Learning to Crawl

Well, I guess you have all been wondering what is going on around here at Leftbanker. I’m sure you’ve all noticed a dry spell in the Leftbanker humor department. I thought I could ride it out. I was thrown off the ride. I thought I could fake it for a while. You have a better chance of jumping off a tall building and faking like you can fly than you do of faking a sense of humor. I needed--desperately needed--professional help.

The workmen came over and looked down in the basement for almost two hours. When they finally came upstairs they were covered in filth and stunk to high heaven. They told me that things were horribly gunked-up down there. They told me the problem was going to cost me a bundle and there was no guarantee that things would ever be the same again. They hadn’t seen so little trace of humor since they did some work on the last season of Friends. They said that this clog, this humorless matrix, could very well equal that of the Whoopi Goldberg career--a humor-free vacuum so impenetrable that even her family and friends are unable to emit mildly polite laughter. Mother of God, how could things have become this bad?

I told the workmen that I wasn’t washed up. I told them that I was just regrouping and that I would return with humor that would dwarf anything I had come up with in the past. They listened politely to my rants. When I started telling them knock-knock jokes they took action. One of them wrapped me in a blanket so I wouldn’t go into shock while the other shoved a stick in my mouth to keep me from biting off my tongue.

That was a little over a week ago and I’ve been pretty heavily medicated since. I have started humor group therapy. For my first project I drew moustaches on women models in magazine ads. I know it may sound stupid but try drawing a Hitler moustache on all of the gals in an entire Victoria’s Secret catalogue: it’s funny. I thought that I performed rather well in the bodily functions workshop and I scored perfect 10’s on the “Mocking Foreign Accents” exercises.

I can’t say when I will be back. I may never return. The doctors told me that sometimes people snap right back while other folks lose it completely and spend the rest of their lives stumbling around babbling incoherently or, worse yet, laughing at Dilbert cartoons or volunteering to be part of the studio audience for Funniest Home Videos. I don’t think that I have lost my sophistication when it comes to humor--I just can’t write anything funny—but I did find myself chuckling at a TV ad of a lizard selling insurance. I just need to take it one day at a time.