Yes, Gene. The story about the car accident was mine. I keep forgetting to add my name at least half of the time I submit questions, or anecdotes. I never intend for anything I send to be anonymous.
I was in the hospital, had my throat opearted on. A friend came to visit me, and when I pointed to the blackboard which said "Can not talk, surgery" or something like that. She either burst into tears or laughter at the thought that I couldn't open my mouth to offer something 'witty'. She ran out of the room before I could figure out which, and came back five mnutes later. If she had been a comedy writer, I could just imagine the skit she could write from it.
As the center of the humor universe (or at least the Delmarva and points west), now known as "Weingarten's Ward" --- (" I had a suppurating cyst removed, and hilarity ensued") --- it is perhaps altogether fitting and proper to reflect on the physiological benefits of laughter. We have known for some time that yukking it up induces a wide variety of benefits ranging from stress reduction, improved breathing and glucose tolerance, to providing an extra boost to the body’s immune system and increasing pain tolerance, likely because of the release of endorphins. Although we find a prescription at least as far back as the Old Testament's Book of Proverbs ("A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones..."), it was left to Norman Cousins, the long-time editor of "The Saturday Review" to raise broad awareness of it in "Anatomy of an Illness (As Perceived by the Patient)" published in (of all places) "The New England Journal of Medicine" in 1976.
Being read E.B. White and Max Eastman and shown "Candid Camera" reruns and old Marx Brothers movies while flat on his back in a New York hospital with a debilitating connective tissue disease had an anesthetic effect, he suggested, and allowed him to get two hours of pain-free sleep at a time after "... 10 minutes of genuine belly laughter..." Cousin's article and subsequent advocacy for "laughter therapy" sparked a good deal of research, some of which controversially concluded that simulated laughter worked as well, in many cases, as the real thing. Of course Cousins was the first to agree that there were limits to "whooping it up wellness." "We mustn't regard any of this as a substitute for competent medical attention," he said in an interview. "But the doctor can only do half the job. The other half is the patient's response to the illness."
About drink; in my family we have a saying: "We can hold our liquor ...but we can't let it go."
Many years ago, one of my nephews was getting married. It was a 'seat yourself' wedding at a fire station and the room was filled with dozens of long stretches of tables that seated 25 people.
When we entered the firehouse, my brother (father of the groom) and I looked at each other and smiled knowingly. He said "Taking bets on where Dad sits," our father being the first one to enter the room. I smiled and pointed over to the bar and the table right in front of it (furthest table from the entrance, furthest from the restrooms, furthest from the dance floor, hardest to get to, furthest from the buffet tables, furthest from anything related to why we were there that day), "There's our table." Without skipping a beat, our father sat directly in front of the bar, turned around in his seat, and ordered a gin and tonic. A family full of alcoholics, seated right in front of the bar.
My father once said "I don't drink water - I've seen how it rusts pipes." And it is probably true that he never drank water - I never saw him drink anything but beer, gin, and vodka. He made it to 86 and cigarettes killed him.
My first mastectomy: 1985. I was 36 years old. A baseline mammogram detected malignant microcalcifications. A biopsy confirmed it. The choices were to "watch it'' or lop it off. Watch it do what, grow tentacles that would reach up and choke me to death? The choice seemed simple, even though I was young, single, and loathe to sacrifice an important erogenous zone. As I wrote a year later in the newspaper that employed me, "I went from a 34 DD to a 34 nothing in the flick of a surgeon's scalpel.'' Being an otherwise tiny person, all that bazoomage - h/t to Dave Barry - used to attract a fair amount of attention. And being part of a newsroom full of characters (read: semi-civilized whackos), I knew to expect entirely inappropriate gallows humor. The best line, IMHO, courtesy of a male photographer - and you know how they are: "Hey, waddaya gonna do with that thing, bronze it and make it into a doorstop?" Cracked up everyone in my hospital room. Well, almost everyone. Mom didn't really appreciate the joke.
