Getting Serious About Comedy (Part I)

If I were asked to remark on my life and the childhood that paved some road leading me to this point, I would have to say something about all the funny people who surrounded me for the last 26,872 days (and counting). Somewhere along that road, I became a big fan of laughter and the comedy that spawns it – and, I mean not only my own laughter, but the laughter of others, some of which I have actually been responsible for inducing.

I grew up on a farm and was in daily contact with an extended family of unknowing comedians. From an early age, my mother laughed at most of my jokes. She also laughed at things that I did and said which I didn’t imagine to be funny at the point of doing them or saying them. She made me realize that the “proper” phrasing of my conversations could actually render them funny to others around me. I remember writing a letter to my aunt and uncle and cousins who moved from Canada to live in Germany for four years. I told them all the details of my short and sheltered day-to-day farm life. Being a perfectionist, starting at a young age, a trait I have maintained all my life, I found it necessary for my mom to proof read my personal letters. At one point we adopted a cute little cocker spaniel puppy, so naturally that was big news in one of the letters. In the same breath I mentioned that the older dog we already had, was not dead yet. For some reason, my mother found this to be extremely funny. At that point in my life, I learned that I was capable of making people laugh by the way I structured my speech and my writing. At that young age, I assumed that the only time a person or family would get a new pet, would be when the previous pet had somehow expired. I deduced that the implications of personal assumptions could be funny – that is, giving the audience credit for being intelligent enough to fill in some or most of the blanks without my help.

My mother, like most farm mothers of her day, baked and sewed and knitted. She was thrifty and collected buttons and jars of other handy items that could be used to repair family clothing. She would often bring out these jars and align them on the kitchen table when she was in the mood for fixing something. My brother and my sister and I loved looking through the jars for little treasures or simply counting and sorting the contents. One particular jar contained the snaps found on women’s garter belts – under garments that contained the fasteners used to hold up nylon stockings.

I happened to be browsing the items from that jar one day while at the same time, thinking of a new 45 rpm record my sister had just purchased. The record was “Blue on Blue” by Bobby Vinton.

The A-side song was good but I found the flip-side to be a little livelier so I listened to it more often – it was entitled “Those Little Things”. While counting and sorting the garter belt snaps from the jar, I happened to mention to my mom how, “I really loved Those Little Things!” Her laughter-filled response is still one of the most memorable moments from my childhood. I found it was possible to call on two totally unrelated thoughts, topics or ideas, neither of which would be considered funny by itself, and make the combination a humorous one, by inserting the one with two meanings into the domain of the other. Like when a tired old donkey farmer crosses the highway and holds up traffic from both directions, causing one of the stranded drivers to stick his head out of an open car window and holler, “Hey buddy, move your ass!” The demand is not as funny if the farmer is pushing his wife in a wheel chair, or if the speaker is sunbathing at a nearby pool and thus not affected by the farmer and his donkey.

Some of the other members of my extended family included my younger brother and my older sister.

My father, who died when I was quite young didn’t really cut me up with his brand of humor but to be fair and similarly, I am relieved that my jokes were not responsible for putting an end to him. I was young and I didn't hear it directly from the doctors, but apparently he did not die laughing.

He did watch Stampede Wrestling though and swear at the TV while doing so, which to me at the time, seemed pretty hilarious.

My dad’s brother, sister and father also lived in a separate house on the same farm as us. My grandpa was pretty serious mostly.

He was a tough audience. If I could make him laugh, I knew I was in top form. I could always make my aunt laugh by surprising her with totally unexpected comments -usually about politics.

When I was a kid, politicians were truly special and interesting. The more of a character they were, the more I liked them. Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker toggled back and forth in an official capacity as Canadian Prime Minister. I loved Mr. Diefenbaker because of the way he spoke – he was a great orator with amazingly excessive and active jowls. He always started his speeches with the phrase, “My fellow Canadians . . .” , which when combined with the movement of his chin, always made me laugh.

