Good Morning and Good Luck

From the Perry Bible Fellowship, by the genius cartoonist Nicholas Gurewitch

Hello. As of this week, I am 73. It is a pedestrian birthday, representing no notable milestone except for one. It is the year of death for the average American man.

There are competing claims for this milestone — ages 72 through 75, mostly — but I chose the one cited by the Journal of the American Medical Association, the most respected medical journal in the world, an accolade with which I concur after some research: Online, as far as I can tell, JAMA appears more than any other medical journal after the words “according to.” So.

I have complicated feelings about this birthday. Perversely, it might provide unwanted pressure on me to remain productive. For example, William Shakespeare wrote his first play, “Henry VI, Part I,” when he was 77 and already dead.

But that is not my main bogus point. My main bogus point is that I am probably going to die this year, and I am making that point largely because if I turn out to be right, this column will be quoted in every single obit of mine. That would be cool.

So. Here is my one-year truncated bucket list. I am not aiming high. I am too old for that.

1. Get my dog to come when I call her. She never does. She almost never does anything I want her to do. For $28, I recently bought Lexi what I believed to be the most innovative dog toy ever invented, an engineering triumph by dog behavioral scientists that won the 2019 Pet Business Industry Recognition Award (IRA) for exciting and functional design. It does seem electronically ingenious and philosophically canine-aware. It is two balls; when the dog bites or jiggles one, the other one squeaks. The idea is that the dog will spend hours racing idiotically from one ball to the other until she exhausts herself in inane delight. In our basement, Lexi spent two minutes having no idea what to do with the squawking things, then yawned and then stuck her snoot in a pile of dirty laundry, scattering it all over the floor. That was the game she wanted.

2. Buy a new Tesla CyberTruck and then do this.

3. Find everyone in the U.S. who goes by “Geoff,” and pants them all.

4. Create, to the best of my ability, a realistic reproduction of Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” using only dried macaroni, fingernail polish and model airplane glue. Art critics will declare it genius

5. Visit places I’ve never been, such as Zurich, Barcelona and Shimiankuang, China, whose name means “Asbestos Mine.” The entire town is an asbestos mine. Here is a photo of downtown:

   

   And this is the town’s main scenic treasure:

   

6. Throw out the first pitch at a Yankees game, which would be the first time I have ever thrown a ball in a major-league ballpark, and instantly blow out my ulnar collateral ligament.

7. Finally publicly admit that I was pressured by my doofus employer to apologize for not liking Indian curry, which I still do not like. Whoa. I just crossed that one off!

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For the Gene Pool Gene Poll on the Weekend, I asked whether a racist joke — one presenting a negative stereotype about a particular ethnic group — can ever, in any circumstances, be funny. About 70 percent of you said “yes.” There was a robust discussion in the ensuing Comments. I’d like to offer my two cents, but as a Jew I know it would not be a wise expenditure since it would not earn interest, and thus would not provide an economically justifiable return on my investment.

Still, I will comment.

I would have answered “yes,” too. I think racist humor is usually mean-spirited and almost always indefensible. On borderline case there is one overriding rule: If you do not have the benefit of the doubt among your audience — if you do not know them and they do not know you, it is never okay. And yet — if they DO know you and trust you, and what you are doing is really funny, there is some leeway. The single best example of this that I can think of is this sketch, about football players’ names, by Key and Peele from early in their career. Hard to argue it is not racist. Hard to argue it is not funny. Not hard to argue that only a black comedy team could have done it without it being wildly offensive.

To me there is a gossamer, filigreed line between making fun of a race or a people, or making fun of the silly stereotype that attaches, or once attached, to those people. A classic and indelible joke that was at least initially malevolent toward Jews is “Why do Jews have big noses? Because air is free.” I don’t think that has the power to injure anymore for the simple reason that the ideas of Jews being “cheap” has disappeared. It’s a Depression-era throwback. So why is it — I would argue — still funny? Because the stereotype is funny. “Why do Jews wear those beanie hats?” “Because the little propeller would have cost extra.” Same argument. It’s a joke about a joke.

There’s a terrific example of the subtlety of this in something that happened in 2006. Don Imus lost his job at CBS Radio, and justifiably so, for making a crude and cruel joke about a women’s college basketball game between Rutgers and Tennessee. He said of the Rutgers players, “These are some rough girls. They got tattoos, some hard-core ho’s. Some nappy-headed ho’s, I’m gonna tell you that.”

