Not Just Another Dick Joke
I like Bob. I mean, I like the name. Bob.
And I like Dick. I mean, the name, Dick.
Dick Cheney,
Dick Clark,
Dick Van Dyke,
Dick Cavett,
Dick Gregory,
“Tricky” Dick Nixon,
Dick Head.
It could have been worse.
Thankfully, the Lord stepped in and writ,
“Thou shalt not take the given name Prick.”
Fatigued, but pleased,
the Lord napped,
but while he slept,
a family named Prick was born.
Today, the Prick family name
stands proud in the USA, UK, Canada, and Scotland.
Look it up!
We’ve only scratched the surface of
the Prick family name, so let’s move on to
the core of this exercise…
what constitutes comedy?
There’s no comedy in anything I’ve said,
just jokes.
Jokes are what you find in joke books.
And then there are comedy jokes, writes New York Magazine comedy critic Jesse David Fox. He explains that comedy jokes are bits, stories, ideas, images, moods, themes, words, basically anything that does the thing that comedy is supposed to do.
Steve Harvey, talking to Jerry Seinfeld, said, “Tragedy strikes. I got news for you. We have the jokes that night.”
But, what, exactly, is comedy supposed to do?
James Parker, writing for The Atlantic Magazine, says, “Comedy goes where the pain is — yours, mine, the comedian’s, the world’s — straight to it, because that’s where the laughs are; because the laughs are pain, transmuted. Simple as that. Comedy has no responsibility. It never will. And we need it like air.”
My AI assistant tells me that, in August 2012, Tig Notaro performed a now-famous stand-up comedy set at Largo, a club in Los Angeles, where she revealed her breast cancer diagnosis. What made this set remarkable was that she received the news just the day before, making her performance raw and emotionally powerful. The opening line of her set, “Good evening, hello, I have cancer,” immediately grabbed the audience’s attention and showcased her ability to find humor in even the darkest moments. This set was later released as an album titled “Live”. You can find it on YouTube. Highly recommended.
I’ll close with a story I overheard a boy tell his friends the day after we got our report cards. “When I showed my dad my report card, he looked at me and said, You’re not my son anymore. “Well, can I be your daughter?”
