Finally, I found my father in the kitchen, and inspiration struck.
Clarence Frederick Liston Eats a Bowl of Cereal
A REVIEW BY JAKE LISTON
It was with great excitement that I found my seat for the much-anticipated show entitled Clarence Frederick Liston Eats a Bowl of Cereal, which premiered yesterday in the kitchen of Mr. Liston’s comfortable but somewhat messy home. Fans of Mr. Liston’s career may recall his previous groundbreaking works, including Clarence Frederick Liston Eats a Turkey Leg and Clarence Frederick Liston Drinks a Glass of Milk.
As the world’s loudest chewer and swallower, Mr. Liston is one of the most dynamic live performers on the scene, able to create a symphony of sounds with nothing but his teeth and throat. It’s as if he has an amplifier hidden inside his mouth. You could be anywhere in the house, and if he is consuming any type of food or beverage, you will know it. Even cheese, which you would think would be soundless. Even if you are watching TV. Or dead.
Last night’s performance was an unusual one for several reasons. First of all, it is weird to eat a bowl of cereal at five-thirty p.m. Second, it is weird to eat a bowl of cereal less than an hour before you are about to eat a dinner of lasagna and salad—a dinner you yourself are about to start making. When asked about this by a member of the audience, Mr. Liston explained his philosophy that it is never a good idea to “cook on an empty stomach,” and also that cereal is “delicious any time, not just for breakfast.” He then proceeded to tell a story about how, in college, he often ate cereal “morning, noon, and night.”
This story, which was at least an eight on the Boring Scale, delayed the performance by a full five minutes, causing Mr. Liston’s audience to become somewhat fidgety.
Finally, it was the moment we had all been waiting for. Mr. Liston picked up his spoon, which was the largest spoon in the Liston household, not counting the giganto serving spoons, and dipped it into his bowl of Belchos, like an Olympic diver sliding into the water or a backhoe breaking ground.
The spoon emerged full of tan, perfectly round Cheerios, floating on a thin layer of nice white milk.
It is worth pointing out, for those unfamiliar with Mr. Liston’s work, that he is a huge fan of milk, especially whole milk. In fact, he thinks other milks, such as two percent and nonfat, are “for the birds,” though this is just an expression and Mr. Liston does not actually think that birds drink milk, as they are not even mammals.
The spoon hovered in midair, and the tension in the room was so thick you could cut it with a knife. What was Mr. Liston going to do? Would he put the spoon in his mouth? Would it fit? Would he miss his mouth and bang the spoon against his chin, spilling milk and tiny whole-grain morsels everywhere?
And then, with the grace of a ballerina standing on top of a tiger standing on top of a shark, Mr. Liston wrapped his lips around the spoon, and the milk and Cheerios disappeared into his mouth, and the spoon came back out empty.
The audience was on the edge of their seats, waiting for that first CRUNCH. And Mr. Liston did not disappoint. His teeth annihilated the cereal. It sounded like how you might imagine it would sound if a Tyrannosaurus rex bit into a school bus stuffed full of dried leaves.
The audience burst into applause, which seemed to surprise Mr. Liston for a moment. But then: He SWALLOWED. It was like the sound a four-ton boulder makes when you roll it off a hundred-foot-high cliff into a lake.
At this point the audience could not help leaping out of their seats in a standing ovation.
With an expertise that was awesome to behold, Mr. Liston then began to build up a steady rhythm of spoon dipping, mouth filling, cereal chomping, and swallowing.
If you closed your eyes and concentrated only on the sound, you might find yourself lulled and soothed by the regularity of it. But if you did this, you would miss out on all the visual parts of the drama, because as the performance went on, the issue of ingredient management began to emerge as a major theme in the work: Would Mr. Liston be able to balance the ratio of cereal to milk and finish big, with a final bite that left the bowl empty of both? Or would he miscalculate, and have to slurp up the extra milk?
But Mr. Liston is a professional, and the audience did not need to be concerned. His final bite cleared the bowl, and in an unexpected flourish, he stood up as he swallowed it (the final bite, not the bowl), treating the audience to the sight of his enormous Adam’s apple bobbing down and then up again in his throat, and placed both his bowl and spoon in the sink.
All in all, it was an amazing show by an American genius at the top of his artistic game.
Mr. Liston will be offering repeat performances at seven-thirty a.m. every weekday for the foreseeable future. Seating is limited and on a first-come, first-served basis, and audience members are advised to bring earplugs.
“You have to do it,” Azure said to me in the cafeteria. Lunch that day was quinoa fritters with rémoulade, a grapefruit and lump crab salad, and carrot-ginger soup. It was delicious, but I could barely eat a bite. My stomach was all knotted up from the stress of everybody telling me what to do.
“You really should, dude,” Zenobia agreed. “I’ll come and watch.”
“We all will,” Azure added. “Even Mr. Allen, I bet.”
“Zayink no iz not an opzhun!” Klaus shouted, slamming his fist against the table so hard all our plates rattled.