It was revolting, revealing a poison in his heart — virulently racist, buying into live, raw, hurtful, untrue stereotypes.

So, no doubt there. Don Imus needed to lose his job.

Not long afterwards, my friend Peter Sagal, host of NPR’s comedy improv quiz show “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me…” was mentioning the recent death of Don Ho, the Hawaiian crooner. Someone noted that Ho had had dozens of sons and daughters and grandchildren and great grandchildren. Sagal is too sharp to miss a chance at something like that. An improv pro, he brilliantly said, on the air:

"You know, when all those babies were in diapers, that means dozens of nappy-bottomed Hos."

He took some shit from the live audience and, I think privately from some network brass. They were wrong. There was nothing remotely racist about that joke — it was innocently harnessing a recent controversy into a harmless pun, and doing it perfectly.

The most interesting case study in where this can go is the British-Irish comic Jimmy Carr. Everything he does is deliberately tasteless, to the point where you can argue he earns a pass. He is indiscriminately horrible, and by that, I believe — YOU MIGHT NOT AGREE, AND YOU WOULD NOT NECESSARILY BE WRONG — he earns some valuable doubt-benefit.

Carr has uttered the following, which is joke number one:

“They say that there is safety in numbers. Trying telling that to six million Jews.”

I don’t find that offensive. It is not belittling the memory of six million dead. You may disagree.

He also said this, which is joke number two: “It is awful that Hitler killed six million Jewish people. But one thing they never tell you is that he also killed one million Gypsies. They never tell you the positive things.”

I know, you are shocked. That is the idea. I am absolutely certain that if Hitler had instead killed one million Serbs, Jimmy would have happily used them as the butt of the joke. I believe he doesn’t hate the Romani, and he doesn’t hate Serbs. He’s an all-purpose asshole, and funny.

And now, today’s two Gene Pool Gene Polls.

And:

Special added feature: Here is a best-of Jimmy Carr horrific and tasteless statements. Don’t watch it.

And now! Another question of taste. I direct your attention to this commercial from a quarter century ago. ALERT: You do need sound, but DO NOT PLAY THIS ALOUD AT WORK.

Second major item: I note a few days ago that in the Big Debate, Kamala Harris almost never said “um” or “uh.” I implied that she was something of a Superwoman in this regard. Well. Here is a 22-second clip during her interview with 60 Minutes where she says it three times. “And, um.” Thrice. She was talking about her ownership of a Glock. I do not know what to make of it.

Okay, that’s it. Now we enter the Real Time portion of The Gene Pool, where you ask questions and make observations, and I answer them in Real Time. Today’s questions (so far) are in part influenced by my call, on the weekend, for your stories about times you felt you were going to die … and obviously, were wrong.

PLEASE send your Observations and Questions right here. They will be dealt with with alacrity and gusto, a promise employing an amazing sentence that uses the expression “with with.”

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Also, please take a moment to pity your poor hosts. We try to scrape by in what passes for our “lives” through the continuing kindness of strangers. Not that you are strangers, exactly. Many if not most of you are persons we have never met, though we feel we somehow know you, and know the naive goodness in your hearts. You are persons with real jobs and real incomes who deceive yourselves into thinking our fate — wretched street mendicants — will never befall you. Out of respect for you, we would do nothing to disabuse you of these notions. We will, however ask you to find it in those weeping, financially successful hearts to come up with $50 a year — $4.15 a month, 22 cents a day, barely more than a ha’penny an hour — to fund us a bit. You do it here:

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Q: Many many (many) years ago when I was on my year abroad in Paris I stupidly agreed to hitchhike to Florence with a French friend I hadn't known for very long. What quickly became apparent was that she was a genuine nymphomaniac, something I'd thought was a mythological creature invented by patriarchy, but Ninon was the real article. She came on to every single man who picked us up, which was instructive as well as horrifying, because I was surprised to discover that French and Italian men almost all seemed to resent being sexually pursued in Ninon's aggressive and unsubtle manner.

She also couldn't hold her liquor and got us briefly arrested at the Swiss border when she called the border guard a fascist after having drunk a glass or two of local wine. After a few hours they released us because Ninon was too annoying (and also because we hadn't actually done anything illegal).

