When last I was cartooning about Fantastica, I had fallen into a dream about pirates and had been taken prisoner…
On that cliffhanger note… To be continued…
Tag Archives: paffooney
The 40-Year Class Reunion
This Goodwill rescue Barbie is stamped 1966, but an irate collector once pointed out to me that is no indication of when this doll was actually made and sold.
One of the main reasons that I went to Iowa this Summer at the time that I did was because the Belmond High School Class of 1975 was having a reunion dinner for the 40th anniversary of the high school getting rid of all of our dumb behinds all at once, an entire class full of mooks and monkey-heads and minions. I desperately wanted to see them again… for possibly the last time in our lives. It has been 40 years. Seven of us are gone (more than 10% of a small, rural Iowegian high school class). And now I want to tell stories about them and relentlessly make fun of them… though I will change the names to protect the innocent… and the ones I like… which is all of them.
We had the hootenanny at the Belmond Country-Club and Golf Course (and no, we were not eating golf balls… the most favorite of all Belmond restaurants had been destroyed by a tornado not long ago, and is now re-opened at the Country-Club grounds). I was really hoping to see my best friend there, Dr. Bilbo Bonaduce… the mook in the lobster shirt in high school that always got my jokes in Mr. Salcomb’s English classes, but never laughed… because he always needed to top them. (That goof-ball was willing to say out loud in front of everyone the kind of jokes I could only whisper to him behind my hand… needless to say, I only basked in the laughs second-hand.) Unfortunately, he was not there. He suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and may not even still be among the living. It has been a decade since I last saw or heard from him. Gee, this part of the story is not nearly as funny and uplifting as I had planned. But, then, time and fortune are not universally kind.
I did get to see the boy I fell in love with in Junior High. Now, that is not exactly what it sounds like. Neither of us were ever gay, and both have children by the one and only wives that we each married. I loved him because he was magical. He relied on my big brain to help him in Math and History, and I relied on him as we played together, side by side, in football, basketball, and track. As a teammate, he always made me better at what I was doing. I tackled harder and shot the ball more accurately and ran faster because he was always there encouraging me. I was actually the better athlete of the two of us (in my unbiased opinion), but he lettered in three sports when I did not letter in any. He dated the girl I had the hugest crush of my life upon… for a while… and got all the glory. But I shared in it because he was my friend and the “shiny” rubbed off on me. He grew up to be the only farmer in our class who is still actually farming. Still living the life we once knew. God, Roger, I never envied you more, and I love you still.
This is a picture of Brent Clarke, not Roger Williams. Character and inspiration? Maybe.
I spent the most time talking to three people I had not talked to much in 40 years… Rachel McMichaels was one of the organizers of the dinner. She was the brainiest girl in our class and the Valedictorian in high school. The scuttlebutt was that if I courted and married Rachel, all our children would have frizzy white hair and mustaches like Albert Einstein. She was as warm and caring as ever. She asked all about my family and told me one or two things about hers. There was never a flicker of romance between us in high school… probably because of all the teasing… but I do realize what a good thing was always there to be missed out on entirely.
Daniel Mastermill was there too. We sat beside each other in the front row of the infamous Miss Rubelmacher’s seventh-grade Science class. The terrifying Miss R sat us there together in her seating chart because of size. Daniel, in seventh grade, was even shorter and scrawnier than I was. At the reunion, he was telling me the story (which I had never heard before) of his family’s buried treasure. It seems that his parents buried a treasure on their family farm, and told the children that it was there, but never gave them a treasure map, or told them what was in the treasure. The old folks apparently died without telling where it was buried, and the children spent weeks digging up everything they dared to dig up looking for it before the farm was sold. The treasure is apparently still there.
And I sat next to Reggie Simmery all during the meal. Everybody talks to Reggie. He was the class clown. We were sitting across the table from Angela Oberkfell, the classmate who was also the Junior High School Principal’s daughter, and listened to a recounting of several times Reg was subjected to paddlings, stern lectures, and even a couple of suspensions. Reggie could never resist the temptation to say or do the most ridiculous, stupid, and pointless things his little peanut-butter-powered brain could think of. And he always laughed about everything, even when Angela’s dad whacked him on the behind with a board of education.
The reunion was a disappointment because I didn’t see all the people I wanted to see. Even the girl I had the greatest crush of my life upon was not there. (Clever of her to avoid me.) But I saw people I needed to see, and felt the things I needed to feel, about a time and place so long ago now, and my heart is full… re-filled to the brim.
