| You’re not giving them a chance to be funny.” “The jokes aren’t funny, Brian. And it’s not funny when the headmaster is trying to be Hamlet. Come to rehearsal. Give me a little breathing room and I’ll spread my funny around. You have some very talented comedians in the cast, but comedians always try to be funny. I get that, but it’s not the comedy jokes the movie is about. It’s about how all these smart kids don’t know what my character is going to do next. That’s what I’m establishing. Martha just doesn’t get my humor. That doesn’t mean it’s not funny. Here, I’ll prove it to you. Why is a Groucho Marx mustache funnier painted on than a real one?” Brian is very smart, and I could tell it bothered him to have to answer what everyone has to answer. “I don’t know Val, why?” he said with the slightest bit of condescension. I really liked him and didn’t like putting him on the spot like I had with Martha when I asked her the same question. “I’m sorry, Brian, I’m not trying to give you a hard time. The answer is, ‘Who the hell knows why, it just is.’ Comedy isn’t intellectual. You laugh or you don’t. If you want, I’ll stop making the film better and get right down to the television laugh track it sounds like everyone is into.” Brian relented. Martha relented. I was rehired before I was ever fired. I got to do |
we were still living at the beach. I was three when I asked Mom to show me how to capture butterflies and moths and make the holes in the tin tops to the glass jars we stored fruit in from our couple of trees. But Mom, giggling with a girlfriend on the phone, paid me no mind. I was crushed and decided to leave once and for all. Mom didn’t even notice when I grabbed my GI Joe backpack and tiny plastic tent and indignantly announced that I was never returning home. If she wanted to see my new digs, I’d be living under the tree in the empty lot next door. Still on the phone, she only half-heard my gallant farewell speech. I was burning with anger. The adventure was arduous, about thirty feet away, and the day scalding hot. The lot was covered in sand. Twenty yards… I was uncomfortable and bored. For a few minutes, I rested, watching a caravan of crawling caterpillars. Then, with the smell of Mom’s insanely delicious melty chocolate chip cookies wafting through the air, I nearly caved, before I swore to stand my ground, and made it another ten yards to the middle of the sandy lot. For ten minutes. Then twenty. Then thirty. Then… enough. The ol’ “make me come home ’cause of chocolate cookie smell” was one thing, but the thought of Mom’s bologna sandwiches with mayonnaise oozing through the crevices of squishy Wonder Bread… I ran home and felt |
