Day Nineteen #2
“We’re college students, Mr. Doctor.” A handsome kid with enormous headphones spoke loudly, making it clear he was also listening to music.
He looked not unlike Jesse’s old college roommate, who was Black and Japanese, and Jesse made a mental note to ask his new student his heritage, as there might be some cultural humor to mine.
As it was, the kid made a show of stuffing his long legs under his small desk, which made several of his classmates laugh.
In fact, he probably rivaled Jesse in height even if the kid was much leaner.
“Call of Duty, then,” Jesse said, matching his volume and gesturing for him to lose the cans.
This seemed to satisfy Headphones, who gave two enthusiastic thumbs up before sliding his headphones back until they were resting around his neck, revealing two black gauges where earrings might be. “Hold up. Did you call me Mr. Doctor?”
“You underlined the d and the R in your name.”
Jesse turned around and looked at the way he had written del Ruth on the blackboard. He had underlined those letters.
“I thought it was because you were overcompensating. You know, for not having a PhD.” If Headphones weren’t already Headphones in Jesse’s mind, he would have absolutely been Freud.
“I could have a PhD.”
“Do you have a PhD?” Headphones asked skeptically.
“Go fish.” Jesse bowed his head and chuckled, still annoyed at COD. “FYI, I have an MFA from UCLA, and I hope that will be A-OK and we can be BFFs. Otherwise, TTFN.”
Headphones sat up in his chair like this new professor might just have something worthwhile to say after all; he was wearing a sleeveless Def Leppard shirt, which was either ironic or belonged to his parents, who were most likely Jesse’s exact age.
Jesse took inventory of his students; only one could be considered nontraditional, old enough to actually wear an eighties band tee.
He was graying in his beard and carried a briefcase, looking not unlike one of the accountants they drag onstage at the Oscars.
Jesse slipped his glasses on and took a second look at his eager students, then at their names on the roster.
He was never good with remembering names, so they became Backpack, Headphones, Non-Trad, Snickers, Mountain Dew, and Unicorn.
Doling out nicknames was a first-day-of-class tradition, and he always picked one Unicorn, who was recognizable right up front.
The student who was not only there to learn but had the talent to go all the way.
Only once was he ever wrong. This year’s Unicorn had a mane of blue hair coupled with a Don’t fuck with me expression that dared anyone to joke about it, and no one, at least in this classroom, did; she sat apart from the group, leaving at least one empty desk on all sides.
She (or they, kids today were fluid with pronouns) wore a Once Upon a Mattress T-shirt, and while it was from the more recent Broadway revival, the original production had been a launching pad for Carol Burnett. Not bad for a comedic pedigree.
“You all have the same books on your desk,” Jesse observed. “Are you in some sort of cult?” Unicorn was the only one whose desk was clear.
“It was the suggested reading, Mr. Doctor,” Non-Trad explained, and his copy looked well-thumbed. Non-trads were rule followers, always.
“Okay, you can just call me Jesse.” The familiarity of nicknames, he felt, should be a one-way street. “All of you, I mean. Not just Non-Trad.”
Jesse wet his thumb and tried to erase the underlining of his name on the chalkboard, then swiped a book from the desk closest to him, nearly knocking Snickers’s (you guessed it) chocolate bar onto the floor.
Snickers, the varsity jock in this Breakfast Club, grabbed it just in time; upon closer inspection, it may have been a protein bar.
The book was How to Be Funny in Eight Steps by a man named—Jesse squinted and looked twice—Peter Killjoy.
“Suggested reading,” he scowled. “Suggested by whom?”
“Ms. Flores,” Mountain Dew replied before opening a two-liter bottle of what looked like radioactive waste, which hissed when she unscrewed the cap.
She poured herself a tall glass in a cup from Pizza Hut.
Her hair had a similar yellow-green tint, as if PepsiCo had opened their factory to misbehaved children Willy Wonka–style and she had ingested too much of the swill (You’re turning violet, Violet!), although it was much more likely she was a swimmer who’d spent too many hours in a chlorinated pool.
When she caught Jesse staring in disbelief, she inched the plastic soda bottle toward him. “I’m sorry, did you want some?”
“Do I want Mountain Dew in the morning?” Jesse asked incredulously.
She shrugged, unfazed. “It’s ten o’clock somewhere.”
“No, thank you,” he declined politely, smiling. Mountain Dew might actually be funny. “I had too much Fanta at breakfast.”
Focusing, Jesse flipped through the book in his hand.
It fell open to Rule 6: Contradiction. Finally, he understood this morning’s interaction with Luisa Flores.
He would be having words with his department chair; there was only room for one of them to teach this class.
(Technically, in this room, a veritable clown car of adjuncts could drive through the center aisle, but that was not the point.) It was all he could do not to rip chapter six out in frustration; it worked for Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, after all.
Up until one of his students shot himself and Williams was ultimately dismissed.
Jesse didn’t want to incite anything like that—he already had one person’s fate to answer for.
So instead, he threw the book back on Snickers’s desk; it landed with a thwap on the wooden surface.
“Okay. Well, I suggest you don’t read this book, unless you want to fail.
” Jesse guessed he could name at least half of these so-called rules as he watched his students tuck their books back in their backpacks and briefcases and, in the case of Headphones, score a three-point shot right in the trash.
Say no when you mean yes. Inventing numbers (eleventy) or exaggerating them for comedic effect (“What are you, a thousand years old?”).
Employing the Rule of Threes. “The problem with these books is that they are written by painfully unfunny people with no comedic pedigree but with lots of time on their hands.”
“Those who can’t do, teach,” Headphones helpfully observed.
“Exactly,” Jesse said before realizing that did not sit quite right. “Wait a minute, no. I’m teaching.”
“But not with a PhD.” Headphones crossed his arms, pleased with himself.