Filed under high school, humor, Paffooney
Holiday Place Holders
I am quite serious about posting every day this year. But not every day is given the opportunity to be a writing day. The fact is, some days things like holidays and family come first and you cannot always live the entire day in your own stupid head. So this post is a cheat, a fake, a place-holder that gets words published on WordPress merely for the sake of getting words published on WordPress. Believe me, I understand if you don’t bother with this quickly-written and poorly edited drivel. It is only about a hundred words in any case. Not worth the time beyond its ability to plug the hole with chewing gum.
Filed under Paffooney
The Politics of Clowns
It is almost not fair to make fun of presidential candidates. They are making it so easy. If you can’t take anything but cheap shots at certain folks, then what value is in your words? Still, it is a temptation hard to resist.
So, I have spared no expense in hiring a couple of KlownTown’s finest to watch my every word, and keep me honest.
It is almost impossible to find a picture of Donald Trump on a good hair day.
1. Candidate Hair– The field of candidates on both sides of the divide is filled with marvelous examples of clown hair. I am left wondering how they achieve such effects. Assuming Rand Paul is not wearing a bad toupee, how does he get his hair to look like a squirrel who fell into a vat of yellow wood-stain shellac and then crawled out and died on his head? I think his father proved before him that too much Libertarian political purity has a profoundly pickling effect upon your head, and leads to making what hair you have growing out funny. Donald Trump obviously takes his hair off every morning and steam presses it on wrought-iron ironing boards in a thoroughly Republican flat-tax flattening sort of arm motion. It’s too bad he is in the habit of taking his hair off at the neck, because the ritual flattening is having a bad effect on the “maybe-I-shouldn’t-say-that-out-loud” centers in his brain. The Democrats are not immune to the clown-hair scourge either Bernie Sanders obviously uses my grandfather’s bald-guy low-maintenance approach to hair-styling. Step out of the shower, rub a towel across the top of your head, and you are ready to roll with that straight-talking brand of no-nonsense socialism that you can get by with because everyone is looking at how the towel Bozo-ed up your hair and distracts them from listening to your actual words. (Okay, the Klown Kops caught me. Bozo is not a legal verb.)
I bet you didn’t know that Ted Cruz went to Ringling Bros. Clown College for two years.
2. Candidate Words– Yes, the greater part of the clown-offences committed by candidates have to do with words. Some, like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have a marvelous glibness that defies understanding. Cruz can go on talk shows and talk with two different tongues at the same moment. He is smart and Ivy-League-educated, but when he denies climate change he says he is not a scientist (which absolves him of using scientific reasoning in his arguments) but he says the science is not yet settled (which he routinely backs up with facts and statistics that are not true). Here is a noble statesman who is of Cuban descent and speaks no Spanish. He was born in Canada but renounced his Canadian citizenship so it wouldn’t interfere with his presidential aspirations. So, where the heck is he from, and why did we elect him in Texas? Even Republican Senator John McCain calls him a “wacko bird” for his combative Me-against-the-world political maneuverings. Who would possibly make a better president? At least, he is certainly capable of keeping the cartoonists and satirists happy. (The KlownTown Kops are reminding me that I have already passed 500 words and too much politics on the internet is a very bad thing… so maybe I must leave the rest of this topic for another day.)
Taking the Road Home
I was once offered a hundred dollars for this oil painting of State Highway 3 in Iowa. The art collector who offered it was a fellow teacher at the time. He didn’t really know much about painting. He collected wooden Santos, or carved saints from Mexico, and he had bought wooden carousel horses before. He was very knowledgeable about wooden sculpture from Mexico, but kind of a dithering old fool who was actually going blind at the time from cataracts when it came to other kinds of art. He wanted to encourage me as an artist, although he couldn’t really see the painting very well. I loved the old guy, but blind guys shouldn’t really be teachers (unless they have Daredevil level hearing skills), and they definitely shouldn’t try to evaluate art that they can’t see by touching. I was flattered, but also very happy I held on to the painting instead of selling it.
You see, this is literally the road home. Traveling west on Highway Three, you only have to go a couple more miles down this road to reach the little town where I grew up, Rowan, Iowa. And I am going home this week. My parents live on what used to be the Raymond Aldrich farm. Up ahead in the painting you turn right on the gravel road north to reach the connecting gravel room that takes you to Grandpa and Grandma’s farm house, where my parents, in their 80’s now live. In many ways it is a journey into the past. I have a class reunion of the Belmond High School Class of 1975 on July 3rd. I get to revisit the town where I grew up and the family farm which always used to be the center of my world even though we lived in a different house in the town of Rowan. My whole family of 5 is going along. My sisters and their families will also be there. It is worth the 700-plus mile trip, which we are doing today. Soon, the picture becomes reality. I thank my lucky stars I never sold it.
Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney
Googling for Paffoonies
Now that I have alienated so many of my conservative friends by doing the horrible political act of posting a post yesterday in which I took the terrifyingly earth-shaking step of coming out against racism, I must take it back down a notch and just be silly again. I discovered yesterday that most of my family members whose opinions I take seriously, agree with me. In fact, some of them are more radically liberal than I am. (Of course that goes without saying… I did, after all, defend Richard Nixon as being a good president in 1973… just before he resigned in Watergate disgrace. My political insights are always so keen.) There are also people whose intelligence I respect who don’t quite want to condemn what happened in South Carolina as racial terrorism They want to call it a failure of mental health care, the way Jeb Bush did on the campaign trail. Or they want to think of it as an “accident” that is being seized on by lib-tards to take away people’s God-given second amendment rights the way Rick Perry did (the only candidate for President on record for declaring that he is running while under an indictment for abuse of power as a governor of Texas). And I suppose it is their right to have their own opinions and feel the way they want to feel about it. Maybe they really don’t know any racist people anywhere… because they don’t read minds… not because they’re afraid to admit that racism exists. But I argued yesterday that everyone should love everyone else no matter what language they spoke or what color their skin was. Apparently that idea is too liberal for some of the people I know.
But that was yesterday. Today I am in recovery from political thinking and the philosophical brain-bruising I always seem to take whenever I make any of my disgustingly liberal lunatic statements. Today I just want to celebrate the fact that I have published a lot of artwork on the internet where a lot of people seem to like it.
If you try “Googling Paffooney” you want to do the thing suggested in my Paffooney ad for all Paffoonies (pictured above) and specify that you are looking for “Beyer Paffooney”. Google-tastic algorithms help Google figure out what the heck you actually mean by googling a silly, made-up word like “Paffooney” when you add my last name to it. Somehow that clarifies that you don’t want the pictures from Facebook posts belonging to women named Valerie, teacher websites that may be only vaguely connected to the fact that I am a former school teacher, and foolish enough to be honest about it in my posts, and artwork by any and all painters and cartoonists on the web. Adding my name somehow clears up for Google the fact that the artwork that I continually label and categorize as “Paffooney” is not that weird variety of other things. I am, after all, the only idiot on the web using that silly magic made-up word… at least that I know of. So I hope you give a look and try to like my Paffoonies, even though they are probably just as goofy and mixed-up as my politics. Here is a link to make it entirely too easy for you to do this weird thing;
Red State Hate
It has taken me some time to put ideas together to tackle this terrible thing. Jon Stewart did a segment at the beginning of his show that was not funny. It was somber, thoughtful, and full of real outrage that cast lightning bolts at the heart of the dragon. And I admire Stewart for what he is… someone who truly cares about things, and fights the good fight using the best weapon he has. Humor. Mark Twain said that against it, nothing could stand. But some things are so terrible that not even a joke can put it right. Why? Because there are places in this human world where ideas are like a festering sore, spreading at an alarming rate, and daily becoming more and more poisonous. Texas is like that. It is a Red State. That means it is a hotbed of conservative ideas and nurtures Republican values… like being distrustful and fearful of them… And who are they? They are not us. They have a different religion. They have a different skin color. They are not opposed to raising taxes on the rich, even if they are rich themselves. They are not capitalists… Or not freedom-loving… They think it can be left up to women to decide what to do with their own bodies. They don’t see abortion as murder. They don’t think teaching evolution in schools is evil. We must fear them… and, yes, even hate them.
As a school teacher, I learned early on that if you only look for the bad in other people, then that is what you will be left with, a world in which there are only bad people. I don’t know about you, but I can’t live in a world like that. I learned to look at the world as being full of imperfect people who all have good in them, lots of good. I grew up in Iowa where the people were so white in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s that when the winter snow fell heavy enough, we all had the super power of invisibility. I remember only one black face from my childhood that wasn’t on television. There was a little girl from Chicago who came to stay with a volunteer family so she could get out of the inner city for a while. The adults warned us that she might be prone to stealing things, so don’t do anything to tempt her. And we didn’t. And she didn’t. And damn it, I don’t know whether we did a good job of not tempting her, or that warning was just an empty prejudice. She was just like us. She laughed at things. She loved kittens. She played our games. She was just like us… but she had a better tan.
