Sunday, November 17, 2002 6:39 PM Joe Coluccio
Working Paper #1

I never metaphor I didn’t like.

I admit that even by my own standards I am perverse. When I hear a rule turning to concrete law, I don't merely fly swat it, but I take to nuclear armament. Bombard the thing into its constituent quarks. So, occasionally, for my own good health, I review all the rules that I have to live by, personal and societal and give them a good laugh. That is the basis for my comedy. It may be the basis for all comedy. In the remarkably astute words of Professor Wagstaff, Huxley College, (appropriately contra Darwin) "Whatever it is I am against it."

I have been reading that Plato banned poets from his Republic. And that Aristotle argued for them. One because they were imitators of the ideal, the other because they were imitators of the ideal. Now this ideal is an idea that I am roundly enamored of. And I mostly tip my hat to Aristotle even though I find his endless classification more tedious than the sparkle of Socrates beating his colleagues into a fluffy soufflé during dialogue.

I, despairingly, do not have the temperament or the skills of a philosopher. I, hopefully, have the soul, or at least the spleen, of a poet. (Wouldn't want to live in your old Republic anyhow, Mr. Plato!) But I am forced, by my own superego, if by nothing else to confront my self aggrandized aesthetic. So, poetically, if not philosophically, the following is where I quick stand.

All that I do know and see resides in the word.

Simple, no?

I cannot move on without a consideration of those who I consider my antecedents. If they know up in that big laughing Elysium in the sky, they must look, a smile on their wine red dribbling lips, askance and aghast. Hell, you should stop here and go read them and leave this blogging trail blaze in the deeps of the woods where it belongs among the sheltering pines.

Although I love to death, Groucho and his kin, and Abbot and his Costello; Steve Allen once said that Harry Ritz was the funniest man alive; I don't get it; I nod off to the Stooges; hunger for Harold Lloyd, grudgingly acknowledge Chaplin and marvel at Buster Keaton, these, friends, were not primarily writers.

Turn your gaze instead to the works of S.J. Perelman. They sit before me as I write. I need only mention titles like Carry Me Back to Old Pastrami; Is There and Osteosynchrondroitrician in the House; And Thou Beside Me, Yacketing in the Wilderness; and of course; Captain Future, Block That Kick, to give you a major dose of comedic genius. Perelman left America for England, like old Thomas Stearns Eliot who wasn’t that much for a laugh (Head full of straw, alas), because, unlike T.S. and his now frustratingly ambitious Cats, he couldn't any longer find funny articles in the newspapers to feed his wild imagination. It is a stance in which I have long been in sympathy and agree with the whole of my heart and several other sensitive portions of my body. As a note in passing, you should know that S.J's. brother-in-law and friend was Nathaniel West who hardly wrote anything funny after Day of the Locusts.

Turn your gaze, sorry for all this head swinging, to Robert Benchley, part of the Algonquin Crown Stable of American Wit. Who has been known to say "A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down." and whose The Sex Life of a Polyp (1928) is one of the funniest and most biologically informative works I have ever seen. I should warn those of you with young children that although this short would definitely carry at least an "R" had our rating system, which allows us to watch a person get cut in half from the abdomen by a laser sited automatic pistol, but shuns as obscene the vision of a mother’s naked breast feeding an infant, been in effect in those days. Some of the more exploratory and sexy Polyp stuff is pretty gamy leaving me to propose the definite possibility of a NC-17. Certainly a Quadruple X, banning it to the Garden Theater on the North Side. Nay, I say, it is better to pick up the VHS in the hot little back room of your local video renter. Fore warned, c’est á dire!

I should mention Thurber and Parker and Max Schulman and Jean Shepard and Mark Twain and Lawrence Sterne and Tobias Smollet and Stephen Leacock and Alexander Wollcott and certainly George S. Kaufman, who once begged people back stage during a Marx brothers performance to be quiet because he thought he actually heard a line performed by the Marxes in one of his plays that he had written, and a panoply of others. There is great comedy out there that didn't come from the meager infested minds of those who inhabit Hollywood today.

Now comes the working part, in part.

Here is the fruitful beginning of Joe’s unwritten (now written) Rules of Comedy. I open my mind for your careful perusal.

The limits to my comedy are not length of time. There are those who would relegate comedy to the fast quip, the sorry AM morning joke. To them I simply say, Hah!

I almost never mention bodily parts, although I think people running around on the stage smacking each other with various sized and colored fake penises would be a scream, and flatulence for comedic effect. I save those for my more dramatic moments.

Topical and political observations are verboten! Notice I use the German here for totalitarian emphasis.

Never write after dinner and you are tired. Which I very am now.