Eventually, just as we arrived at our destination, Ninon got lucky. Over my objections we ended up in an apartment on the outskirts of Florence with a young student with a Fiat 400, the last guy to pick us up. It was unclear whose apartment this was, and I sat in the living room playing "A Horse With No Name" loudly on the record player to drown out the sounds emanating from the bedroom. Afterwards I asked him to take us to where we were staying, saying that if he didn't take us there I would just leave and find my own way. He said: No! don't do that! There's a murderer on the loose! And then he pulled out a sheaf of press clippings about a serial killer who had been killing young women in the area, and he also pulled out a very large knife which he unsheathed, to show me that the situation was serious. Meanwhile Ninon was lounging dreamily. I looked at the knife and thought: what a strange way to die. I was sure that this was The Guy, and that I was about to meet an exotic and ridiculous death. But then he got dressed and took us back to where we were staying, and at the end of the week we hitchhiked back to Paris, and I never found a way to tell this story so as to truly convey how close I'd felt to an untimely and stupid death.  

A: Thank you. My initial thought was to reject this story as a fabrication — the facts were simply too juicy and melodramatic and camera-ready — but then I showed it to two women of my acquaintance who believed it, and gave me good, solid reasons to believe it, too. So, there you go.

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TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this on an email: Just click on the headline in the email and it will deliver you to the full column online. Keep refreshing the screen to see the new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post.

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Q: "Create, to the best of my ability, a realistic reproduction of Botticelli’s 'The Birth of Venus,' using only dried macaroni, fingernail polish and model airplane glue." Wait...you're from NYC and you never went to summer day camp? I did that when I was eight.

A: THEY HAD YOU DOING BOTTICELLI?

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Q: Not an anecdote on your requested topics but a reflection on life in Florida. Having just been clipped by Helene (the real damage started about 15-20 miles east of me) and watching in horror as Milton approaches the Tampa Bay-Sarasota coastal area, it's worth remembering that our Republican Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this year prepared Floridians for these catastrophes by passing a bill removing the words "climate change" from state laws. So as a record hot Gulf of Mexico caused by man-made pollution generates yet another top-level swirling cataclysm that will bring death and destruction to the state, how much storm surge, blasting winds, and flooding rains did this wall of ignorance hold back?

A: Thirteen phlogistons’ worth. That is a term I use for disasters caused by idiocies.

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Q: I was a goner.  I went into the hospital with mild symptoms of a heart attack.  The next morning, in my hospital room, I went into cardiac arrest. (True….3 times).  While “dead”, I remember walking down a long hallway toward a light.  There was a little old man at a desk.  St. Peter??  He had me follow him further down the hallway.  We passed an enormous room with lots of people partying.  I asked Peter what that was, as we walked on.  He answered, “that’s the Catholics; we don’t want them to know that there is anyone else up here”.  Then I woke up again in the ICU, with very sore ribs from being zapped back 3 times.

A: I have your name but will not use it.   It is POSSIBLE you are telling the truth, but this is an ancient, moldy desiccated joke.  I probably first heard it when I was 15. 

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Q: It’s 1980.   Two callow college boys are driving from Massachusetts to Colorado for the summer to make their fortunes doing construction work.   We’re dropping a third kid off in Chicago to catch a bus home to Minnesota.   We arrive in Chicago at 3am.   We miss our exit and take the next one.   Suddenly every building on the block is a seedy bar with letters missing in the neon sign.   Or a homespun storefront church of unfamiliar denomination.   

Shit, we are lost in the wrong place at the wrong time.   At a red light. 

A beat-up Chevy pulls up next to us.  Two menacing-looking guys visible through the window.  Which is rolling down, ever so slowly.  A hand, with something shiny in it, flashes out the window….

 It’s a badge.   “You boys lost?,” asks the undercover cop.   

Armed with directions to the bus station, we breathe in once again.

— Mark Raffman, Reston VA

A: Nice, Raffo.   Well told.   Well paced.  Advice: Don’t write a story in the present tense if it happened in the past. It always looks pretentious.  Professional writers do it a lot, and it bothers me.  I used to do it too.  We all do it. It BOTHERS me.

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IMPORTANT BREAKING HEADLINE! TRUMP IS HITLER AND GOEBBELS ROLLED INTO ONE FAT GUY!

