rafitorres

You know, the go-to joke, the one joke you always tell when someone says “tell a joke right now,” and that all your friends are sick of hearing. This is mine:

Guy gets on the bus. Only available seat is next to a little old lady who has a brown paper bag placed on the empty seat.

Guy asks, “excuse me, can I take that seat?”

Lady says, “yes, but be careful with the nuts.”

“There are nuts in that bag?”

“No, needles.”

(More about my daughter than about me, actually.)

This morning I took my daughter to get an MRI. It’s a long story¹, but the thing is they had to sedate her for it, since she got scared when she first saw the MRI machine. Watching her fall asleep was a bit funny and really weird, since you’re basically watching a 3-year-old drunk person.

“Dad, everything is SOOOOO dizzy.”
“Paula, you should say ‘I feel so dizzy.’”
“Daddy, ha ha! [burp].”

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¹ Paula is almost 4 years old now, but she started speaking late. Speech therapy over the last year and a half has helped tremendously, to the point where you can’t tell she even had a problem, which is awesome. However, now we need to know how much longer to continue with the therapy program, and one of the things the doctors want to rule out is Apraxia of Speech. This is very unlikely, but we need to make sure, thus the MRI.

(Yeah, yeah. Here we go with another Favrd post…)

Dean Allen’s more detailed explanation about why he shut down Favrd instantly reminded me of Roger Ebert’s review of a 2002 documentary film called “Comedian.” The film follows Jerry Seinfeld as he goes back to the stand-up comedy circuit after retiring from his insanely successful TV show.

“Why, you might wonder, would a man with untold millions in the bank go on a tour of comedy clubs? What’s in it for him if the people in Cleveland laugh? Why, for that matter, does Jay Leno go to comedy clubs every single week, even after having been called over by Johnny for the ultimate reward? Is it because to walk out on the stage, to risk all, to depend on your nerve and skill, and to possibly ‘die,’ is an addiction?”

The biggest revelation, at least to the eyes of Ebert, is that these comics are often miserable, tortured by their craft, easily depressed by the smallest of mistakes.¹

“It looks to the audience as if stand-up comics walk out on a stage, are funny, walk off, and spend the rest of the time hanging around the bar being envied by wannabes. In fact, we discover, they agonize over ‘a minute,’ ‘five minutes,’ ‘10 minutes,’ on their way to nirvana.”

Sounds familiar? I don’t know about others on the Favrd crowd (though I can guess), but the truth is I’ve frequently agonized over the wording, rhythm and structure of a tweet, sometimes for days (thanks, Birdhouse), before clicking the publish button. Spend fifteen minutes figuring out how to fit the joke into those 140 characters? Typical. And don’t get me started on finding a typo after I published. And then, just as Dean said, I’d go to my Favrd page, eager to see how the tweet did. If it bombed, I’d just get to work on the next one, determined to get a “hit.” Addiction indeed.

I had to learn to curb that at some point—I have a job, after all—so I just had to learn simply not to care that much about the whole thing. To this day, though, getting a “hit” is still, well, a “hit.” I can imagine how others may be much more obsessed than I am—as @tj explained so well—so when I read Dean saying

“Anyway, please don’t take the shut-down as anything other than a shift in my own priorities, manifested in a desire to stop selling crack.”

I just think he knows what’s up.

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¹ I remember thinking the same thing independently as I watched Last Comic Standing on TV one summer. I was shocked by how some of the best comics were so bitter and humorless off the stage.