Ten Things That Make me Laugh

Hugh hefner's bucking the establishment again. No sooner does The Washington Post dub me "the Darth Vader of the Nixon Administration" than Playboy asks me to play Han Solo and tell you the kinds of things I find funny. Well, aside from the fact that I find such a request the funniest thing since they sat down to grade John Sirica's bar-exam paper, there are at least nine other things I find to laugh about in this world.

For instance, I find jargon funny. The next time you're aboard a commercial flight, listen to the stewardess as she announces, "In the unlikely event of a water landing, your seat cushion may be employed as a flotation device...."

In plain English, what the woman is saying is, "If we crash at sea, you can use your seat cushion as a float." If she were to say that, of course, half the passengers would get up and leave before take-off.

Stewardesses are a funny lot, anyway. Listen to the inflection, the emphasis, as any one of them announces:

"Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Spin-well is beginning our final descent into the Fudville area, and he has turned on the No smoking and Fasten seat belt signs and does request that you bring all seat backs...."

The clear implication is that a mass of hostile passengers have somehow challenged her statements and asserted that the captain had done no such things.

Military jargon is funny, too. As the last time I was on active duty was in 1954, I'd forgotten that. Then my son, Tom, returned from having his eyes examined and showed me the result on standard form 513. He passed. But under reason for request was typed the following: "This 19 y/o male with a history of applying for a commission in the U.S. Marine Corps as an aviator."

If that sounds to you like a complaint of illness ("This 19 y/o male with a history of hip dysplasia and deafness in one eye"), it's probably because the form had been filled out by a member of the U.S. Navy requesting a medical facility of the U.S. Air Force to examine a young man with the good sense to want to fly with the U.S. Marine Corps. What it meant to say was, "This 19-year-old male has applied for a commission in the U.S. Marine Corps as an aviator." But the military couldn't do that. We are dealing here with people for whom the verbs load and unload are impossible to understand. They have to onload and offload the aircraft.

Another thing I find funny is the press. The ladies and gentlemen of the fourth estate don't often coin new words, but their creative ability should not be underestimated. Recently, as I was checking into a hotel on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, a young lady representing The Island Packet was on hand and interviewed me. In the course of telling her what I was doing these days, I mentioned that I was the host of a soon-to-be-syndicated television interview program and gave as an example of my guests Admiral Gene La Rocque of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C. Although the young lady wrote that down, she must not have been able to read her notes when she got back to her paper. Undaunted, she just made something up, creating an officer with a name I'd never heard and, uncertain of his rank, appointed him a "general admiral"—surely a first in American military and naval history. Not to worry. When she grows up, she can join The Washington Post, make up entire stories and win the Pulitzer Prize.

The aftermath of Watergate continues to amuse me. The latest source of amusement is the report that Jeb Magruder has made a mid-life career change and has metamorphosed into a Protestant minister. Somehow, I did not find his ghostwritten autobiography on a par with The Confessions of Saint Augustine; instead of the awe inspired by the account of the striking to the ground of Saul of Tarsus by the hand of God, a chuckle is all I can manage for this mincing away from marketing. I wonder who's watching the poor box?

Sex, as some people practice it, makes me laugh. The subject came up recently when my friend the noted screenwriter Bob Dellinger had my wife, Fran, and me in tow, showing off his home town of Venice, California. As we walked along th]e waterfront, dodging microbikinied teenyboppers hurtling by on state-of-the-art roller skates like so many Exocet missiles with jammed guidance systems, Bob spotted an attractive young woman limping toward us pushing a bicycle. He hailed her and we were all introduced by our first names (surnames have been outlawed in California); the usual "How are ya?" elicited the fact that his friend was suffering from shin splints. We all commiserated and the poor woman hobbled off, leaning on her bicycle for support.

"Now, there's an interesting woman," Bob commented. "I used her case as the basis for a television script for a cop show a while ago. There's nothing like ordinary people to give you something fresh for a long-running series."

According to Dellinger, since puberty the woman had had a fantasy of making it with a uniformed policeman (preferably one assigned to motorcycle duty); upon reaching adulthood, she proceeded to act out her fantasy in spades. At the end of each episode, as her officer of the day got back into his uniform preparatory to hopping on his Harley to hit the freeway, relieved of the stresses built up in the war against crime, she would hand him his gun belt lovingly—but not without first slipping from the cartridge carrier a souvenir round of .38 special.

"By the time I met her," said Bob, "that chick had more ammunition than we left on the ground in Vietnam."

"My God," said my awe-struck wife, "no wonder the poor thing can't walk! You'd think she'd find another fantasy."