Years ago, I had a lesion on my labia. The only reason why I looked is because a good girlfriend told me that she had had this experience. It was white and bubbly and obviously not normal. When I mentioned this to the doctor, she said: just because your friend has cancer doesn’t mean you do. fast forward a couple months later I moved to San Francisco went to a new doctor asked her to look at my labia and she said: I don’t know what that is, but we are going to find out. It was cancer, thankfully localized, but it had to be excised. I wish I could say that would happened next was my brilliance, but it was my friends brilliance. Her lesion was fine and needed no treatment. She asked me if I had phantom labia, oddly enough, I did. Well, she said I think you you talk to your dr about a prosthetic, I am thinking wax lips. No, I will not be identifying myself at the loser party.b
The number of dissolute, debauched, degenerate and decadent creatives (and that's just the "Ds") is legendary. The mention of several here again raises the seemingly intractable question (questions don't grow on trees, you know) of whether an author, artist or comedian owes their public anything more than their best (or at least consistent) creative effort/performance(s) --- their private lives or lives apart from that effort, being irrelevant. Is his wise and amusing prose enough for a Gene Weingarten, or must we view his wisdom and wryness (and that's just the "Ws"), through the lens of his sexual proclivities and scatological leanings (just the "Ss") ?
The message of the dead horse story, of course, is a first cousin (or step sibling) to the "greater fool" theory of economics being applied presently to things crypto and esp. NFTs. Also the House majority (even greater fools). The theory asserts that it doesn’t matter if an asset is risky, has a massively inflated price, or is worthless. All that matters is that someone else is willing to buy it from you for more than you paid. In other words, as the adage wisely points out, “You don’t have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you.”
A few weeks before the Louis CK scandal broke, I heard his album in a binge-listening session that included Amy Schumer and Margaret Cho. There was something creepy about his sexual humor, but it was nothing that I could quantify at the time. When he returned to stand-up, his martyr attitude wasn’t funny. Instead of genuine remorse or contriteness, he talked like a child who had been made to stand in the corner, like he had served his time and assumed all was forgotten or forgiven. That’s when I understood my adult daughters’ dislike of most men in modern stand-up. With exceptions like Patton Oswalt and John Mulaney, the men seem angry and arrogant. Maybe I’m spoiled since the men doing stand-up when I was younger were Steve Martin and Robin Williams and Richard Pryor.
I was in the emergency room because I thought I was having a heart attack; I could not imagine any other pain that would be worse. After 20 minutes in the ER, it started subsiding. When the doctor showed up, he asked me the pain scale question and I answered 6 - I was starting to feel ok. He looked at me and said, Nope, it's an eight. I can tell you're very stoic. They never did figure out what was wrong with me, but it was seven years ago and I'm still alive.
I always answer the idiotic pain scale question with a pain I know about—if 10 is child birth without drugs, which you didn’t plan on doing, then this is a ____. But I still don’t think that really tells them anything
Or #@! For reference, my mother, who has osteoporosis, swears a lot but only uses the F word when she has a has a back fracture. We don’t need to see no stinkin’ chart to know when it’s bad.
The dead horse joke doesn't sound like a joke to me, so much as a story a business school professor might tell their students during a lecture on alternative valuations or outside-the-box marketing strategies.
You're not obtuse. I think it's just written poorly. My take is that the guy who bought the horse and raffled it off was trying to say either "I was rid of the dead-horse disposal problem, and HE was happy as a clam," or that by giving the "winner" his money back plus $20, the winner no longer had a problem with the horse being dead.
The too soon joke is funny. Too soon jokes are generally funny because they give you the discomfort from being too soon and then giving you permission to both laugh at the joke and that you are committing a minor sin by laughing too soon.
I once had a nurse define the pain scale with "And 10 is the worst pain you can imagine." Ok, my pain is a 2. "Only a 2?" "Yes, I have a very good imagination."
Yes, Gene. The story about the car accident was mine. I keep forgetting to add my name at least half of the time I submit questions, or anecdotes. I never intend for anything I send to be anonymous.
