship methods do not work in a world fairly far removed from the Middle Ages, and Dewey the Goon is a cartoon villain anyway. This post is going to simply be another in a long list of posts where I bend ideas like pretzels in order to justify the spurious claim that this is a humor blog, and therefore, I can truthfully claim to know how to write something funny.
It can be argued that somebody like me can’t possibly be a writer of good humor simply because I am too gosh-dang smart. (And those of my friends who use this particular criticism on me, tend to actually use country-bumpkinisms like “gosh-dang” way more often than is considered merely foolish.) I admit to using multi-syllable complex words to sound funny because they sound like boobly-doobly-doo gibberish to listeners who have no idea what a word like “bumpkinisms” actually means. And I might add, the listeners don’t usually go to an Oxford English Dictionary (unabridged) simply to be able to laugh at a big word.
I recognize that being an intellectual and having a head full of proven-but-useless facts is actually a disability. You can’t talk to anybody and be fully understood. Talking to somebody who can’t make logical connections between ideas is like walking over a wooden bridge built by an idiot who doesn’t know how nails work… and there are sharks in the water under the bridge. People will pigeonhole you as a “nerd” and treat you like your intelligence makes you radioactive.
So, the logical conclusion is… to be funny you have to act dumber than you actually are.
This man is trying to write humor using chemistry. Beware! He is likely to blow you up if you hang out with him!
Humor can be volatile. Sometimes it insults people. Sometimes it shocks you with things you should be outraged by, but you see the irony and laugh instead. (Preferably without needing someone to throw a steam iron at your head in order to make you see the irony.)
It is probably inappropriate to suggest that kids should go to school naked. Even parents would make other parents uncomfortable by suggesting such a thing. But as a former teacher, I can tell you that most middle school and high school kids are naked in school almost all of the time. Of course, not literally. They are metaphorically naked. Not capable of keeping anything personal a secret. Most of them would never want people to see them literally naked. But they go to great lengths to show you their emotionally naked selves. You can’t keep them from doing it.
And seeing kids emotionally naked is mostly an uncomfortably icky thing for mature adults to contemplate. But teachers have to deal with it. That’s why so few good teachers let themselves become mature adults.
By this point, if you are still reading, you are probably saying to yourself. “Mickey, you are just recycling the same old pictures and lame jokes.”
You got me. That’s what the stand-up comics all do. They tell the same set of jokes over and over, only changing the city they are telling them in.
So, now you know the truth. Writing humor is hard. And most of us who practice it are only pretending that we know what we are doing. You have to be smart, but pretend you are dumb. You have to shock and offend your audience, but only to the point of making them laugh, and never reaching the point where they all grab torches and pitchforks.
So, there it is. Today’s humor post. I said a bunch of things I should not have said. So, rotten tomatoes in the comments are expected. And, please, no pitchforks. I do not know how getting a pitchfork into an internet comment is possible, but I do know that there are Trolls out there with some real skills.
Catch a Falling Star 
Nutzy Nuts
Things are not what they seem. Life throws curve balls across the plate ninety percent of the time. Fastballs are rare. And fastballs you can hit are even rarer. But if Life is pitching, who is the batter? Does it change the metaphor and who you are rooting for if the batter is Death?
If you think this means that I am planning on dying because of the Coronavirus pandemic, well, you would be right. Of course, I am always planning for death with every dark thing that bounces down the hopscotch squares of the immediate future. That’s what it means to be a pessimist. No matter what bad thing we are talking about, it will not take ME by surprise. And if I think everything is going to kill me, sooner or later I have to be right… though, hopefully, much later.
I keep seeing things that aren’t there. Childlike faces keep looking at me from the top of the stairs, but when I focus my attention there, they disappear. And I know there are no children in the house anymore since my youngest is now legally an adult. And the chimpanzee that peeked at me from behind the couch in the family room was definitely not there. I swear, it looked exactly like Roddy McDowell from the Planet of the Apes movies, whom I know for a fact to be deceased. So, obviously, it has to be Roddy McDowell’s monkey-ghost. I believe I may have mentioned before that there is a ghost dog in our house. I often catch glimpses of its tail rounding the corner ahead of me when my own dog is definitely behind me. And I am sure I shared the facts before that Parkinson’s sufferers often see partial visions of people and faces (and apparently dogs) that aren’t really there, and that my father suffers from Parkinson’s Disease. So, obviously it is my father and not me that is seeing these things… He’s just using my eyeballs to do it with.
But… and this is absolutely true even if it starts with a butt… the best way to deal with scary possibilities is to laugh at them. Jokes, satire, mockery, and ludicrous hilarity expressed in big words are the proper things to use against the fearful things you cannot change. So, this essay is nothing but a can of mixed nutz. Nutzy nuts. And fortunately, peanut allergies are one incurable and possibly fatal disease I don’t have. One of the few.
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Filed under commentary, feeling sorry for myself, goofy thoughts, humor, Paffooney, satire, wordplay