They were talking about open mic night at the Yuk-Yuk, which is a comedy club downtown. Every comedian who’d ever made anything of himself had performed there, according to Mr. Allen. Maury Kovalski himself had said the same thing, and also told me that the key to comedy was performing over and over and over again. Telling jokes to anyone who would listen.
To illustrate the point, he told me a story about Henny Youngman, a famous comedian from the dawn of time.
Henny had just come out of a comedy club and was walking down the street by himself, unaware that Maury had also come out of the club and was walking a few paces behind him. A pigeon was standing on the sidewalk, and Henny Youngman—who, as Maury made sure to point out repeatedly and loudly, THOUGHT HE WAS COMPLETELY ALONE—bent down and said to the pigeon, “Any mail for me?”
This was what made him a genius, Maury said. He told jokes even when there was no one there to laugh.
Just then, Forrest sat down across from me and dumped a giant bag of acorns onto the table. Nobody said a word. We all knew Forrest had trouble eating indoors. This was his way of coping.
“So,” he said, rolling an acorn between his palms, “you gonna do some comedy tonight or what?”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I guess it’s what Henny Youngman would do, right?”
Forrest frowned. “How do you know my hen’s name?” he asked.
“You have a hen?” said Zenobia.
“I have eighteen hens,” Forrest replied. “My family likes eggs.”
He was quiet for a moment, and then he looked up at me very seriously and nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think it is what Henny Youngman would do.”
“Okay then,” I said. “I guess I can’t be a chicken, huh?”
Azure slapped her forehead. “You better be funnier than that tonight, dude.”
“What, you don’t like puns about poultry? You think they’re fowl?”
Everybody groaned. I picked up my quinoa fritter, feeling suddenly hungry. Sometimes making a bad joke is way more satisfying than making a good one.
“So you’ll perform?” Azure asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “A stand-up has to stand up, I guess.”
Azure leaped out of her seat. “I’m going to go make some posters!” she announced, and darted off.
I stood up, too. “I guess I better go work on my set,” I said.
The truth was, I’d been working on my set all week. Maybe all month. Ever since the talent show, I’d been writing down jok
es. Except they weren’t really jokes—not the kind with a setup and a punch line, anyway. They were more like observations about life, and weird ways of looking at things. I kept thinking back to the Music and Art Academy talent show. That day, I’d gotten laughs by making fun of the school—and that, if I understood right, was what Maury Kovalski meant by “punching up.” You had to have targets that were bigger and more powerful than you.
Everybody wants to hear you diss the president. Nobody wants to hear you diss a baby.
Although, actually, I could see how dissing a baby might be kind of funny.
* * *
•••
That night, the Yuk-Yuk was packed. My whole class showed up, just like Azure had promised. They were spread out over the front four tables—which obviously annoyed the heck out of the waitresses, since waitresses work for tips and my friends were ordering, like, one soda apiece and a side of fries to split six ways.
In the second row of tables were my parents, along with Lisa and Pierre and Evan. And in the way back, I could make out Mr. Allen and Maury Kovalski. They seemed to be spending enough to make up for the broke-ness of the kids. Their whole table was covered with food: those mini-hamburgers called sliders that you can eat if you want to pretend you’re a giant, a huge pot of cheese fondue, a platter of nachos the size of my head. It was like they’d ordered everything on the menu.
The show was going to start in a few minutes, so I thought I’d say hello before I went backstage. My stomach was full of butterflies, and I decided chatting was better than pacing around trying to remember my jokes and imagining what it would feel like to bomb in front of everyone I knew.
“Hi,” I said. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Allen. You too, Maury.”
Maury shoved calamari into his mouth, wiped away the marinara sauce with the napkin tucked under his chin, and said, “Well, well. Look who it is. The man of the hour. Mr. Big Shot. Fancypants McGillicuddy. Captain Superstar.”
He scratched his chin with the fork. “What was your name again?”
“Good one,” I said.
He picked up a buffalo wing and took a bite. “No, really. I forgot your name.”
“Sometimes when I eat my own weight in appetizers, my brain stops working, too,” I said.
Maury jerked his thumb at Mr. Allen. “He offered to buy me dinner, so I figured I’d eat for the whole month. Like a camel. I tried to tell ya, kid. Comedy doesn’t pay.” He picked up a fried pickle and toasted me with it. “Break a leg.”
No sooner did he say it than the lights dimmed and the host took the stage. And the next thing I knew, he was saying my name and I was threading my way through the tables and clambering up there myself.
I felt great. Talking to Maury had gotten me loose, taking me out of my own head. It was weird how trading a few wisecracks with that gluttonous old crank made me feel like I was part of something. Like there was some secret brotherhood of comedians, and this was how the guys in it treated each other, and outsiders might find it weird or confusing, but to us it was normal and no big deal.
I took the microphone off the stand and unwrapped the cord, which also made me feel like part of the brotherhood, since it was what every comedian I’d ever seen did. You had to wonder why they wrapped it around the stand to begin with. Maybe it was some kind of union rule or something.