I started teaching in South Texas. I quickly learned how to deal with Hispanic kids who were mostly poor and mostly Spanish-speaking. I learned that they didn’t laugh at the same things as I did. When they called me Batman for a while, it wasn’t a compliment. I learned to laugh at the things they found funny and learned to joke the way they joked. I played their games. I learned to love pit-bulls and other dogs the way they loved dogs. I was just like them… but they couldn’t hide in the snow as easily as me.
I learned to teach black kids like they complain about on Fox News, the ones they throw to the ground and sit on at pool parties in McKinney, Texas, when I moved to the Dallas area and the town of Carrollton. I quickly learned why some teachers are so stressed out by them. They are louder than the white kids. Their nerves can be more raw and their tempers hotter than the other kids. Not all of them… just about 51 %. But you have to look close enough to see that… they laugh at most of the same things as us. Some of the brightest, widest smiles I have ever seen are on the faces of black kids when you laugh at their jokes. They play the same games as I do. They love puppies just like I do. They sometimes even have more faith in God than I do. Some of my favorite students of all time had very dark faces. I still think of them often… and i will never stop loving them… all of them. And when something happens like it happened in South Carolina… Forgive me, I have to cry again for a bit.
And how do we solve the problem of places where love is so badly needed, but is not present in large doses? How do we overcome this passion some people have to exclude illegal immigrants, and the need some people feel to move their children out of schools where there are too many of the wrong colored faces? I do not know the answer.
But you do not create love by passing laws and building walls. You have to spend time with them. You have to laugh at the same jokes. You have to play the same games. You have to love puppies and kittens. Don’t you?
Filed under Paffooney, philosophy, red States
More Nuts n’ Bolts… This Time Mostly Bolts
Okay, this is another filler piece to allow me to post every day of 2015. But it does give me a chance to write down a few things I have been thinking about… And I do realize allowing me to think nowadays is a completely risky proposition. But when you talk about Nuts and Bolts, you are talking about how things are put together. The nut keeps the attachment from sliding apart and failing to do its job, but the real work of bonding things together is done by the bolt. So, to keep mangling the metaphor until it is either as tightly bolted as it will go, or it bursts from the torque and stress, let me talk about some bolts in my cartooning endeavors.
This most recent pen and ink Paffooney is a cartoon panel about Pirates from the imaginary dream world of Fantastica. In the cartoon environment I am working on now, Pirates take your gold and valuables basically by being bankers and compounding your interest… mostly by compounding really, really hard… like with hammers and heavy swords. So here is one of the bolts holding my posts together. I am financially troubled right now (right now meaning the last twenty years) by trouble with credit card debt and banks. I fight that kind of trouble with swords of satire. You find me complaining a lot about this particular topic by mostly metaphorical means.
And that leads to another bolt that is a common rivet in the girders of my purple paisley prose. I use metaphors and drawings in a way that can be characterized by the artistic term (or is that autistic term?) surrealism. Yes, I am an out-of-the-closet surrealist like Salvador Dali, Juan Miro, and Rene Magritte. I would like to argue that I am also a surrealist in the manner of Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, Charles Schultz, creator of Peanuts, and Dan Piraro, creator of Bizzaro, but cartoonists in general don’t tend to be out of the closet, willing to admit that they juxtapose disjointed images with realist elements in them to make a comic point or raise an emotional response. That is something most cartoonists are unwilling to let their parents understand about them… that, or they simply don’t know what big words like juxtapose mean… because cartoonist are generally unwilling to look things up in the dictionary. I hope this paragraph doesn’t make your brain hurt. But if it does… well, that’s why most of us surrealists try really hard to keep it secret and end up living a double life.
I think you can also tell by today’s post that I need to revisit this idea of examining bolts. I am swiftly coming to the end of today’s 500 words, and I have only covered two working bolts. What kind of structure can stand up to high winds with only two bolts in the entire thing? But hopefully it won’t all suddenly collapse before I have a chance to come back and place a few more bolts. And on that note, I am at 514.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, surrealism
The Haunting 2 ; The Wicked Witch of Creek Valley
If a horror movie is going to succeed as a movie franchise, the most serious challenge is to make a good #2, So, for the sequel to The Haunting, I will tell you about the Wicked Witch of Creek Valley. I hope to haunt her when I become a ghost, I really do. And I should explain to you why.