He was easy to imitate and I attempted to do so at every opportunity, although I was never nearly as proficient in the endeavor as the great Canadian impressionist – Rich Little. Rich Little also embellished his impressions with funny stuff that Mr. Diefenbaker probably would never have said, which by some weird association, made him funny as well.

All of the adults in my family, however, were partial to Tommy Douglas, leader of the CCF/NDP party – so much so that on the book shelf in the living room of our house, right beside a photo of grandpa and grandma, was another photo, of equal magnificence, of Mr. Tommy Douglas.

For the longest time, I thought that Mr. Douglas was my uncle or something. Anyway, one day I was sitting on an overturned five-gallon pail in the back porch of my aunt’s house. The door was open into the house, with just the screen door separating me from her. I overheard her, in the kitchen, complain about something that John Diefenbaker had done or said and how miffed she was with him about the whole affair. On hearing this, I cleared my throat and immediately went to his defense. I guess her abundant laughter on hearing me intervene came from surprise and the unexpectedness of a child making such a comment about politics no less. I learned right then that the elements of surprise and the unexpected, were worthwhile notions in the world of comedy. These elements also work well when doing magic tricks or when the bad guys ambush the good guys in a late night duster. Maybe that’s why magicians and old cowboy movies always make me laugh. I think that my Auntie Jean realized something at that juncture as well. Knowing how much I admired Mr. Diefenbaker, and during one of his visits to our home town, as he made his way through the waiting crowd, shaking hands with all the important adults of voting age, she reached out and grabbed him by the arm and yanked him toward the two of us so that he could talk to me. My aunt released her grip, he straightened his fedora, bent down to my level, took my tiny hand in his hammy paw, and asked me my name. I replied, "John." To which he replied, "That's a good name now, isn't it?" I suppose I should have reveled in the glory of the moment - that the Prime Minister of Canada was actually talking to me and that all my class-mates had gathered around me like they would have done to watch a schoolyard fight. But all I could do was fixate on his jowls jiggling in the night lights of the train platform. Anyway, if that arm grab had happened in today’s world, my Auntie Jean would have ended up in jail for molesting the PM, which may not have been so funny at all.

My dad’s younger brother – my Uncle Harry – was perhaps the funniest person I ever met as a kid. Although he was a superb ice-skater and a trained airplane mechanic in the second World War, and a master carpenter and cabinet maker, he always acted funny.

He could speak comically, and often did. He looked funny – I joked with him in later life, when his ears had grown (or his head had shrunk maybe) that he resembled a Volkswagen Beetle with the doors open. He sometimes dressed funny – he often wore wildly printed fortrel shirts and plaid-checkered trousers, with a 3-inch burgundy belt. His multi-colored pork-pie hat sat adventurously on the top of his head and covered his thinning hair while accentuating his longish sideburns.

He was a master of one-liners, riddles, jokes, puns, comical facial expressions and he had a laugh that could make the worst comedians in the room feel like they had perhaps unraveled the greatest joke in the history of stand-up. From him, I learned that timing and physicality have a major role to play in comedy and in making people laugh. I think that he, in turn, learned his particular brand of comedy from the likes of Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy, Larry, Moe, Curly, George Goble, Milton Berle and Sid Ceasar.

His favorite television program was the Red Skelton Hour.

I always knew when it was on TV because I could hear him laughing all the way from our house. He also liked “The Dukes of Hazzard”. He said that Boss Hogg was his favorite, but I really think he tuned in to check out Daisy.

Anyway, given his many sophisticated talents, it always seemed funny to me that he spent some well-wasted time watching the gang from Hazzard County cutting up roads and back trails alike in the “General Lee”.

I also had a host of relatives living in town. Those from my dad’s side of the family had somehow inherited the funny gene. The relatives from my mom’s side were more sober and tended to put me (and others) to sleep with their take on the world. I don’t know how she did it but my mom miraculously escaped the long-and-boring-stories spell put on the rest of her family. My dad’s sister Hazel and her husband Uncle Ben were very fun-loving and always up for a good time and a good laugh.