Jesse smirked, impressed. “Good job. In comedy, that’s known as a callback.” Headphones was clearly tickled. He’d stumbled into a subject where being a smartass might be an asset.
“What is your pedigree?” Mountain Dew asked.
Jesse was going to have to institute a policy of raising hands.
“I’m sorry. Was that rude? I haven’t had my Mountain Dew yet this morning.
” She said it as if Mountain Dew were as common and acceptable as coffee and everyone had at least four gallons before lunch. (Exaggeration.)
“My pedigree? Belgian sheepdog.” As a joke, it bombed. His students shifted uncomfortably in their seats. He should have backed out of the semester as soon as Norman disappeared and took Jesse’s ability to be funny with him. “My pedigree is that I was hired to teach this class.”
Non-Trad looked at his watch, the old-fashioned kind that didn’t keep track of his steps. “He wrote a novel. He won the Mark Twain Prize.”
“Thank you. It was not the Mark Twain Prize, but another prize named after a different humorist. But that’s beside the point.”
“What is the point?” asked Headphones, but not in a malicious way.
“The point is, I’m being serious.”
“About the Bolivian—” Backpack began.
“Belgian.”
“Belgian dog? I thought you were joking,” Backpack said.
Jessie hid his face in his hands. “I’m being serious about the types of people who write these books. I am joking about being a dog.”
“I guess you really can’t teach someone to be funny,” Mountain Dew said under her breath before downing half her glass. It was the first real laugh from the class.
Jesse plucked Headphone’s discarded book from the trash and read from the author’s note on the back cover to make his point, before losing control of the class irrevocably; a lot was always riding on first days.
“I watched one thousand hours of talk show appearances and here’s what makes an audience laugh.
” This, he knew, was no exaggeration, and was pretty par for the course.
“These books can’t tell you what makes an audience laugh; every audience is different.
And anything can be funny. Someone tripping and falling can be funny.
A man getting dumped can be funny.” Jesse caught a lump in his throat.
“But humor is not just what’s funny, in this case on the page.
Humor is a tool. What’s important is how you employ it.
What you use it to say.” For the first time he held their attention.
“Books like these are for weak-minded people. People who don’t observe the world they are living in, they just amalgamate other people’s observations.
Or they’re thinly disguised self-help screeds disguised as humorous insight, the type of thing you used to find in Reader’s Digest.” Reader’s Digest was an outdated reference, and went over as such.
Nowadays, this kind of dreck populated online posts people wrote behind screen names like LOLlypop, Shaquille Oatmeal, or SunnySideUp, if these users were even real and not bots engagement farming for clout or for money, or posts under subreddits like r/standup, r/socialskills, r/publicspeaking, or r/DecidingToBeBetter.
r/YouKiddingMe, Jesse always wanted to scream.
Snickers raised his meaty hand. “You wrote a book that won an award?”
“I did,” Jesse sighed. And then quickly added, “For humor,” staving off the inevitable follow-up questions, and sure enough—three hands in the process of being raised were lowered.
His second novel had won the prestigious award in humor writing nine years back, much to both his and Norman’s shock (although Norman was a little too shocked for Jesse’s liking, if he were being honest); winning had been a double-edged sword.
Before he was handed the award, Jesse would have said books that win literary prizes were bland consensus picks.
True genius was always divisive, sure to alienate a judge or two.
Winners did not offend. Then he won and changed his tune—cream absolutely rises to the top!
The award had opened several doors, figuratively and literally, as he was newly a welcome guest at parties on the rare occasions they visited New York, hosted by literati or cartoonists from the New Yorker.
And it had given Jesse the authority to teach others the subject, something he found wryly funny given the adage.
But winning had deadened the humor in his own work, as if he’d used up his allotted jokes for this lifetime in his prizewinner and was now stuck, humorless (and therefore naked) in a world that felt increasingly, sometimes violently, unfunny.
And now his husband had gone, for lack of a better term, missing, and he didn’t feel like anything would ever be funny again.
“Well, that’s cool,” Snickers added, breaking his train of thought.
It was cool. They had flown to an award banquet in New York, where, during the cocktail reception beforehand, the other nominees kept coming up to Jesse to tell him how much they loved Norman.
Norman, as it turned out, had had one too many Tanqueray martinis and was telling everyone else they were going to win; he had boundless optimism for everyone except, it seemed, his husband, who received no such assurance.
Jesse, on the other hand, was greeted by people commenting on his tuxedo, a suit that was perhaps not his usual style, but something that made him feel quite sophisticated until the ninth or tenth person approached him to say, “I wish I could wear something like that” and he realized from a tilt of the head or a twist of the lips that it wasn’t meant as a compliment.
In truth, had Norman abandoned him a long time ago?
It gave him an idea.
“Your first assignment. I want you to write a short story about a time you felt abandoned.”
“Abandoned?” Backpack asked, nearly knocking her bag off her desk. “That doesn’t sound funny.”
“I know. It doesn’t sound funny at all. But that’s where you come in!
Look at something not funny in a humorous way.
Find something absurd. Something ridiculous.
Something over-the-top. Or go small. Find something funny about the tiniest detail for your character to obsess over when their world is falling apart.
I don’t know. I’m not here to do the hard work for you.
” He had sudden empathy for his students, who looked frightened to be left to their own devices.
“But. I will do it with you. And we’ll all share our stories next week and see if we can’t find a laugh. ”
In the spirit of looking at things in a new way, Jesse tucked the textbook by Peter Killjoy into his messenger bag.
He then said a silent prayer that this ragtag group he was assigned would come through.
He looked at Unicorn and sent her a thought telepathically: I’m counting on you.
He couldn’t teach a class to be funny, but he hoped to god they already were.
His husband was missing. He desperately needed a laugh.