Tag Archives: humor

October 2, 2023 · 1:12 am

Red Skelton

I don’t usually do portraits, but, as I believe I may have said on an older post, Red Skelton is like a god to me.  Much of what I know about comedy, I learned from him back in the 60’s and early 70’s.  I watched him religiously on Wednesday nights on both CBS and NBC (channels 5 from Mason City, Iowa, and 13 from Des Moines).  He made me laugh.  Sometimes he even made me cry.  So I honor him now with a portrait (or insult him, depending on your opinion of my artwork) in a Paffooney of Red as Clem Kadiddlehopper, pride (or maybe village idiot) of Cornpone County, Tennessee.

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September 26, 2023 · 1:17 am

Danny Kaye

Archive photo from the Los Angeles Times

Archive photo from the Los Angeles Times

My childhood was shaped by television events like the annual showing of The Wizard of Oz and classic movies on Friday nights when I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime to watch the whole thing.  I have told you before how much I loved the comedy of Red Skelton.  Another comedian who shaped who I am through his wondrously manic movie performances was Danny Kaye.

One of those Friday movie classics that really struck home was the wonderful, kid-friendly movie Hans Christian Andersen.

1952 movie poster from Wikipedia

1952 movie poster from Wikipedia

The movie was about a storyteller from a previous century and embroidered his biographical story with his famous children’s stories in the form of songs.  And Danny Kaye could trip through multi-syllabic, fast-paced musical numbers like no other rubber-faced clown I have ever seen.   I wanted to be such a story-teller from a very early age.  I even wanted to write the kind of stories that could be made into songs.  Let me show you a few of the bits that amazed me and killed me with laughter.

This song from the Inspector General was doubly engaging because the corrupt businessmen were trying to poison the character Danny played with the wine he was supposed to drink during the drinking song.

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The movies Danny Kaye was in were mostly about the musical comedy.  But sometimes they were just about the music.  He appeared in musicals like White Christmas with Bing Crosby and stage musicals like Lady in the Dark which won him awards on Broadway.  He made movies about music like The Five Pennies and A Song is Born.  He always said he couldn’t read music, but he demonstrated perfect pitch and scored a number one hit with The Woody Woodpecker Song recorded for the animated cartoons of Walter Lantz.  How cool is that?

And you already know that The Wizard of Oz is my favorite movie of all time.  In 1964 Danny became the host for CBS’s annual showing of the film.  He was able to do funny songs that made you snort your hot cocoa through your nose from laughing, and he could also do beautiful ballads like these.

I will always take the opportunity to watch a Danny Kaye movie one more time, whether it comes on YouTube or a Netflix oldie or a $5 DVD from the bin at the front of the Walmart Superstore.  And I will always think of him in his role as Hans Christian Anderson.

Oh, and he was a very funny comedian too when he wasn’t singing, as in The Court Jester and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

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September 13, 2023 · 12:50 am

Advertising on E-Bay Ignorantly

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You are probably not going to believe this, but there are certain things you simply cannot safely sell on E-Bay.  My first good novel, Catch a Falling Star, took years to write.  The research, interviews with survivors, fighting off remaining alien invaders left behind when the Telleron invasion failed, and clean-up of sites and inconvenient witnesses took at least from 1990 to 2012.  And then, as part of my marketing-by-blogging strategy for the book, I took a box of leftover skortch pistols and listed them for sale on E-Bay.  They turned out to be a very popular item.  It took the first skortch ray almost a year to sell for a measly five dollars.  It was bought by a woman with a very annoying husband.  She apparently bought the item as a joke, thinking it would not actually work as a molecular disintegration weapon.  But after she surprised her husband with it and then posted the surprising results on Facebook, I quickly sold out the rest of the 26 pistols in the box and made almost $800. I am told by concerned investigative reporters that crotchety old men, ugly wives, and particularly Dennis-the-Menace-like kids were disappearing all across the Midwest.  I also learned that one skortch ray pistol came into the hands of a Republican political operative before the election in 2016.  That fact may have accounted for the disappearances of large numbers of registered Democrats in both Michigan and Pennsylvania in the weeks before the election.

I wanted to inform you that I may have done something stupid on E-Bay.  Therefore I am re-posting the drawing I did of Studpopper the Telleron demonstrating the firing of an example skortch pistol created by Zillokahsitter Industries on Telleri Prime with Sylvani technology.  If you should see one of these in the hands of a spouse that thinks you are grumpy too much of the time, I would suggest an almost instantaneous program of self-improvement.  And if you see one in the hands of someone in a red MAGA baseball cap, immediately put on your own red hat and say something inordinately stupid so they will assume you are one of them, and hope they skortch themselves by accident before they get around to skortching you.

