One Line Says It All (All the World's a Stage)

January 21 being "National One-Liners Day" amused him, because the one-liner was a unique construct. He recognized it shared something with poetry, packing into so few words entire treatises — entire expositions. It wasn't some aphorism with just a beginning, middle, and end. One-liners are deceptive in that they're not really linear. Pithy wisdom is a tessaract in the human mind.

There's irony afoot — and humor.

Humor, quintessential outlier of mammalian sensibility making us all human. Ah, he thought, now I've opened a can of worms. Humor isn't just about what's funny. Humor is reflexic, usually to the unexpected.

Unforeseen surprises, he realized, were too damn quick for his human mind to process. There lagged time in his brain between taking in the data, processing it, and finally adjudicating it meaninfully. During that lag time, his human mind was befuddled and vulnerable to the unexpected. Like topping the highest point of that first hill on a roller coaster: Yes, you still recognize what the world is, beyond that spinopause of cold chill. Yet, that chill incapacitates you mercilessly. And, beyond that zenith, you're laughing.

But it's not really funny, is it? Or a trove of unreal reality looking for the right neurons to synapse together.

One-liners were like that. They place you in peril on a precipice, and what comes is clumsy to process. And you laugh. (He could bypass the whole mental pathway by simple tickling, but even that documents the brain's inability to process some things.)

He remembered his 4th Grade class erupting into laughter in 1963 after the announcement of JFK's assassination. It wasn't funny, but merely unprocessable.

His epiphany: a one-liner was like an epitaph or — better — an epitaph should be a one-liner.

He thought about his own life and how he beat the odds by beating everyone else out — to the jobs, the trophies, the girls, and even his cancer. So, in his will, he left instructions for the epitaph on his gravestone. He wanted a true one-liner, a summary of his life. But he wanted "pithy," the processing challenge when juxtaposing gravitas and flippancy:

YOU SHOULD SEE THE OTHER GUY