I don’t think there is any subject which cannot be funny.
—Peter Cook
“Ask me the secret of comedy.”
“What is the secret of…”
“Timing.”
Yeah we’ve all heard that joke. But the secret of comedy is sadness. Bleakness. It’s a young man’s game. Only the young have sufficient moral certainty to see how things are and how that differs from how things ought to be. The anger of comedy is for the young. Age sucks. With age comes ambivalence, the inability to be shocked anymore by the constant disappointments of life. I should know. I’m a forty-four-year-old professor of micropaleontology at USSAT hooked up with a thirty-something biology buff who’s driving me nuts. Don’t talk to me about anger. I’m stuck every day studying the crap of the late twentieth century, and she’s out there partying. I have to sit and read about all those poor sods on the cusp of the twenty-first century, a whole new millennium dawning, and they’re wearing their caps backwards. Two thousand years of civilization, and they’re walking around with the manufacturers’ names on the outside of their clothes. Don’t make me laugh. We’re all just thin layers of rock in the end. Sedimentary, my dear Watson.
Thank Christ for Carlton. My secret. My lifeline. The inventor of the antijoke. I kid you not. He postulated a category of things that don’t make you laugh which he called the antijoke. There were the things that were funny, and the things that were not funny. The things that were not funny he called anticomedy. The trouble is that these things kept shifting. Things could be both funny and not funny depending on the context. He could find nothing that was funny in and of itself, and nothing that couldn’t be funny occasionally. Baffling. He defined the anticomic too. He had observed that both Lewis and Alex hated certain comedians. Detested them. Couldn’t stand them. “They’re just not funny,” they said. This totally puzzled him since these comedians were often very successful and drew big laughs from an audience. How could they get laughs and still not be funny? He worked for days postulating something he called the antilaugh, before he realized that it was just plain old–fashioned jealousy. Alex and Lewis were envious.
Currently he’s working on the biology of comedy. Seriously. He’s studying the genetic makeup of comics. He suspects that there’s a comedy gene, something inherited, hidden somewhere in their autoimmune system. He points out human DNA is so long that if it were possible to stretch out the DNA of a baby into a single line, the distance would be staggering: fifteen times the round trip between Pluto and the sun. Somewhere in that billion-mile line of genetic material there could easily lurk a comedy gene. But how to find it? He dreams vaguely of identifying this gene and putting it into a lab rat. The world’s first stand-up mouse. He’s a hoot, isn’t he?
§
The coffee shop was busy. They left Carlton plugged into the recharger.
“I really don’t need a top-up, my batteries are fine,” he protested.
“Better safe than sorry,” said Lewis.
They nabbed a table by the window and ordered a couple of coffees. Alex drummed his leg nervously. He could hardly contain himself as the gangly Lewis wound his limbs into the booth.
“So how d’you think we did?” he asked the minute he’d settled.
“Well…” said Lewis, staring at the legs of the waitress.
“Not good, huh?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Alex beamed.
“I didn’t say we did good either.” He watched Alex’s face fall instantly, his mouth sinking into an upside-down U. He looked like a mask of tragedy.
“Alex, it wasn’t that bad,” he said.
“So you think we have a shot?” His face brightened again.
Boy, the guy is volatile, thought Lewis. “You can never tell with auditions, Alex. Sometimes you think they liked you and you find they absolutely hated you. Other times you play to twenty minutes of silence and they can’t wait to sign you.”
“So you think we’re still alive?”
“We’re hanging in, I guess. I’d say we woulda had a definite shot if that idiot Boo hadn’t shoved his face in all the time. If they think we’re with him, we’re dead.”
Alex wandered off in search of a sugar bowl. Coffee was his thing since he quit alcohol, but he liked it well stocked with sugar. He squeezed past a warm female body in a fleecy kangora sweater.
“Oh, pardonnez-moi,” he said in his mock camp French accent. He reached across for the sugar and brushed against her. “I a-dore kangora, dahling,” he said in his deep Tallulah shopping voice. “It’s to die for. Half kangaroo, half angora, it’s the jumper that keeps on jumping.”
She turned and he saw her for the first time. Dark hair, nice face, brown eyes, full lips, high cheekbones, almost Slavic, on the tall side for him, but oh how she breathed. She was shaped too, long legs, straight limbs; her body seemed to glow from within, and the woolly kangora sweater clung flatteringly to her outlines.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Alex, sniffing the air, “the scent is familiar but the shape escapes me. You wouldn’t be a woman, would you?”
“I might be,” she said. “Hang on a minute, I’ll just check.” She reached inside her sweater and felt around.
“Oh-oh, breasts, yes. One of the telltale giveaway signs. Woman definitely.”
“Mind if I just get a second opinion,” said Alex, reaching forward for the hand slap he knew would stop him. It didn’t come. He was left with his hand frozen lamely halfway towards her breasts, not quite having the nerve to go through with it.
“Chicken, huh?”
“That’s right. Half man, half chicken.”
“Not half funny though, Alex. Hi, I’m Katy Wallace.”
“You know me?”
“I was just looking at a tape upstairs. Hopping hospital. Very funny stuff.”
“You think so?”
“You made me laugh.”
“Oh, thank you, God” said Alex, looking upwards.
“Do you always speak to Him in public?”
“Only in coffee shops,” said Alex. “He’s a caffeine freak, you see. A speed-of-light junkie. Ever since the Big Bang, he needs more and more energy.”
Her laugh was open and genuine.
“So you’re with the Keppler cruise?”
“That’s right.”
Alex couldn’t believe his luck. He had the biggest grin on his face.
“In casting?”
“Not exactly.” She glanced over his shoulder and frowned for a second. Then she relaxed and smiled, put a hand on his arm, and said nicely enough, “Will you excuse me, I gotta make a call.”
“Can I come with you?”
“It’s a call of nature.”
“I love nature.”
“Then we’d better let it take its course.”
She squeezed past him so close he could breathe her in, and headed for the rest room. Halfway across the café she glanced back. He was still watching her. She threw him a little wave.
“Who was that?” asked Lewis.
“Oh, just someone,” said Alex.
“Cute.”
“Cute ain’t it.”