Sorry about that.  I should’ve thought this whole thing through more carefully beforehand.

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September 9, 2023 · 12:40 am

K.I.S.S.

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When learning to write, you have to learn the rules.  And then you start writing, and you learn that you have to break all the rules to do it well.  But what do I know?  You have to be pretty desperate to get your writing advice from a Mickey.  After all, it’s not like Mickey was a writing teacher for over thirty years… oh, wait a minute… yes, he was.

Okay, so I decided to write today about the K.I.S.S. rule of writing.  That’s right, Keep It Simple, Stupid.  Other writing teachers tell me it should be, Keep It Simple, Sweetie, because you can’t say “stupid” to a kid.  Okay, that’s mostly true.  But I use “stupid” when I use the rule myself.  I’m talking to Mickey after all.

So, I better stop “bird-walking” in the middle of this essay, because “bird-walking”, drifting off topic for no purpose, is the opposite of keeping it simple.

I try to write posts of no more than 500 words.  I write an introduction that says something stupid or inane that speaks to the theme I want to talk about.  Then I pile in a few sentences that talk more about the theme and do a good job of irritating the reader to the point that they can’t wait to get to the conclusion.  Finally I finish up with a really pithy and wonderful bit of wisdom to tie a knot in the bow of my essay.  I save that bit for the end as a sort of revenge for all the readers who don’t read all the way to the end, even on a short post like this one.  Of course, I could be wrong about how wonderful and pithy it is.  What does “pithy” even mean?  It can be like the soup in the bottom of the chili pot, thicker and spicier than what came before… or possibly overcooked with burned beans.

That was another bit of “bird-walking”, wasn’t it?  See, you have to break the rules to make it work better.

So, in order to keep it simple, I guess I need to end here for today.  Simple can be the same thing as short, but more often you are trying to achieve “simple and elegant” and pack a lot of meaning and resonance into a few lines.  And I, of course, am totally incapable of doing that with my purple paisley prose.  And there’s the knot in that bow.

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September 8, 2023 · 12:44 am

Toys

A new doll bought to combat depression. Part of a collection of Tinkerbell fairy dolls.

A new doll bought to combat depression. Part of a collection of Tinkerbell fairy dolls.

I have basically written an awful awful lot about my toys.  (The awful is repeated on purpose because I have been having a really awful time this week for reasons I will post about if I survive them).  And there is a reason a retired old man who seems to be rotting away into a second childhood is so obsessed with toys.  Playing is my primary goal for every day right now because darkness is closing in and, while play for children is practice for life in the future, play for an old man can be the reanimation of all the good things in life.

A Lego steam engine and a 1000-piece puzzle that my wife bought me to cheer me up.

A Lego steam engine and a 1000-piece puzzle that my wife bought me to cheer me up.

I have been a toy-maker and a toy-restorer as a part of my over-all quest to be an artist.  I even made some money with an online e-Bay store where I sold collectibles and restored toys.  I bought toys from Goodwill and re-sale stores, repaired them and cleaned them, and sold them for twice the sum I bought them for.  I also made a few porcelain dolls in a kiln I bought in the 1990’s when my mother and I became porcelain doll-makers.  I would show you some of my babies, but the real live children have managed to break all the dolls except for a couple my mother made.  (Well, toys are made to be played with, right?)  But I do still have many of the repaired and cleaned toys that I either didn’t sell or couldn’t bring myself to part with.

Toys in every corner of the house, dang it!

Toys in every corner of the house, dang it!

I have also been a model railroader since childhood, spending countless hours building tunnels and repainting rolling stock, and making buildings and scenery from kits and plaster.  I haven’t rebuilt my layout since moving north away from South Texas, but maybe I will get to that too in my retirement and second childhood.

I do still have some trolley street scenes on the tops of book cases.

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And toys serve as memory objects.  They can do magic with time and space.  I have saved many of my toys from childhood.  Toys were precious and mostly Christmas and birthday gifts.  I learned to save and salvage them because they treated me well, and… well, I owed them the same in return.  My own children were not like that.  They loved toys to pieces and even sometimes ate them, to a point where many of them were un-fixable junk.  But toys bring things back to life from the long-gone past.  Take for instance the toy in this next picture;

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No, I don’t mean the baby doll.  He grew up and joined the Marine Corps.  I mean the stuffed white tiger in the background. That was the first toy I ever bought for baby Dorin.  And it is still with us, though not as fluffy and pretty as it was in the picture.  My daughter, the Princess, inherited it and christened it “Baby Tiger”.  That is, of course, still its name to this very day.  I look at it and see all three of them… my super-destructo toy-flinging and clockwork-wrecking children.  And it is the toys that we have all played with that still link us all together even though they are almost grown.