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-suggests-immigrants-bad-genes-latest-disparagement-migrants-rcna174271

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Q: Was Blazing Saddles the funniest movie ever, even with all the racist jokes? I'd say it is mostly because it pointed out the stupidity of the white townsfolk, just the simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons. Tom Logan - Sterling, VA

A: IT IS not the funniest. Dr. Strangelove is the funniest. But it is very funny; the racist jokes help.

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Q: My question is about Barney and Clyde, as far as I can tell there was no strip on Sunday the 6th, and I was just wondering why.

A: It’s weird. It is on Arcamax, but Not GoComics. Here it is:

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Q: In 1967 - ‘68, I was an infantry draftee in VietNam.  I was convinced that I would never see the States again when I learned of my assignment, but that was a general sense.  The following is a specific occurrence that convinced me that my death might be imminent.

Out in the field our latrines comprised 55 gallon drums that had been cut across their diameters, with plywood sheets across their open tops.  The sheets had large holes in them, to serve as toilet seats.  The privy that I was using on this occasion overlooked a grassy area, with a large crater formed by a blockbuster bomb beyond that, to enhance the scenery.  As I was sitting there minding my own business, a large snake - five feet or so in length - crossed my view about ten or twelve feet away.  It was a nondescript color, a sort of gunmetal gray with a slight coppery tint and no other markings.  It slithered speedily away, with nary a glance toward me.

The one that really caused me to finish up in a hurry was the second snake that followed the first.  The second one stopped, raised its head toward me, and stared at me for several seconds before continuing along the path of the first snake.  At that moment I had no idea what species  they were, but I later asked an old hand what they might have been.  He replied, “Oh, you saw a couple of cobras.”

I’m not sure if our medics had any cobra antivenin or not, but in all the grim scenarios that went through my mind when I found that I was going to be sent to Vietnam as an infantryman, dying from a cobra bite was not among them.

—-Jack M.—

A: Also good.   Super irony.   I once went to Jerusalem for a story about the Fear of Terrorism, in which I had to ride a city bus during an intifada.  Waiting to be vaporized by a suicide bomber. That went fine.   But I almost died in my rental car when I had to swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid hitting a guy on a bike with his kid strapped behind him.

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Q:  Here is my almost-taken-by-a-scam story:

My 18yo son and I traveled outside of Philly last spring for him to play in a golf tournament. We checked into a major hotel chain around 11pm, pretty quiet, no one there as I checked in. Front desk woman (we'll call her "Mia") was young-ish, very nice and capable, made small talk such as what brought me there, etc. I went to get my son (who is in the car) and we brought our  stuff in; as we dd we meet the only other patrons, two young men who got into the elevator with us. I notice one was a stereotypical punk-ish looking (parts of hair bleach blond, lots of earrings, etc.). 

Suddenly it was 4:00 am or so and I got a phone call on the room phone from the front desk. Groggily, I asked who it is, name didn;t sound like "Mia," so I asked again, and she said Mia (so hey, maybe I misheard the first time b/c my brain was totally not working). Apparently Mia is getting off and she forgot to ask me for my credit card for incidentals, and this is standard procedure to have this. As my brain tried to process this (WHAT? WHY NOW? IT CAN'T WAIT??!!) she reminded me who she is, remember, I met you when you checked in, you and your son are there for a golf tournament, etc. So I ignored the small peal of bells going off in my head and gave her my number and gladly got back to sleep. In the morning, though, I was so put off by the unclean room and this call that we leave and get a new place to stay. As I left the parking lot, I saw one of the young punks right there on the curb by my car, talking on the phone - he saw me and raised his hand to say hi. Yeah, bye!

Later that evening I checked my email from my new place and ALERT my bank was trying to contact me. I call and WHAT! DING-DING-DING I find out my account has been compromised. Apparently there is a trail of the would-be scammers going to Dunkins in the morning, Olive Garden for dinner, a bus ticket, and more. Of course, I immediately canceled the card and contacted the police. Next morning I went back to the hotel, spoke to manager--and 100% it was not Mia who made the call. The trooper was hot on their trail, went to Olive Garden, and hey!-the hostess clearly remembered the young punks, just like I had (they picked up an order out). Together, we traced them all the way to an alcohol-abuse house in Pittsburgh, but there the trail - like everything else seems to do in that part of the state- went cold. Apparently, we found that there is a network of scammers who come in from another city, do their work, and go back...and clearly they have staff people FROM THE HOTEL in on the racket. Airbnb, anyone??