My first job in the Dallas Fort-Worth area was at Creek Valley Middle School. I was hired there by Dr. Witchiepoo (most likely not her real name… though not to protect the innocent). She was a very prim and proper sort who had a reputation as a really good principal for earning high test scores on the State tests. When she hired me, it was because I could demonstrate from school-district records that I, as the only 7th grade English teacher in the South Texas school district, was responsible for improving writing scores, above the State targets for the increasingly difficult and high stakes writing tests. She was good at recruiting talented people for her school. She was not, however, very good at treating talented teachers as human beans… er, I mean human beings.
I was assigned to be the #2 English teacher in Team #2 of the Eighth grade. I soon discovered that I was #2 because #1 was one of Witchiepoo’s favorite teachers. Now, I don’t blame #1 for that. She was a nice teacher who loved students and didn’t understand why she got all the best students and the best treatment at faculty meetings. I, and two other English teachers had to handle all the thugs and discipline cases. In fact, the History teacher on our Team was also a basketball coach, and he shared with me the fact that all the worst kids in the 8th grade were in my English classes. Classes of not less than 24 kids and not more than 30, for two consecutive class periods (double-dipping kids in reading and writing for two of the five major tests on the all-important State tests) can be a nightmare when they are packed with discipline problems. I had five special education students who were all emotionally disturbed. I had a bipolar teenage girl in one class who refused to take her medications and was not even identified by the special education department. I had to find out about that one from the mother when discussing incidents in the class room. Juggling that many wackos is possible, but you have to be properly informed and prepared. And I was handling them as well as it is possible to do.
But, Dr. Witchiepoo did not like the way I taught. She believed good classroom discipline is a quiet classroom, and bad kids controlled completely through fear. I normally engaged with kids, joked with kids, listened to kids, and other things that made noise. (Oh, my gawd! The evil-eye looks I got from the boss.) And I had at least one young gentleman of color that Dr. Witchiepoo wanted to see expelled for poor behavior. The thing that ground my kippers the most about that situation was that he was actually a good-natured kid, quite likeable, and trying his hardest to meet behavioral expectations. All of my favorite kids that ill-fated year were actually black kids. I got the distinct impression that Dr. Witchiepoo didn’t feel the same. Bipolar girl registered some kind of complaint about the young gentleman. Dr. Witchiepoo was on my case to punish him daily, but without telling me what he had done wrong in my classroom. I watch kids constantly and learn a lot about them just by looking. Whatever this invisible behavior was, it gave Dr. Witchiepoo the fuel she needed to burn me with. The fireball came during my evaluation. Dr. Witchiepoo came in to evaluate my teaching methods in the class in which both bipolar girl and the young gentleman were in attendance. She told me she didn’t have enough information for her evaluation after the first period-long evaluation (I still maintain it was because she didn’t see any bad things she could use against me). So, she came back on another random day, un-announced, and she lucked out. It was a day when bipolar girl was on a rampage. I knew from the usual signals, late arrival, catty comments, and brooding silence, that bipolar girl was having a bad day. (I have since learned that special education law specifies that my ignoring any attention-getting behaviors was the proper procedure for that kind of problem.) While the bipolar girl was ignoring my wonderful teaching all period long because I didn’t rise to any of her bait, the principal spied the colored marker drawings that bipolar girl was occupying herself with instead of interrupting my lessons. Principal Witchiepoo marched over to bipolar’s desk and took her markers away from her. She didn’t shout at the girl, but she said things to her that guaranteed the retaliation that followed. Witchiepoo put the markers on my desk, indicating that bipolar girl could not expect to get them back. Well, then bipolar girl did interrupt my lesson and quietly got out of her seat without asking permission, walked to my desk, and took her markers back. This is when the shouting started. Not me, mind you. Principal Witchiepoo and bipolar girl. I was ordered to take my class to the library for the remaining ten minutes of the period while the Principal did whatever evil thing she intended to do to bipolar girl.
My evaluation nearly ended my teaching career. As far as I know, bipolar girl got her markers back and maybe sat for two hours in detention. I, on the other hand, was zeroed out in two domains on my evaluation, discipline because that was the obvious one, and promoting critical thinking in the classroom, because Witchiepoo couldn’t guarantee non-renewal with just one zero. I was doomed from that day until the Garland school district gave me another chance to be a teacher three years later. I felt ambushed. The human resources officer for the district I was working for was rooting for me to get another chance, probably because he was getting other similar reports of abuses by Witchiepoo, but because I made the mistake of signing the bad evaluation, he had no recourse but recommend non-renewal of my contract.
