Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Jan. 10, 2003: Make Me Laugh

When times get tough, I turn to comedy.

As a Type A personality, I'm headache-prone. I get headaches just by thinking about them. I was often sent home from school, which most students would have welcomed. My headaches, however, worsened as I worried about the work I was missing.

Once, in fifth grade, I was staying overnight at my best friend Pam's house when a headache hit.

Her mom soaked a wash cloth in hot water and placed it across my forehead. She read to me from Art Linkletter's Letters from Camp, one of those kids-say-the-darndedst-things books.

"Laughter is the best medicine," she explained. In that case, it would have helped if the book were funny.

But she was cheerful, and despite myself, I smiled. I no longer remember if it helped my headache, but I've remembered that moment when everything in life seemed wrong.

In high school, I was terribly unpopular: a bookish, chubby "band fag" whose love experiences consisted of a kiss in a store by the store owner's son, when we were both 3. My parents remember this; I don't. Perhaps they invented it to make me feel better about my unpopularity.

Then there was the next-door-neighbor, Richie, who used to play "boyfriend" with me and who taught me how to French kiss. It felt like a worm squiggling around my mouth.

"Do you like it?" he asked.

"Sure," I lied, learning early the stereotypical role of female accommodation.

Between first grade and high school, there was nothing except for five weeks with a dwarfish, hyperactive letch who reminded me of Carmine Ragusa after a freak trash compactor accident. But even he broke up with me, when I wouldn't put out.

I wrote miserable, obscure poetry, so obscure I still don't understand it. And I read voraciously, living through the pages. It took me weeks to recover after finishing The Catcher in the Rye and realizing Holden Caulfield wasn't real. Don't ask me why, if I was going to live through books, I chose books like 1984 and Catch-22.

Classes were so boring I brought colored pencils and drew cartoons of my classmates and teachers. All under false names, of course, in case my cartoons should fall out of my notebook, lead to my untimely death and earn me a page in the Book of Geek Martyrs.

Then in my senior year, I saw the light: I discovered the Dr. Demento radio show. Before long I was an addict, taping the show when I could and writing down the playlist when I couldn't.

I soon found an unlikely compatriot.

To most of the school, he'd been known since seventh grade as Moustache Man, because of his early facial hair growth. His other nickname was McGuyver, for his uncanny ability to create electrical devices from household objects and for fixing a physics experiment with a wad of gum.

He ranked below me on the popularity scale, so it was social death to fraternize with him. Although, come to think of it, he might have felt the same way about me.

We were stuck together as calculus study partners when a friend partnered with her intended prom date. As it turned out, she wouldn't end up going and I would go with a blind date, arranged by my mom.

Moustache Man, or Mike, as I soon called him, had a wacky sense of humor. Before long, I discovered he knew about Dr. Demento, too. I began looking forward to calculus class and joking around with Mike about the latest comedy shows we'd discovered — Saturday Night Live or SCTV reruns, British comedy like Monty Python and The Young Ones.

We played games in class, writing composite stories with the other front row nerds, under the teacher's gaze. I tried to come up with contributions so bizarre they'd make Mike turn red, trying not to laugh. One friend inserted disgusting but obscure words, forcing us to ask for definitions: "What's coprophilia?" He would write down the definition, and we'd pass it down the row, trying not to guffaw.

One day, we were writing things backwards so you could only read it from the opposite side of the paper. I got Mike to laugh out loud by writing,

                 Dear Mary,

                 I am dead.

                       Love,
                       Lazarus

He got me back a year later at our graduation ceremony, when he fell in behind me as we filed to the stage for our diplomas. Just before I took the stage, Mike said my name. I turned around and he did something I had never seen: He vibrated both his eyeballs side-to-side in a mind-blowing feat of ocular skill.

Mike got his revenge: I was laughing hysterically as I grabbed my diploma.

In later years, he would become a born-again Christian and lose his sense of humor. And I, too, lost my sense of humor from time to time, in the grips of depression. But it was always laughter that brought me back.

In college, I joined the Penn State Monty Python Society and met a whole crew of people just like Mike. It was a glorious time for me, a way to break away from all preconceptions about myself. I discovered life could be fun, it could be an adventure, it could be a creative rush.

In celebration, I converted from the ordinary "Alice" to "Alyce" with a "y," a change which continues to baffle employers (since it was never legally changed) but has nonetheless been symbolic for me. It also gives me a way to confuse telemarketers: "Aleece? Sorry, there's no one here by that name."

I joined the college radio comedy show, where I was relegated to playing screaming women or nagging wives. The humor I wrote was too cerebral for them, since my sketches rarely included bodily functions. To get an idea of the sort of humor they wrote, their most infamous sketch was a parody of The Terminator, called "The Sperminator," which made such enthusiastic use of a waterfall sound effect that the show was nearly canceled.

After awhile, I found other outlets. I wrote sketches for the Monty Python Society members to perform at meetings and gloried in my esoteric but, I thought, deeply textured comedy pieces for the club newsletter. For that audience, they were perfect, but unless you fall down laughing at the word "Semprini," they'd be lost on most others.

Then came Leechboy. That's what I call him because he doesn't deserve a name. He leeched off me in every possible way, financially and emotionally. I even began to dress differently: I tucked my shirt in, cut my bangs short, and wore a carefully approved palette. My tie-dyes were shoved to the back of my drawer, reserved for special occasions.

Leechboy did everything he could to suck the laughter out of my life. I still popped my head out from time to time, making appearances at the Monty Python Society, under strict watch. And, against my better judgment, I drifted further from these people who had provided me with some of the first real joy I'd found.

But it's not important to dwell on Leechboy. I cut those ties, perhaps later than I should have, but cut them nonetheless.

And yet, to some degree, Leechboy has never left. He shows up in recurrent dreams, insisting he be let in. I guess you could call it Post-Controlling-Jerk Stress Disorder.

Far be it from me to pick on him for the obvious reasons: his taste in music (negligible), his penis size (minuscule), or his sexual drive (nil). I prefer to relegate him where he belongs: a circle of Purgatory reserved for emotional abusers. There, the Devil plays head games with them all day long, until they are convinced every evil in the world is their fault. The doors to this Purgatory are open, but the Devil has warped their minds so that they feel there's no escape. And every once in awhile, Rod Stewart does their hair (hey, had to get something funny in there).

More recently, my depression persisting like the stale food fragments my dog manages to find and chew on, it was Margaret Cho who rescued me.

Margaret Cho deserves a Medal of Humor, because I've sure she's done the same for many trapped and bleeding souls. I rented I'm the One That I Want, and as she launched into a hilarious tirade about weight problems, dieting and relationships, it seemed as if she was speaking for me. She was taking all of her anger and pain and turning it into something brighter. By laughing at the terrible things that happened to her -- racism, sexism, size discrimination — she divested her attackers of power. It was as if she held a golden ball of fire, and it sucked all of life's pain into it, growing ever brighter, ever stronger. I felt stronger, just by watching it.

And my counselor kind of helped, too.

But if watching or reading comedy helps, there is also joy in creativity. Writing about the bad things that happen to me helps me disavow them of power.

And it helps, sometimes, when bad things happen, to think, "This will make a great story someday." Or, "Someday, this will be funny."

You know, it's surprising how often that is true.

Moral:
Smile, darn ya, smile. Unless you're at a funeral.

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson

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