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September 7, 2023 · 12:57 am

Weirdie Poetry

Mr. R RabbitThe Man Who Had Bird Knees

I once knew a man…

Who had knees…

That bent backwards, like a bird’s…

And this man…

Could only walk…

Like a limping, lame old duck.

The children all laughed…

And pointed at him…

When he passed them in the park…

And it made him smile…

And laugh to himself…

That his handicap made them happy.

Every single night…

He oiled his weary knees…

And tried to fight the pain…

And every single day…

He used his silly legs…

To do the Chicken Dance for kids.

And then there came a day…

When the bird legs came no more…

To be noticed by kids at the park…

And the parents all learned…

That the poor man had died…

And the whole world brought him flowers.

The next day in Heaven…

St. Peter saw a man…

Whose knees bent backwards like a bird’s…

And all of Heaven laughed…

As he did the Chicken Dance…

While angels clapped in Heaven.

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The thing I find to be most witlessly true about both poetry and life is that things can be funny, and make you laugh, and at the same time make you cry on the inside.  Humor is hard to write because it can be both happy and sad at the same exact moment.  How do you define that quality?  The bitter-sweet nature of nature?  That’s saying it in a way that is both contradictory and odd.  It can give you a wry smile at the same moment it both confounds and confuses you.  So better just to shrug your shoulders and tell yourself you know it when you see it… and this either is or isn’t it.  Sorry if I made you think too hard, cause I know that sometimes thinking hurts.

Mickey at the Wishing Well of Souls

I found a country well, and I thought I had a quarter,

But I fished in pockets hard, and found nothing for the warter,

And since I had to warp a line to make the poem rhyme,

I figured I would just look in, because I had the time.

I looked into the warty water which sat there still and deep,

And could not see the bottom, and I began to weep.

The water was clear and dark and black,

And the only thing I saw… was Mickey looking back.

And nothing of the wishing well, its magic could I see,

For only there just staring back, the secret thing was me.

Kops

I apologize for inflicting poetry on you when you probably came here looking for goofy stuff to laugh at.  But my poetry is just like all my word-mangling and picture-crayoning.  It tends to be goofy and weird and walking a tightrope over a shark tank between chuckle-inducing and tear-jerking.  You probably can’t even tell which is the poetry and which are the burbled brain-farts of commentary that pad this thing out to five hundred words.  Four hundred and ninety six, actually.

mANDY

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September 6, 2023 · 12:48 am

Devotion in Motion

How long have I been a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals?  Since Bob Gibson and the World Series victories of the 60’s.  When will it end?  I have to know if there is baseball in Heaven before I can tell you.  And I believe there is.

970012_598081996889896_1749856650_nA true baseball fan never abandons the team he or she loves.  They live and breathe and die with the team.  In the 1960’s I got to experience my Cardinals win the World Series against the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.  I got to experience the defeat in seven games by the Detroit Tigers and Mickey Lolich their star pitcher in 1968.  And I followed them mostly by the sports page in the Mason City Globe Gazette.  And sometimes second hand when I listened to the Twins’ games on radio with Great Grandpa Milo Raymond.  I followed the individual players and their numbers.  Curt Flood, the center fielder was a vacuum cleaner with legs in center field.  Lou Brock could steal a base, though he was even more amazing at it in the 1970’s with veteran savvy and know-how on his side.  Gibson was extraordinary as pitcher.  And I followed the others too.  Dal Maxvill at short stop, Tim McCarver at catcher.  Mike Shannon at third.  And a fading Roger Maris in right field, having never reached the heights again as the Yankee slugger who hit 61 home runs in 1961. 1010493_520267051372821_2054131685_n

I watched and waited in the 1970’s, when I could follow them on television at least occasionally.  I didn’t get more World Series victories that decade, but I listened to the ball game on radio when Bob Gibson pitched his no-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates.  I was giddy about the base stealing record that Lou Brock set in the 70’s, later to be eclipsed by Ricky Henderson.  I followed Ted Simmons, the catcher, and Joe Torre the third baseman.