"She did," said Dellinger. "Ran out of cops. Still digs uniforms, though. Now she's into bus drivers. Waits till everyone else gets off at the end of the line, then hits on them."

"Don't tell me," said Fran. "Now she collects...."

"You got it," Bob said. "Transfers!"

"I thought," (concluded on page 237)Make me Laugh(continued from page 174) I said, "you told us you got your fresh script ideas from ordinary people."

"For Venice, California, that is ordinary people!"

I gave up.

•

Three thousand miles away, in New York City, ordinary people are more subtle. As I walked up Broadway a few days ago to visit my lecture agent, Brian Winthrop, I passed the usual streetlight poles characteristically plastered with so many posters that they serve as informal neighborhood bulletin boards. On pole after pole, down low, I saw crudely reproduced posters announcing the forthcoming meeting of an organization named Jews for Jesus. On the very next pole, down in the same position, was a poster of the same over-all design but of a contrasting background color and clearly superior reproduction. It advertised:

Goyim for Jesus

I love it.

My favorite graffito from that time was Flower Children, go pluck yourselves. But of all the figures of the Sixties, my favorite is Timothy Leary. He has a marvelous sense of humor, which makes debating him always new, always fun and always difficult, because he can say the most outrageous things and get away with it. He is dead set against smoking marijuana. Why? Not because of what it does to one's head or genes but because it does more damage to the lungs than smoking tobacco cigarettes. He counsels people who want to ingest marijuana to eat it in brownies. Now, if we could just get kids to crumble cigarettes into their school lunch instead of smoking tobacco, we could substitute gastritis for cancer, heart disease and emphysema; not ideal but, as liberals are so fond of saying of their newest regulatory schemes, it's a beginning....

The workings of the minds of the bureaucrats are a fountainhead of funny things. Certainly, someone as familiar with our own Government as I ought not to be pointing the finger, middle or otherwise, at any other government for its foibles; but I can't help noting that after my release from prison, I was permitted entry to the United Kingdom and to such present or former members of the commonwealth as Canada, Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia—and made very welcome, too, thank you. But not New Zealand. They denied me entry. At the time, I thought that because I had just emerged from a prison term longer than World War Two, they were concerned for their womenfolk. Recently, however, a horrifying thought occurred to me: Could they have been worried about their sheep?

Some of the large amount of mail I get is hilarious. I was solicited the other day for membership and a contribution to yet another nonprofit corporation. As evidence of the organization's legitimacy, included with the solicitation letter was a copy of the articles of incorporation. According to the articles, the corporation was formed for, among others, the following purposes:

I want to set up a new Organization that destroys "all" Inter-racial couples, including two people that "are not" in the same "Race" that are: just going together, sleeping together, living together and doing personal things together. (It is good to be "nice," but it is not good to be "too nice.")

Although asserting that it is within the bounds of "nice" to destroy interracial couples, the document of incorporation assures us that it is not the intent of the corporation to "spread hate." Nor is taking the law into one's own hands encouraged. The interracial couples are not to be destroyed until a law has been passed requiring their destruction.

The accompanying letter lists 38 reasons (and one postscript) for joining. The dominant grievance is interracial sex:

30. If the few black women and the few black men that are looking for white people to go to bed with "get hot in the behind," they "better find" someone in their own Race, "the Black Race" to go to bed with....

32. Black female movie stars "hang loose" for white men, and black male movie stars "hang loose" for white women.

35. "Black people," do you want to "stop" white persons from "marrying and sleeping" with your people? "Join this Organization!"

The name of the organization? Are you ready? It's the Dorothy White Company.

But I don't have to depend on travel or the mail to provide things to amuse me; I get plenty of laughs at home. Without in any way intending it, my wife is one of the funniest people I know. She suffers from what is known in her family as a Dutch tongue. In listening to her, one must pay close attention to the context of the conversation. Fran's problem arises from her use of any word or words that pop into her head and sound roughly like what she intends. She knows what she means, so you should be able to figure it out. For example, Fran thinks I look a lot younger than I am, especially in view of the life I have led. At a recent party, she intended to allude to the classic story The Picture of Dorian Gray and ended up telling a puzzled group of friends, "Gordon looks remarkably young for his age. But, of course, up there in the attic, we have a picture of the Andrea Doria."

Fran's best, however, was her praise of the toughness and courage of her 92-year-old aunt, who, at the age of 90, had undergone successful surgery for cancer of both breasts.

"She's a brave and remarkable woman," said Fran to a stunned gathering. "At the age of 90, she survived a double vasectomy!"

Top that one, Mrs. Malaprop.

"Someone so familiar with our Government ought not to be pointing the finger, middle or otherwise."