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In an interview some years ago, I was asked when I realized that on occasion I could actually make people laugh. Remarkably, I knew. It was in Sunday school. I think I was in sixth grade. I was a shy little boy and, up to that point, insanely well behaved. The story that exemplifies that level of decorum—the only story of my grade-school years in Kansas City that my daughters have ever enjoyed hearing—goes like this: In about third grade, our teacher announced on a Monday morning that there would be an extra recess period on Friday for anyone who had gone the entire week without a check mark for any sort of misbehavior or disturbance. When Friday arrived, I was the only one in the class with no check marks, so my reward was to spend an extra period on the playground all by myself—lonely, bored, and insanely well behaved.
In that Sunday-school class of my epiphany, the teacher, a rather pedantic and self-important man, was droning on about a passage in Psalms—“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” Suddenly, I found myself standing up. In a loud voice, I said, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning.” As I spoke, I extended my right hand from my body at a weird angle, dangling from a limp right arm. I finished the passage with my attempt to replicate the speech of someone whose tongue had cleaved to the roof of his mouth. The class exploded with laughter. The teacher simply exploded. I was ejected from the room.
Was I then transformed into the class clown—the kid who sneaks a whoopee cushion under the pad on the teacher’s chair and is regularly sent to the vice-principal’s office? No. For one thing, there were guardrails at home to prevent that. I’ve often mentioned that, as I interpreted my father’s aspirations for me, he wanted me to become the President of the United States and his fall-back position was that I not become a ward of the county. I’m certain that there were some callings in between that he would have considered acceptable, but none of them began with regular sessions in the vice-principal’s office.
I did, though, make some attempts at humor during my school days. For a high-school literary society, I wrote a few comic short stories, all of which, I devoutly hope, long ago disintegrated at the bottom of some landfill. In a speech to decide the presidency of the Southwest High School student council, I remember saying that more wastebaskets in the halls were needed and that I’d thought of making my campaign slogan “Get swept into office with wastebaskets in the halls.” Feeble? Yes, but it got a laugh. Also, another student and I briefly had a sort of standup act. My partner did foreign accents, the effectiveness of which was enhanced by the fact that most of the people in that audience of Kansas City high-school students had never met a foreigner. The one joke I can remember from the act was a weatherman saying, “Tomorrow will be muggy, followed by Tueggy, Weggy, Thurggy, and Frieggy.” My only defense for that one is that we didn’t make it up; we stole it from a radio disk jockey. At graduation, I wasn’t voted the Funniest Boy. That honor, as I remember, went to a classmate who acted out the records of Spike Jones and His City Slickers, a band that was to music more or less what the Harlem Globetrotters are to basketball. I was voted third Most Likely to Succeed. Third Most Likely to Succeed—now, that’s funny.
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