I used to love putting on a show for them. They were a superbly appreciative audience. In later life as a young adult, I would visit them on Halloween suited up as an old lady in a dress or something similar, just to make them laugh. I remember travelling with them to a KFC store in the city. I was maybe eight years old. It was back in the day when you bought a bucket of chicken and then ate it and all the trimmings out in the car. After the bucket was empty, I felt the sudden and unexplained urge to put it on my head and hop out of the car and dance wildly around the parking lot. Not only did my Auntie Hazel and my Mom encourage me to perform at that point, but they taught me confidence. No matter how silly I looked or crazy I acted, they laughed and cheered and laughed some more and applauded until they had also encouraged car-loads of other Kentucky Fried Chicken lovers to likewise get into the audience act. It was perhaps one of my greatest moments in physical comedy – car windows rolled down en masse; complete strangers cheered and honked their horns. Every time I thought about tossing the bucket into the trash container to finish the show, someone else would hoot for more. There was certainly something very addicting about having an audience laugh at my performance. I warn others now, that one should always be careful about how you encourage comedians and harmonica players (which I also do).

My early comedy influences from outside of my family came from a whole list of stand-up comics and comedians who appeared on variety shows throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Ed Sullivan invited comics like Stiller & Mara, Rowan & Martin, The Smothers Brothers, Alan King, Rodney Dangerfield, Myron Cohen, Jack Benny, Bob Hope and others onto his weekly Sunday evening show.

I watched their material, delivery, timing, pauses and call-backs with great enthusiasm, trying my best to imitate each of them in front of the bathroom mirror all week until the next Sunday rolled around. On the school bus on Monday mornings a complete rerun of the comedy acts on Ed Sullivan’s show from the night before would take place. I was lucky enough to have two of the funniest school mates ever on our bus. Darryl Potts and Melvin Odne were able to imitate the comedians and repeat their jokes and material with great accuracy and consistency week after week, month after month and year after year. As those years rolled along, so did the new comedians and TV sitcoms. “All in the Family”, “WKRP in Cincinnati”, “Barney Miller”, “Soap”, “Laugh-In”, "Seinfeld" and others supplied a never-ending array of brave new comedy. Stand-up stars like Billy Crystal, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, and George Carlin filled, while others like Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Martin, Trevor Noah, Jim Carey and Jim Jeffries continue to fill the air-waves with great material and new techniques.

Print materials like “Mad Magazine”, “Herman” comics and Gary Larsen’s “Far Side” all played a major role in altering the way I looked at, and still look at the world. And I can’t forget the influence, the impression that Second City TV, and Saturday Night Live had on the funny side of my life (note: that the funny side of my life makes up about 99% of my life) – I have been in comedy heaven for so many of my years because of these influences.

Over the last decade and a half, I have been lucky enough to be married to one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. My wife Patti’s main talents lie in the field of music and singing. Her vocals have led to her fame as an international artist in Italy, France, the UK, China and Canada. Although she is most known for her music, she possesses a wealth of comedic sense and inspiration. She appreciates good comedy and, in fact, is in constant search for it. She laughs at my jokes and I laugh with her constantly regarding the world around us. She is “in character” so relentlessly and so tirelessly that one (I) cannot help but find great humor and enjoyment in the routine of her life. Without her, the world would simply not be quite so funny.

Within this constant humorous environment over my thousands of days on Planet Earth, I reckon it would have been almost impossible not to start looking at the world through comedy-colored glasses. Fortunately, I have had that upbringing, and fortunately I was able to take it all seriously enough to use the techniques and deliveries in my everyday life and as an teacher, coach, science museum interpreter and actor. And because I have been well-trained by all these mentors and role models, it is certain that I will continue to see the funny side of things for the remainder of my days. I am truly grateful to all of my influences along the way for assisting me with that. The “funny” world is so much more satisfying than the alternative. I just wish that everyone had the same opportunities to enjoy it as I have had.