A: Thank you.  I went through and changed all of your present tenses to past so I didn’t have to berate you, too.

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Q: I am moderately well known within my little circles for being the guy who courts death through inattention on a fairly regular basis. At least, I used to do that -- it occurred to me that death was getting more likely in each incident, so I had better wise up.

One time, I went back-country hiking in Hawaii, in Volcanoes National Park, with the plan of hiking 5 miles through lava rock and desert to a campsite, spend the night, and hike five miles back to the car. Not hard. You are instructed to carry a gallon of water per day, or tablets to purify water from rainwater catchment tanks at the campsites. Two gallons? That's a lot of water, and I didn't have the bottles for it. But clearly they meant someone less mighty than myself. Half a gallon should be fine…

I hiked to my intended campsite by the shore, then because I felt so good, I hiked another mile and a half to another site that seemed like it would be prettier (it was). I drank only half a quart of water. I was doing great!

The next morning, I swam for a bit, then hiked back to the original site... during which I drank all the rest of my water. And then I reckoned with the fact that the preceding day's five mile hike was so easy because it had been all downhill, and I had to climb 1000' elevation to get back to my car. I was able to climb maybe 100 feet before I realized I had no hope. Furthermore, the trail was so obscure and well hidden that I could get within 100 yards of my car, expire there from exhaustion, and it might be weeks before anyone would notice me. And further furthermore, I was already dreadfully thirsty. I could see I was going to die, and I was going to die stupidly.

I filled my bottles with the rainwater. Turns out, drinking the water downwind from an active volcano is probably okay, so far as bacteria are concerned. That's because of all the sulfuric acid in the water, which I burped as H2S, the chemical that gives rotten eggs their lovely smell.

I then set out hiking 6 miles horizontal over desert and black lava, to reach a place where I had been told there were people assigned by the Park Service to watch for nesting hawksbill turtles. I knew because I was told by people watching for nesting hawksbill turtles at the place where I had camped the night before. They had offered me water that morning, which I stupidly turned down because I did not want the extra weight to carry.

Obviously, I lived, wondering the whole way if I were strong enough to make it. The turtle guys gave me water and radioed the Park Service to tell them where and I when I would hit the road, if I made it, because there were another 5 or 6 miles from them to the road. Not once did they use the word "idiot". Very nice of them.

I felt better over the remaining miles -- at least if I didn't make it on foot, someone would know to come get me. It's fun hiking on black lava. Some lava forms fracture into sharp knife edges, which slice open the side of cheap hiking boots, like mine, just by pressing against them. You do not want to trip and fall on it, ever. I also had the fun of hovering my butt over a crack in the rock, rimmed by knife-edge rock, to make a fecal offering to Pele.

The thing is, there is no record of Pele wanting anyone's feces. I hope she isn't mad about that. But I really had to go.  — Tim Livengood

A: In my opinion, Tim Livengood, you aint Livin’ Good.

Please note that Pele is a Hawaiian god of fire, not the guy with the bicycle kick.

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Q: One night I was suddenly awake, and could not breathe. Total blockage. Some instinct made me stand up, and after a few moments of terror the blockage slowly cleared -- a trickle of air, then a little more, and finally semi-normal breath (tasting of acid). But for the first 10-20 seconds, I was thinking "You have one lungful of air left, then you die." Doc said it was related to acid reflux, and I should stop eating leftover pepperoni pizza just before bedtime.

A: Wow. I once woke up momentarily blind. Then I realized it was 2 am, and I was staying in a closed room without a window.

Q:  Not sure if this meets your requirement as death was only a possibility.

In a car race, entering a turn at about 80 mph when the rear axle broke and the stub dug into the track throwing the car's side up into the air.  Thought sure it would flip over (and at that speed, multiple times) but fortunately it landed back on its remaining wheels and spun to a halt.  (Yes there was a roll bar, I had a helmet and a 5 point harness but when cars flip, you never know what will happen.)  Corner worker came running over and said "wow, that was a three roller!"  I said "I didn't think it rolled over."  He said, "no, that's how many rolls of toilet paper we thought we'd need to clean out the seat." – Robert Rosen

A: Okay, that made me laff.

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So here I am, and I am calling us down. Please continue to send in questions and observations so I can make fun of you. Self-dep is the most appreciated part of humor. Send them here:

See you on Thursday, when we deliver the Invitational, featuring at least one highly celebrated entry involving constipation.