“What’s to say? If you’re waiting for David Sedaris to fuck up and just not be entertaining, prepare to be disappointed.
If you’ve never read him before, you really need to get on it. I know that he’s sort associated with this precious, NPR style of storytelling, but you just have to trust me when I tell you that I can’t stand a lot of that stuff and still found myself laughing my ass off reading this last night.
There’s not much else to say about this book, although I am comfortable saying that when it comes to humor, we are so quick to excuse people. We’re so quick to say, “It’s just a matter of opinion.” Well, I’m here to tell you that’s not really true. Some things are funny and some aren’t.
I think we have a good idea about an enriched versus a surface experience when it comes to other emotions. Think about fear. There’s a difference between someone jumping out when you’re not expecting it and someone producing a horror movie that has you up all goddamn night wondering how quietly you might be able to nail boards over the windows. There’s a difference between crying because something is truly sad and because a cartoon lion dies and triggers something. Look, I know that when I start getting misty-eyed watching Rocky Balboa, that’s not the same thing as attending a funeral. Some tears are shed in both cases, but some are more rich and meaningful.
Comedy is the same way. David Sedaris writes what I consider very rich comedy. It’s not as simple as a setup and a punchline. It does a lot more than that, and that’s why I recommend his books all the time.
Okay, with that out of the way, there was one other part of this book that brought a piece of the past rushing back to me. Just before the start of the book there’s a brief author’s note. It goes like this:
Over the years I’ve met quite a few teenagers who participate in what is called “Forensics.” It’s basically a cross between speech and debate. Students take published short stories and essays, edit them down to a predetermined length, and recite them competitively. To that end, as part of the “Etc.” in this book’s subtitle, I have written six brief monologues that young people might deliver before a panel of judges. I believe these stories should be self-evident. They’re the pieces in which I am a woman, a father, and a sixteen-year-old girl with a fake British accent.
Ah, indeed. Indeed there is a thing called forensics. I know it all too well.
I don’t remember exactly how I ended up in the class. It must have been one of those things that other kids were doing, which has always been more than enough reason for me to do something as well. That thing parents say about your friends jumping off a cliff? That’s dumb. Because no, I wouldn’t jump to my doom if my friends did it. The reason I did the stuff my friends did was because some of them had girlfriends, and some of them had even gotten handjobs from these girlfriends. You can’t get a handjob when you’re dead, so cliff jumps were out of the question. HOWEVER, if my friend jumped off someone’s roof and into their swimming pool, and if this friend had gotten a handjob before, the only scientific way to make sure I would someday get a handjob was to try anything and everything he had done. So: cliff? No. Roof? Yes. Forensics? Apparently.
At our school the class was a weird hybrid of a class and an activity.
The class part was just about like any other class with the notable exception of our teacher, who we will call Ms. Hanson because that was her name. She didn’t really earn the respect of a fake name here, although I do have slight concerns of her being a murder these days, based on her behavior with kids of about 14. But she may be beyond the point of even having memories or eyeballs at this point.
She was famous for throwing temper tantrums, throwing a chair or a clipboard across the room because someone hadn’t done homework or said something disrespectful. She was infamous for announcing to our entire class that she was pregnant and then going into detail about the pregnancy being the result not of intercourse, per se, but of her significant other masturbating ON her and one of his gametes finding its way to hers.
With her at the helm, we would meet for class and then, much like the track team, we’d load up on a bus early on a Saturday and be driven off to some other school that was like the bizarro version of our own. They had amateurish mascot murals on their walls too, but theirs was a bulldog instead of a wildcat.
Upon arriving at the school, you were essentially turned loose. You’d find out when you had to perform, a couple sessions which would kill a total of about 90 minutes of the entire day, and then spend the other 10 hours screwing around.
There’s this sort of rumor, an idea swirling around that kids who are in plays and marching band are all just fucking each other like crazy. They don’t mix in with the more popular kids and instead just go at each other because why the hell not. I’m not here to say whether or not that’s true. It’s not really true for me, honestly. But it did seem like there was an awful lot of making out, switching between girlfriends, all that weird stuff. But fuck me, you had all of Saturday to do nothing else, really, and you were wearing a tie.
And I WILL say, one advantage of forensics over sports was its co-ed nature. Boys and girls on the same bus, spending the entire day wandering a school with a very low level of supervision.
I wasn’t exactly poised to be the ladykiller that could really take advantage of something like this. I had a friend who had better luck, and one young lady of the…burly persuasion was so taken with him that she bodychecked me out of the way so she could sit next to him on the bus ride home. As for me, I can remember one time going to a tournament where I thought a girl might, MIGHT, like me, and then I realized I hadn’t put on any deodorant before leaving the house and spent most of the day in the bathroom washing my armpits and trying to use the ubiquitous pink liquid soap from school bathrooms to create a sort of crusty shield between my armpit and the outside world. I don’t think this advice is necessary, but I will strongly advise against this tactic. You end up smelling like a sweaty elementary school janitor.
The acting and debating part of forensics was completely ridiculous. You’d sit in a classroom and watch teens pretend to be grown people with grown people problems. There were a few stalwart pieces, ones you saw over and over. Something called “Watermelon Boats” that sounded to me like a weird and somehow even more boring version of my mom talking to one of her friends. “The Bad Seed” where a girl pushed an old woman down the stairs to get her prized snow globe, which should have been great but really wasn’t.
One of the funniest I ever saw, looking back, was performed by a guy and a girl. They would come into the round, take their seats and pretend to be in love. Then they would perform. Their piece involved the husband character smacking the wife around, and then after they finished they would take seats again, but they would sit far apart and spend the rest of the round glaring at each other.
I must have seen dozens of fake couples involved in abusive relationships over that year. Not many pieces about older, dispassionate but happy couples picking out a lunch together.
People were taking this very seriously, I guess. I don’t know. The piece I did with a friend was some bullshit where we added on a scene of us fighting with folding chairs, and the biggest laugh we ever got came from an accidental pubescent voice crack.
It’s really silly. You put a bunch of teens on a bus. Then they act like teens and try to make out with each other. Then, for about 3 minutes they act like adults, I mean actually act like adults, as in fill the role of an adult. But even from that short few minutes you can tell they aren’t all that good at the adult thing.
I only did this for one year before deciding, as I did with most school events and activities, “Fuck this shit.”
However, being in forensics meant I was picked to be in a play by the aforementioned Ms. Hanson. A play that was a total abortion due to some serious stunt-casting, me as the captain of the football team, for instance. I was the smallest person she could find.
As an added bonus, the play included a good deal of semi-nudity. All male, of course. Three fellows were doused in cooking spray and ripped their shirts off to dance around at one point. There was a fat one, a skinny one, and a hairy one. Then there was me. Bill, the captain of the football team whose quirk was showing up in scenes with different articles of clothing missing, something that was never mentioned and that baffled the holy bejeezus out of my mom when she came to the show. (“Why did you come out on stage and take off your pants?”)
However, after the last show we had a cast party, and some crazy, stupid, stupid idiot gave a bunch of teens free reign over their backyard hot tub. Where, for the first time ever, a person that wasn’t me touched my penis.
Granted, she would later go on to allegedly do drugs, pass out near a heat register and wake up with serious brain damage, a fact I would later find out from a mutual friend and never be able to confirm. But that’s probably a monologue for another time.
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