The 1980’s brought more World Series with victory in 1981 over the Milwaukee Brewers, and losses against the Kansas City Royals and Minnesota Twins.  I invented some new cuss words the night the Royals came from behind to win the sixth game of the series because an umpire blew the call at first base that would’ve given the Cardinals the series win.  That bad call (the runner was clearly out at first) changed the series from a Cardinals’ win in six games to a Royals’ victory in seven games.

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In the late 1990’s I cheered for Mark McGwire to break Roger Maris’ single season home run record.  I watched on TV as he did it, holding my young son in my lap and cheering loudly enough to scare all the cockroaches out of the house in South Texas.  It burned me later that the steroids scandals and Barry Bonds would later tarnish that moment.  But I lived it never-the-less, and it was a highlight of my life as a Cardinals’ fan.

62722_574692719263587_14180130_n378194_10151001599341840_1087304628_nAnd now, this year, as everything is going wrong in my life and my body is breaking down more often than my car does, the Cardinals are surging again.  They could win a hundred games this year.  They could win World Series number twelve.  We have history, this team and I.  And I am a devoted fan.  I can no more explain my love of the team to you than any baseball fan anywhere could ever explain to you why they love baseball.  Or what the heck Fredbird is all about.  12032015_547957218694150_5911281379869985407_nBut there it is.  We don’t wait til next year.  Not the Cardinals.

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Jun 9, 2015; St. Petersburg, FL, USA; Los Angeles Angels first baseman Albert Pujols (5) reacts at home plate after he hit a solo home run during the fifth inning against the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Jun 9, 2015; St. Petersburg, FL, USA; Los Angeles Angels first baseman Albert Pujols (5) reacts at home plate after he hit a solo home run during the fifth inning against the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Albert Pujols will always be a Cardinal in my mind.  We won it all in 2011.

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September 5, 2023 · 1:18 am

Mangled Metaphors and Purple Paisley Prose

Color boy

I have rather regularly been revising and editing old writing.  One thing I have discovered is that I am capable of the most gawd-awful convoluted sentences filled with mangled metaphors and ideas that can only be followed while doing mental back-flips or managing miracles of interpretation.    That last sentence is a perfect example of purple paisley prose.  Paisley, in case you didn’t know this, is a printed pattern on clothing or other cloth that makes an intricate design out of the basic twisted teardrop shape borrowed from Persian art.   The basic motif, the teardrop shape, is a leaf or vegetable design often referred to as the Persian pickle.  I write like that.  You can pick out the Persian pickles in this very paragraph.  Alliterations, mangled metaphors, rhyming words, sound patterns, the occasional literary allusion, personification, bungles, jungles, and junk.  “How can you actually write like that?” you ask.  Easy.  I think like that.

To make a point about mangled metaphors, let me visit a couple of recent scenes in novels I have been working on;

From The Bicycle Wheel Genius; page 189

Mike Murphy and Frosty Anderson sat at the kitchen table eating a batch of Orben’s pancakes, the twentieth try at pancakes, and nearly edible.  Mike could eat anything with maple syrup on it… well, maybe not dog poop, but these were slightly better than dog poop.

From The Magical Miss Morgan; page 7

Blue looked at Mike and grinned.  It was an impish and fully disarming grin.  It made Mike do whatever Blue said, even being willing to eat a lump of dog poop if she asked him to, though she would never ask him to.

So, here’s the thing.  Why is there a repetition of the dog-poop-eating metaphor?  In one case it is Mike Murphy expressing in metaphorical terms his love of maple syrup.  In the other, it is Mike Murphy expressing his love of Blueberry Bates’ dimpled grin.  He is a somewhat unique character, but why would anybody associate love with eating dog poop?  I don’t know.  I just wrote the dang things.

I like to take a convoluted plot and complicate it with complex sentences and numerous running gags, with a seasoned-sauce of mangled metaphors poured on top like gravy.  I will use sentences like this either to make you laugh, or give you a headache.  I’m almost sure it is one of those.  So if you have gotten this far in this post without a headache, then I guess it must be funny.

