How do you spell comedy? R-E-D-S-K-E-L-T-O-N! For real, that’s how I spelled it during a third grade spelling bee in 1965. Pretty dang dumb, wasn’t I? But it got a laugh from the prettiest girl in class. I truly couldn’t get enough of Red Skelton on Wednesday nights. It was on past my bedtime, but Dad always let me watch, because… well, I think it was his favorite show too. George Appleby always trying to get something past his wife who would always catch him and punish him soundly for something that truthfully wasn’t his fault. That con man tricked him into drinking that stuff that made him act like an insane lady’s man. San Fernando Red pulling a gag on the man with the silver six-gun and hoofing it out of town before the townsfolk caught on to him with the tar and feathers. He never truly got what he had coming, or what he wanted, either. Someone else got it instead. Freddy the Freeloader making even poverty and homelessness funny. He never passed up a cigar butt in the street and found a dime on every sidewalk.
picture from boomermagonline.com
I always thought that if it was going to be funny, it had to be done Red’s way. Let’s face it, there were two kinds of humor back then and only one my parents truly approved of. They were Eisenhower Republicans living in Iowa, the heart of the Midwest. Red’s gentle humor, with its hidden ribald parts, could profoundly make you laugh, and once in a while bring a tear into your eye. It was never mean-spirited or cruel. It never made a political or religious point. It always assumed that all people were good deep down, and even the bad guys could be reformed with the right joke or prank to make them see the error of their ways. That was comedy.
The other kind, the scary kind was Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. They would say bad words, even though you couldn’t say Carlin’s famous seven words on TV back then. They made jokes about dark and desperate things. Democratic political conventions in Chicago, the Viet Nam War, racial tension, the Black Panthers, these were all fair game for satire and black humor. Their jokes assumed that all people were basically bad and greedy and ignorant… full of malice towards all. Not even the comedian himself was assumed to be the exception to the rule.
And seriously un-funny things were happening. Kennedy was shot in 1963. Another Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were both killed in 1968. Patty Hearst was first kidnapped by and then somehow forced to be a part of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Chaos took the world we knew and turned it upside down. You had to learn to laugh at dark things, because laughing was somehow better than crying and hurting inside. The pictures of the My Lai Massacre in Life Magazine made me sick to my stomach for weeks. I did everything I could in class to make that pretty girl laugh, and when I couldn’t… I had to shut up for a while. I had to think.
I decided early on that I needed humor to live. I had to have the funny parts in my life in order to ward off the darkness. I whistled walking home from choir practice at the Methodist church on dark November nights. I told jokes to the rustling leaves and invisible hoot owls. I got by.
So, what is the lesson learned? If you read this far without gagging, then you know I mix a little funny with a little sad… and try to make a serious point in my writing. Maybe I’m a fool to do it, but I truly believe that Red had it right. People are basically good. You can reform a bad guy with a good joke. You can get by in the dark times.
If dark times are truly here again, then maybe that is why I have to tell my stories, make a few jokes, and make people think. I know I may be killing you with boredom by now, but that’s what I do. I’m a professional English teacher. I bore people to death. And if you read this far, and you’re still alive, maybe I can make you a little bit smarter too.
Catch a Falling Star 
Forgetfulness
I may be suffering from the onset of… what’s that disease called? The one that makes you shake and be mentally confused about… what was I talking about? Oh, yes, I still can’t remember.
It disturbs me that I have difficulty recalling names that I used to rattle off the top of my head quite accurately when I was teaching and was a total master of all the useless trivia information in the universe.
Recently my daughter and number-one son were arguing with me about actors who played Superman. I successfully remembered TV Superman George Reeves who I watched as a pre-teen kid, and Christopher Reeve who I watched on the big screen as a college sophomore, and I even put the “s” at the end of the right one’s name. But I couldn’t remember the name of that new guy… No, not Brandon Routh from Superman Returns (apparently for only one movie), but that other new guy… from Man of Steel, and he was in the movie remake of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Number-One Son finally figured out who I meant by looking it up on his smartphone. Henry Cavill! Why couldn’t I remember that guy’s name? I recently watched him in the Witcher on Netflix. Henry gol-danged Cavill!!?
But then I ponder why there are some names and details I can’t seem to forget. Dawn Wells played Mary Ann on Gilligan’s Island. But it wasn’t the actress’s name I could never forget. It was the sight of her belly button. When the series was on television on a night that didn’t conflict with watching Batman, I watched Mary Ann’s every movement and flounce and prance and twirl, and every banana cream or coconut cream pie she ever handed to Gilligan. At the ages of ten, eleven, and twelve I was mad to see a glimpse of her actual belly button. But not for the reason you think! I insisted to all my friends at school that I did NOT LIKE GIRLS! (Even though I actually did.) It was because I didn’t know if she had one. She wore revealing clothes and even bikini two-pieces on the show, and yet, it was always covered somehow. I remember every delicious detail of my too-close-to-the-TV inspection of Dawn Wells’ acting ability in black-and-white, and later, in syndication, in color. It was clear that somebody in the TV universe didn’t want me to see it. And maybe that is precisely why I can never forget it.
But, then again, I can’t remember this guy’s name. Yes, I know, Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. I even remember the two “d’s” in Addams. And I remember that he played the Kid when he was a little kid in Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Kid.
Yes, I honestly could not remember Jackie Coogan’s name until I looked up the Chaplin movie on Wikipedia.
It really bothers me that I cannot remember some things that I used to know really well. But given time I am able to remember that it is Parkinson’s Disease that my father has and may be causing my memory losses, and that the narrator-guy in the first picture I used in this post is Ludwig Von Drake, a character voiced by legendary cartoon voice actor Paul Frees. I am getting old. And forgetful. But how was I going to end this essay? I forget.
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Filed under autobiography, commentary, feeling sorry for myself, humor, nostalgia
Tagged as blog, life, movies, Superman, TV