A Humorous Interlude

Come on, admit it, you are ready for a little humor. I promise it won’t take long. And it is relevant to what I have recently written.

I tried and tried to be a great composer. But it was frustrating, because I learned just enough about music to recognize how great the Great Composers were (are?) and how I would never match them. If I had worked on composition all my life, I might have been the late twentieth century equivalent of Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. Never heard of him? That’s my point.

I recently wrote an essay (August 9) about genius. Humor is a kind of genius. One kind of comedic genius I envy is stand-up comedy. You have to come up with something really funny, with essentially no time for preparation.

Here are a couple of examples of great ripostes that I could have made, but didn’t think of them until it was too late.

I was an incoming freshman at Santa Barbara in 1975, which was, I think, very early in the Anthropocene Epoch. Departments with low enrollments recruited students by having tours during orientation week. I visited the geography department. While I was there, a student (I hope not a graduate student) was practicing his presentation in front of a paper map. When he saw us clueless freshmen walk past, he turned to us, and pointed to the map. “This is a map.”

If I’d been a comedic genius, I might have said, “Oh, really? Is that what they teach you here? Wow, maybe if I’m a geography major I will be as smart as you someday.” But, of course, I didn’t think of this response until decades later.

I was teaching a university botany lab one time about ten years ago. I had the students taste different foods that they, in their rural Oklahoma dietetic narrowness, had probably never tasted. One of them was seaweed. One student in the class clearly considered himself too good to be in the class. He should have dropped it and taken something more interesting to him, like a correspondence course in shit-kicking. He swaggered in, a half hour late, with a smirk on his face. The others had tasted the seaweed. I had him taste it, too.

"Tastes like shit," he said to the silent class.

If I'd been a comedic genius, I might have said, “How do you know?” But of course I didn’t think of it until long afterwards.

Genius requires a lot of neural connections. I have a lot of them. But they have to work fast also. They have to work like monkeys jumping around. Mine sometimes work more like naked mole rats, bringing up a brilliant insight from deep underground just before it decomposes.