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September 2, 2023 · 1:20 am

The Road Home

The Road Home

This sofa-sized oil Paffooney is called the Road Home because it was painted from a photograph looking west on US Highway 3 towards Rowan, Iowa, the little town I grew up in.  I painted it when I lived by myself in South Texas, believing that one day I would go back to Iowa to live out the rest of my life.  Here’s where today’s post gets mortifyingly morbid.  Yes, I know that last expression is repetitively repetitive, but that little bit of alliteration was necessary to lighten the load of this non-laughing part of my post.  I am not going to make it.  I am stuck in a North Dallas metroplex that I sincerely do not love.  My kids are not done growing up there.  I have family and roots there.  I have them in Iowa, too, but like a Sioux warrior, I belong to my wife’s tribe once I married into it.   I am old.  I have six incurable diseases and I am a cancer survivor since 1983.  Every day of life is a new miracle.  but the miracles are running out.  My COPD makes my chest hurt, and I have trouble breathing, especially at night.  The house is rotting away around us, courtesy of the housing bubble we bought it in back in 2005.  Doing what maintenance and repair that I can makes my arthritic body ache intolerably, more than Aleve can cure.  I will not go back to drugs like Vioxx or Celebrex and let them kill me to enrich the pharmaceutical industry.  My diabetes has made it almost impossible to eat without enduring a round of high blood sugar and nausea.  I do not look forward to either insulin or the possibility of losing an arm or leg.  So, if I get out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, it will probably be by curling up my toes and going bye-bye, followed by a cremation.  I would like to have my ashes scattered in Iowa, but the family will probably find flush toilets much cheaper. Ah well… dark part done.  Now for the part about going home.

The reason I feel uplifted, and crazily feel justified in calling this post “humor” is because I have already won my battle.  I was a teacher for 31 years.  I touched more than 2,500 lives, some of them profoundly.  I have almost raised three wonderful, talented children.  I have written and published three books, and if I can scratch out enough time, I have at least two more ready to be published.  I have shared what little wisdom I have acquired along with a lot of really goofy artwork I have done in this blog, and, although I used to be the best author no one had ever read, people are actually reading and liking my books.  In my stories, I have told about growing up in Iowa, about being a teacher, about being a friend, about being in love, about facing fear, and ultimately about being able to laugh about all of it.  In my fiction, I have already gone home, repeatedly.  When I get my cheapo flushing-funeral, that will not be me.  I will be in the cornfields under the blue Iowa sky with a threat of thunderstorms in the distance.  And while I may cry a little bit, because what is life worth without some of that? I will be mostly laughing and laughing and laughing.  Because life may end in death, but nothing about it is sad if you don’t let it be.  I like to delude myself into thinking the world is a little bit better now than when I got here, and I pretend that I have had something to do with that.  The game is won.  Everything else is just gravy!  (Sorry about that.  I do realize that gravy goes on mashed potatoes, not a game, but mangled metaphors are one of my specialties.)

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September 1, 2023 · 1:18 am

Doofy Dog Doings

I noted before that I have so far used an alarming number of dog-poop jokes in my creative writing projects.  (All right, two instances may not really be alarming, but it does indicate that I am thinking about dog poop way too much.)  I guess the reason for it is that I have a dog, and she is not a genius dog.  She is smarter than I can cope with, but she only beats me at chess once out of every thirty games.  She inspired today’s Paffooney, so let me show you the picture before I tell you everything that is wrong with my little dog.

Dingledum dog

Okay, my dog looks nothing like this.  She is a Cardigan Corgi, a dog bred to chase and kill barn rats, or to protect the baby’s crib when the adults are not in the room.  She is highly possessive, and she considers me her property.  So, here’s where the dog poop comes in.  I have to walk her twice a day, and I have to take a Walmart bag with me to pick up the poop in the park (even though it is obvious that no one else in our neighborhood does it despite the posted law).  And it turns out that this is not enough to keep her from pooping in the house.  The little poop factory can make as many as five times in one day.  And even worse, she will poop in punishment if we commit the crime of leaving her alone to go somewhere.  We get back from the dollar movie and she has pooped on the dining room carpet, or in front of my bedroom door, somewhere where she knows I will see it and get mad.  She doesn’t care if she gets punished in return.  She is satisfied if she made her point.  So I am drowning in dog poop on a daily basis.  It’s no wonder it’s on my mind and I end up writing about it.  God help me, of all the things to have on your mind, I have dog poop on mine!

If you are wondering about the rat in the picture, there is a rat part to my doggy nightmare.  We live near a city park where there are lots of storm drains and rain gutters for rats to inhabit.  And there are throngs of rats.  When we kept the dog in the yard on a chain, the rats would come by daily to laugh at her before coming into the house and gnawing rat holes into the walls and ceilings and eat the glues out of the spines of many of my books.  So rats are a part of the reason she now gets to live in the house.  My wife goes ballistic from seeing or hearing rats.  But I think they still laugh at her as they come in anyway. It’s just that they stay quieter with her around and my wife doesn’t see or hear them.  So, it would be problem solved if only the poop problem would go away.

Here’s her actual portrait.  Sorry if it is too scary for children and the faint of heart.

Jade Monster1

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