Hospital story:
I was in the hospital, had my throat opearted on. A friend came to visit me, and when I pointed to the blackboard which said "Can not talk, surgery" or something like that. She either burst into tears or laughter at the thought that I couldn't open my mouth to offer something 'witty'. She ran out of the room before I could figure out which, and came back five mnutes later. If she had been a comedy writer, I could just imagine the skit she could write from it.
As the center of the humor universe (or at least the Delmarva and points west), now known as "Weingarten's Ward" --- (" I had a suppurating cyst removed, and hilarity ensued") --- it is perhaps altogether fitting and proper to reflect on the physiological benefits of laughter. We have known for some time that yukking it up induces a wide variety of benefits ranging from stress reduction, improved breathing and glucose tolerance, to providing an extra boost to the body’s immune system and increasing pain tolerance, likely because of the release of endorphins. Although we find a prescription at least as far back as the Old Testament's Book of Proverbs ("A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones..."), it was left to Norman Cousins, the long-time editor of "The Saturday Review" to raise broad awareness of it in "Anatomy of an Illness (As Perceived by the Patient)" published in (of all places) "The New England Journal of Medicine" in 1976.
Being read E.B. White and Max Eastman and shown "Candid Camera" reruns and old Marx Brothers movies while flat on his back in a New York hospital with a debilitating connective tissue disease had an anesthetic effect, he suggested, and allowed him to get two hours of pain-free sleep at a time after "... 10 minutes of genuine belly laughter..." Cousin's article and subsequent advocacy for "laughter therapy" sparked a good deal of research, some of which controversially concluded that simulated laughter worked as well, in many cases, as the real thing. Of course Cousins was the first to agree that there were limits to "whooping it up wellness." "We mustn't regard any of this as a substitute for competent medical attention," he said in an interview. "But the doctor can only do half the job. The other half is the patient's response to the illness."
About drink; in my family we have a saying: "We can hold our liquor ...but we can't let it go."
Many years ago, one of my nephews was getting married. It was a 'seat yourself' wedding at a fire station and the room was filled with dozens of long stretches of tables that seated 25 people.
When we entered the firehouse, my brother (father of the groom) and I looked at each other and smiled knowingly. He said "Taking bets on where Dad sits," our father being the first one to enter the room. I smiled and pointed over to the bar and the table right in front of it (furthest table from the entrance, furthest from the restrooms, furthest from the dance floor, hardest to get to, furthest from the buffet tables, furthest from anything related to why we were there that day), "There's our table." Without skipping a beat, our father sat directly in front of the bar, turned around in his seat, and ordered a gin and tonic. A family full of alcoholics, seated right in front of the bar.
My father once said "I don't drink water - I've seen how it rusts pipes." And it is probably true that he never drank water - I never saw him drink anything but beer, gin, and vodka. He made it to 86 and cigarettes killed him.
"Foster Johnson" is a fine example of nominative determinism (a.k.a. aptonym)!
My first mastectomy: 1985. I was 36 years old. A baseline mammogram detected malignant microcalcifications. A biopsy confirmed it. The choices were to "watch it'' or lop it off. Watch it do what, grow tentacles that would reach up and choke me to death? The choice seemed simple, even though I was young, single, and loathe to sacrifice an important erogenous zone. As I wrote a year later in the newspaper that employed me, "I went from a 34 DD to a 34 nothing in the flick of a surgeon's scalpel.'' Being an otherwise tiny person, all that bazoomage - h/t to Dave Barry - used to attract a fair amount of attention. And being part of a newsroom full of characters (read: semi-civilized whackos), I knew to expect entirely inappropriate gallows humor. The best line, IMHO, courtesy of a male photographer - and you know how they are: "Hey, waddaya gonna do with that thing, bronze it and make it into a doorstop?" Cracked up everyone in my hospital room. Well, almost everyone. Mom didn't really appreciate the joke.
