The Reader Travels

My mind is flipping channels today. Lots of related thoughts, flashing by… Being out of control. Laughing about our own misery. God with a sense of humor. TV.

1. Bruce McCulloch of Kids in the Hall fame released an album in 1995, filled with a whole bunch of really funny songs. Shame-Based Man gives us images of drunken daddies, dead and bloated squirrels on the road, grannies who dig Jim Morrison, Bruce dancing naked with a rose sticking out of his anal orifice. It’s beautiful, really. When I wrote the words, “Because no matter what, we have TV,” I was thinking of his song, “Not Happy,” wherein he sings about being unhappy, but it doesn’t matter because he has TV. Then there are trumpets.

2. Most fat comedians tell fat jokes. It’s not easy to be overweight in a society that views fat as disgusting, even immoral in some crowds. And comedy is all about finding humor in misery. Sometimes people joke about things that hit a little close to home for others. If it’s a raw subject for you, you probably won’t think it’s very funny.

Eddie Murphy Raw did just that for me. His abusive mother with the shoe throwing was funny - the gestures, the timing, the boomerang sound effects. Even though it was raw, I could still laugh about it. But when he started talking about his drunken uncle at family gatherings, I was cringing. He nailed it so completely, and at the time I was dwelling on all the drunkenness in my own family, so I just couldn’t laugh. It was what it was. Raw. I enjoyed being Delirious a little more.

3. I’ll flip right past the news every time. If it’s not on Yahoo’s home page, then I don’t know about it. It’s not that I need to push all the ugliness in the world out of sight, it’s just that the news is such sensationalistic crap it makes me roll my eyes so much I get a headache.

4. Oh. The football game is on. I gotta go.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 31st, 2006 at 12:23 pm and is filed under meanderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.