So that is why I intend to haunt Witchiepoo. But it will be hard to find anything scarier than she is to use against her. The one thing a bully in a position of power like that fears most is loss of control. To accomplish that, I will have to possess a number of her students and make them defy her. Nothing scares a bully more than when the powerless stand up to them.
But there are drawbacks to this plan. First of all, being inside a middle-school brain is bound to be super-yucky. Boys often have the next closest thing to raw sewage going through their imaginations at any given time. Girls can be full of saccharine-sickly pink clouds and butterfly-farting unicorns, or they can be darker and more super-Goth than any boy. Possessing a boy would make me feel polluted, while to possess a girl is risking complete Silence of the Lambs levels of insanity. So, there is that.
And worse, by now, karma has probably already caught up with Dr. Witchiepoo. She had driven twelve teachers out of her school with her demanding micro-managing by the time the first semester had ended the year I was teaching for her. The administration was already beginning to wonder. The last time I talked to a colleague from Team #2 about Witchiepoo, a very talented math teacher who was also looking for a new job, I was told that she was on the verge of being fired for excessive abusive behavior against teachers and students. And that was eight years ago now. What are the chances that the tiger traded stripes for lamb’s wool? So once again, my haunting plan will probably not work out.
Where-in Lies the Funny?
The author without his make-up and after imbibing extra caffeine.
I am attempting to be a humor writer. There’s a statement that calls for more than a little rationalization. Why would anyone want to be funny? Especially why would a manic-depressive sick-old former school teacher want to be funny and write books for young people that tackle subjects like suicide, lying, nudity, sex, trans-genderism, death, suffering, religion, alien invasions, and getting old? (Well, okay, getting old is inherently funny… especially the noises you unintentionally make from orifices and joints whenever you try to sit, move, lift, eat, or breathe.) I ask myself this question only because I need to get to 500 words and stretch out the hoopti-doo to cover up the fact that I already know the answer and it is short and simple. Joking about the things that tear your life apart is the only way to handle things and not become a serial killer. (Make that cereal killer, especially Kellogg’s cereal of any and every description. I am a very loving and accepting fool at heart and could never kill even one person… probably even in self-defense.) I recently took a Who-do-you-write-like test that I found on another blog at All Things Chronic. Here is the link; https://painkills2.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/who-do-you-write-like/
That silly little analyzer took a bit of my purple paisley prose and churned out a horror-writer answer, H.P. Lovecraft. The Lord of the Old Mad Gods and Moonbeasts is a particular favorite of mine, one of several writers whose novels I have read everything I can get my hands on. I still sleep with the lights on at night because of The Dunwich Horror, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth. I am mad with admiration for his allusions to gibbering sounds and unholy terrors that taint and transfix our lives with fear to the very marrow of the bones. I have to admit, I like the idea of being compared to him, in spite of the fact that he tries to inspire fear and madness, while I aim for goofiness and gaiety. It is a delicious irony to try always to be Mark-Twain funny while writing with a horror writer’s convoluted and dictionary-intensive style.
And don’t get the idea from my mention of him in this self-reflecting ramble through jumbled ideas that I really believe I am as funny as Mark Twain. I am not deluded or mentally ill… well, not deluded, anyway. I am still learning to make people laugh with words. And I don’t mean to be mean about it. I don’t do George Carlin F**k-the-world-style humor. I don’t even do Don Rickles-style insults. I am more in favor of gentle humor. I am not looking to call anybody names or trying to make certain folks look like Biblical-word-for-donkeys. (Not even Republicans named Rick in yesterday’s post). I want to show fictional people undergoing some of the dark things that filled my life with hurt, and doing it with the grace and good humor that only comes from a heart full of self-sacrificing love. (Gee, no wonder I find comedy hard… I have chosen the most difficult and elusive kind of humor for my art. I’d do a lot better with poo-poo jokes.) (Oh, wait, I do poo-poo jokes, don’t I. This one counts too.)
I wonder if I made a mistake yesterday in portraying Senator Ted Cruz as a lizard man from outer space. Was that a mean, name-calling sort of joke? Or was I painting him in broad, humorous strokes with my colored pencils? Once again, you can be the judge. Here’s the picture again. And you get to decide if anything I have ever said is funnier than it is just plain sad.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, writing humor
Catch a Falling Star 