Years ago, I had a lesion on my labia. The only reason why I looked is because a good girlfriend told me that she had had this experience. It was white and bubbly and obviously not normal. When I mentioned this to the doctor, she said: just because your friend has cancer doesn’t mean you do. fast forward a couple months later I moved to San Francisco went to a new doctor asked her to look at my labia and she said: I don’t know what that is, but we are going to find out. It was cancer, thankfully localized, but it had to be excised. I wish I could say that would happened next was my brilliance, but it was my friends brilliance. Her lesion was fine and needed no treatment. She asked me if I had phantom labia, oddly enough, I did. Well, she said I think you you talk to your dr about a prosthetic, I am thinking wax lips. No, I will not be identifying myself at the loser party.b
The number of dissolute, debauched, degenerate and decadent creatives (and that's just the "Ds") is legendary. The mention of several here again raises the seemingly intractable question (questions don't grow on trees, you know) of whether an author, artist or comedian owes their public anything more than their best (or at least consistent) creative effort/performance(s) --- their private lives or lives apart from that effort, being irrelevant. Is his wise and amusing prose enough for a Gene Weingarten, or must we view his wisdom and wryness (and that's just the "Ws"), through the lens of his sexual proclivities and scatological leanings (just the "Ss") ?
The message of the dead horse story, of course, is a first cousin (or step sibling) to the "greater fool" theory of economics being applied presently to things crypto and esp. NFTs. Also the House majority (even greater fools). The theory asserts that it doesn’t matter if an asset is risky, has a massively inflated price, or is worthless. All that matters is that someone else is willing to buy it from you for more than you paid. In other words, as the adage wisely points out, “You don’t have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you.”
A few weeks before the Louis CK scandal broke, I heard his album in a binge-listening session that included Amy Schumer and Margaret Cho. There was something creepy about his sexual humor, but it was nothing that I could quantify at the time. When he returned to stand-up, his martyr attitude wasn’t funny. Instead of genuine remorse or contriteness, he talked like a child who had been made to stand in the corner, like he had served his time and assumed all was forgotten or forgiven. That’s when I understood my adult daughters’ dislike of most men in modern stand-up. With exceptions like Patton Oswalt and John Mulaney, the men seem angry and arrogant. Maybe I’m spoiled since the men doing stand-up when I was younger were Steve Martin and Robin Williams and Richard Pryor.
I was in the emergency room because I thought I was having a heart attack; I could not imagine any other pain that would be worse. After 20 minutes in the ER, it started subsiding. When the doctor showed up, he asked me the pain scale question and I answered 6 - I was starting to feel ok. He looked at me and said, Nope, it's an eight. I can tell you're very stoic. They never did figure out what was wrong with me, but it was seven years ago and I'm still alive.
I always answer the idiotic pain scale question with a pain I know about—if 10 is child birth without drugs, which you didn’t plan on doing, then this is a ____. But I still don’t think that really tells them anything
Whenever I see a pictorial version of the pain scale, 10 is shown as a sad face with weeping. Shouldn’t it be shown as screaming instead?
Or #@! For reference, my mother, who has osteoporosis, swears a lot but only uses the F word when she has a has a back fracture. We don’t need to see no stinkin’ chart to know when it’s bad.
The dead horse joke doesn't sound like a joke to me, so much as a story a business school professor might tell their students during a lecture on alternative valuations or outside-the-box marketing strategies.
Maybe I'm being obtuse, but how exactly was the winner "rid of his dead horse disposal problem?"
You're not obtuse. I think it's just written poorly. My take is that the guy who bought the horse and raffled it off was trying to say either "I was rid of the dead-horse disposal problem, and HE was happy as a clam," or that by giving the "winner" his money back plus $20, the winner no longer had a problem with the horse being dead.
Thanks. I thought it was just me.
He was no longer the owner of a dead horse! No? The matter had been resolved, the horse would be returned to seller.
Joke 4 reminded me of this outstanding Paula Poundstone bit about attempting to drive without the back of the front seat: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxB2r-PMXjXtrJZyDSqRy40CZQtqHt9DV5
The too soon joke is funny. Too soon jokes are generally funny because they give you the discomfort from being too soon and then giving you permission to both laugh at the joke and that you are committing a minor sin by laughing too soon.
I once had a nurse define the pain scale with "And 10 is the worst pain you can imagine." Ok, my pain is a 2. "Only a 2?" "Yes, I have a very good imagination."