“Hey,” I said. “How about a round of applause for the waitresses?” I was kind of surprised to hear myself say it, since my actual opening line was supposed to be about how the baseball season was starting in a few months and I had some ideas about how to make the game more exciting, such as eliminating four players, adding some ten-foot-tall baskets to the field, covering it in parquet, and substituting the hard, small ball for a much larger, bouncier one. But that seemed stale compared to what was actually happening right now, right here, so I went with it. I could always do the baseball joke later.
Everybody applauded—which was amazing in itself, that I could make a whole room of people clap just by asking them to—and when it died down, I gestured at my friends in the front row and said, “That’s right, show them some love. It’s the least you can do, if you’re gonna order one Coke and six straws.” That got a laugh. “And no,” I continued, “to answer your next question, the salad is not two dollars cheaper if you leave out the avocado, so don’t ask.”
Since I was talking about food, the next thing to pop into my head was a joke I’d made to Evan a few weeks earlier.
“I’m thinking of opening a restaurant,” I said. “Mostly as a way to mess with people. It’s going to be a fusion restaurant because those are all the rage now. I’m thinking vegan-pork fusion. Nobody’s done that yet. We’d serve dishes like tofu and broccoli stir-fry over brown rice…with a pork chop. Or soy-protein nuggets with turnip greens…drenched in four gallons of ham gravy. With a side of bacon.”
I had to stop and wait until the laughter died down, and when it did I pivoted to a new thing. I was beginning to understand that laughs were more than just the desired result of comedy—just as important was that they broke up your routine, let you move between jokes without awkward transitions.
“The other idea I have for my restaurant is that there’d be two price lists: a regular price list, and a carbon-neutral price list.” I waited to let that sink in. “What does it mean? Nobody knows. But who wouldn’t pay an extra couple bucks to be carbon neutral?” I paused and pretended to think about it. “Not counting my friends in the front row, who I see just ordered one corn chip and six pairs of tweezers.”
“Another thing I’d do at my restaurant? Halfway through your meal, I’d walk up to you and say, ‘Hi, I’m the manager. I just wanted to make sure you were enjoying everything.’ And when you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, this lentil and alfalfa sprout wrap topped with an entire roast pig is delicious,’ I’d be like, ‘Fantastic, I’m so happy to hear it. And how has the service been?’ And when you say, ‘Oh, great,’ that’s when I come a little closer and say, ‘Really. You don’t think your waitress has been acting a little…strange?’ And then I come really close, like uncomfortably close, and I say, ‘I think she’s stealing from me. I need you to keep an eye out for anything suspicious. And hey, dessert’s on me.’ And then I walk away. You never see me again. And also, when the check comes, dessert was definitely not on me.”
The audience roared. I felt so loose and free up there on that stage that I never wanted it to end. Which is probably why I did thirteen minutes instead of the five I was supposed to, as the host informed me when I finally took my bow and floated into the wings on a cloud of applause.
“Sorry,” I told him. “I guess I lost track of time.”
He slapped me on the back. “Don’t worry about it, kid. You killed. You’re welcome back anytime.”
I felt like a star.
Thursday morning, I leaped out of bed with a pep in my step and a glide in my stride, as my dad likes to say.
He acts like he made that up, but I know he got it from an old funk song, the one about dancing underwater and not getting wet.
I felt like I could do that, too.
I strutted into the kitchen. Lisa was sitting at the table reading the comics. My mom was rushing out the door, her coffee mug in one hand and her briefcase in the other, and my dad was standing at the stove, about to flip a pancake.
I caught it in midair and took a bite. Like some kind of superhero.
“Are you nuts?” my father said. “That pancake is only half-cooked.”
Which was true, and now my mouth was full of gloopy batter. The same gloopy batter that was also dripping down my hand and onto my shirt, pants, and shoes.
“Save it for the stage, you bozo,” Lisa said without looking up.
“I did that on purpose,” I said, trying to save face. “I like them half-cooked.” I took another bite to prove it.
They both raised their eyebrows, which
is something my father and Lisa do exactly the same way. It was like being silently criticized in surround sound.
“I’m gonna, uh, go change my clothes,” I mumbled, and walked out of the room as coolly as I could, considering there was now pancake batter in my shoes.
But even that didn’t dampen my mood. I’d still killed last night. People I didn’t even know had walked up to me afterward and shaken my hand and said they hadn’t laughed so hard all week.
The other comedians talked shop with me in the greenroom while we ate stale M&M’s from a chipped dish. Maury Kovalski himself had punched me lightly in the arm and said, “That wasn’t half-bad, Jason.” Which I figured was high praise, coming from that schlemiel.
And when I walked into homeroom, I got a standing ovation. It’s true that everyone was standing already because they were gathered around Hotch the snake’s cage, watching him gnaw on a leaf of radicchio. But it still counts.
“Our resident comedy genius!” Mr. Allen said. “Jake, how would you like to change the paper in Hotch’s cage?”
Jake the Fake Goes for Laughs Page 3