Monday, January 13, 2003 6:22 PM Joe Coluccio

Perchance to be dream a farce, or maybe a broad comedy…

When I was just a young popinjay in Mrs. Dunham’s 10th Grade English Class, 1st Period Penn Sr. High, (You understand of course that I am pretty much making this up, ‘cause I can hardly distinguish 7th from 8th from 9th from 10th ... well, you get the picture, grade. I am fairly certain there was a pleasing matronly English teacher named Mrs. Dunham, and that great tragedy befell her when her daughter died in a car crash one weekend. Sorry. It happened. I remember the starkness and the horror of it.) I had ‘em lying in the aisles with laughter over a story I had written about a friend of mine called Grieco, on account’a that was his name.

It is true that Grieco was a study in spontaneity which I managed to escalate into a bit of outrageous behavior that was not very far from the truth and well down the road to hilarious. I believe I had a way with turn of phrase back then that gave the funny bone a bit of a bite. Grieco was a fertile ground of whimsy, because he was so damn serious about the mischief that he caused. It didn’t hurt very much that he was a perfectly normal looking human being from whom everyone expected perfectly normal behavior.

Where is he now? I have no idea. Where am I now? That is the question before me this evening.

I am finding it increasingly hard to escalate any of the bizarre behavior that I see from perfectly normal people into anything funny any more. Have I lost my sense of humor? And gained instead a humor of sense?

I peruse the papers each morning (via the internet, which could well be some of the problem) looking for some incident that sparks me into a full blown joy of the laughing jabbers, but find a kind of illogic that instead gives me a case of the shivering fits. I mimic the truly outrageous words of people in the grocery store or at the bus stop, but instead of high humor, I find pathos and turn it into bathos.

I try to write a comedy bit weekly for Lackzoom, one of them, Ask Emiglio, even appears on the web site. And with some labor I manage to finish what I start. But I regret that I seem to have lost the facility to cause an otherwise strong sensible adult to fall in a fit full of splendid fatuous excess onto the ground and roll around under the table with tears of gut busting abandon and agonizing gaiety.

I vow…what? yet another New Year’s Resolution…I will, deerstalker covering my not yet completely bald head, a magnifying glass of considerable power in one hand, a shaker fashioned from the tail end of a rattler to beat the bushes in the other, move deliberately down the path of this life like a mongoose in search of a cobra, looking for the complete sense of humor that I have let shuck from me like a snake shedding its skin.

Sheesh!, what a bunch of really wretched images! See what I mean? What’s with all this wormy, squiggly, serpentine stuff?

After a stint at WYEP-FM as Program Manager I took a job as Traffic Manager at a TV production facility. One of the on-air people, a guy who managed an off beat avant garde jazz radio program each morning, visited me one day. He had a remarkable resemblance to the magician Doug Henning with long flowing hair and full moustache and was wearing, loose fitting jeans, a colorful woven belt, some kind of mukluks and a tie-dyed shirt. He took one look at me and said, “You look all grown-up!”

Was that the day that I lost it? My ability to take the very serious stuff of life and hold it up to wonderful ridicule? Is that knack here inside me, dormant, waiting for the revolution to occur? Or, as in the last words attributed of Sir Donald Wolfit, is comedy just hard? (Sir Don’s last and oft quoted were said to be “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” At least he got some of it right.)

In any case, win place or fail, neither sleet nor slate nor flail, you will see that I begin my re-emergence from the muck of all seriousness, into the whole yoke of the highly comedic, right here, bi and poly sected, in front of all of Bloggerdom.

What a joke!

Possibly.