Is This Anything?
Page 22
You do not care.
You love that hot dog every time.
Does it suck?
Yes.
Is it great?
Yes.
That’s how close they are.
Sucks and Great are the only two ratings people even use anymore.
No one’s interested in any other opinion.
“Hey, want to go see that new movie? I heard it’s great.”
“Really? I heard it sucks.”
“How could it suck? It was supposed to be great.”
“I heard the beginning is great, but after that it sucks.”
“Aw, that sucks.”
“I know, it could have been great.”
I say to you,
that “sucks” and “great” are the exact same thing.
You have an ice-cream cone. You’re walking down the street.
The ice cream falls off the top of the cone.
Hits the pavement.
Sucks.
What do you say?
“Great.”
The Teens
Over the course of all these years when I look at all this stuff
it reminds me of my horse-racing bit.
Where the out-of-breath horse doesn’t understand why the jockey took them
all around the track, the longest possible route.
He gets to the finish line and says,
“Why didn’t we just stay here? We would have been first.”
So, the horse has quite a good grasp of the logistics of the racetrack.
But incredibly, so little understanding of the horse race itself.
So smart and so dumb.
And I guess that’s me.
It took a lot of effort for me to get all the way around the track to finally discover
the end point is exactly where I wanted to be at the beginning.
So many other avenues have come my way over the years.
And I have taken a visit here and there to the other forms
in which I could press myself into service.
As I write this, we are in the time of corona, so there is no live performing.
Stand-up is about a brief, fleeting moment of human connection.
Like surfers sitting in the water on their board, just waiting
for one more ride.
One more thrilling skim across the top of the world.
People often ask me where I like to work.
What kind of places, theaters, which cities?
The place I like to work is in my head.
To try and reach someone else’s.
The special, special thing about stand-up is the sound that tells you for sure that you did it.
You reached them.
Of course, we can never know exactly how all of it really even happens.
We don’t need to know everything.
We can feel what’s real.
And I hope we get to be together again someday soon.
In the meantime, putting all this together in a book has given us another kind of real connection.
You can feel that it’s how we’re supposed to be.
Annoying Friends
Why are your friends so annoying?
These are the people you have chosen to be with.
And yet, you cannot stand them.
“Who’s going?
How do we get there?
When do we leave?
Where is it again?
Which car? My car? Your car?
One car? Two cars?
Your car’s too small.
We can squeeze.
Pick me up? Pick you up?
It’s on the way.
It’s the opposite direction.
What time is the show?
7 o’clock.
Who the hell has a show at 7 o’clock?
This guy is ruining my entire life.
Are we eating?
Did you eat?
I didn’t eat.
I’m starving.
I’m stuffed.
I’ve been eating Jolly Ranchers all day. I need something solid.”
* * *
Half of you didn’t even remember the damn thing was tonight.
You had to be reminded of that…
“You know, we’re going to that show tonight.”
“… Tonight?”
“Yes, it’s tonight.”
“… I don’t really feel like going tonight.”
“Well, we have to go tonight.
That’s the only night he’s here.
This guy’s huge.
He’s here and he’s gone.
You think he’s going to play here for a month?
We’re living in Bakersfield. Snap out of it.”
Out
What an impressive accomplishment this is on your part.
Got out of the house.
Went somewhere.
Did something.
Dealt with all the natural obstacles of planning, arranging,
difficult people, annoying friends,
many of whom you’re sitting with right now.
That for some reason required unnecessarily complicated back-and-forth communications about.
“What about the tickets?
Who’s got the tickets?”
How many times have you heard the word “tickets” today?
“Make sure you bring the tickets.
I got the tickets.
Don’t forget the tickets.
We need the tickets.
What about their tickets?
I don’t have their tickets.
They’ve got to get their own tickets.
I never got the money from the last time I got them tickets.”
“I like to hold my own tickets.
I want be seen as an individual as opposed to part of a more generalized, anonymous group of ticket holders.”
“Just get in the car before we assassinate you.”
Why are your friends so annoying?
These are the people you have picked to be with in life.
And yet you cannot stand them.
You’d get rid of all of them in a second
if it wasn’t an even bigger pain in the ass to find new people,
learn a whole new set of different annoying problems
that they have and never do anything about.
Change all the names and numbers in your phone.
Delete all the old contact information.
“Oh, the hell with it.
I’ll ride it out with these idiots.
It’s all the same meals, holidays and movies anyway.”
Ready
Husbands and wives that arrived here tonight intact get special credit.
The Simultaneous House Exit is
the highest level of marriage difficulty.
You can have kids,
they win the Olympics, get the Nobel Prize.
That is nothing compared to getting out of that god damn house together.
Once you hear the word “ready,” it’s like a poison gas moving through the house.
“Ready.
Make sure you’re ready.
You need to be ready.
Why aren’t you ready?
How long do you think it’s going to take you to get ready?”
“I’m ready now.”
“You’re wearing that?”
Wives appear out of the bathroom…
(door swings open)
“I’m not even close to ready.”
(door slams shut)
The fights continue in the car.
“How can you drive this fast,
on these roads,
in that shirt?
Why are you wearing that shirt?”
“Look, I just want to have a good time tonight.”
“Then why did you park so far away?
Can’t you see I am in heels?!”
Marriage Happy
The key to marria
ge of course, is
to make the other person happy.
That’s what I tell all my guy friends.
“Make your woman happy.”
You? You’re not going to be
happy and that’s good.
Because that cuts your work in half.
Now we’re down to one person
that we have to worry about
keeping so god damn happy.
You think men want to be happy?
We don’t even know what it is.
We don’t care what it is.
We’ve never experienced it.
And couldn’t be less interested in it.
What men want is to do whatever the hell
stupid thing it is that we’re doing,
and if you could please just
leave me the hell alone and
let me do it,
I think we’ll both be a lot happier.
* * *
And ladies, this is the thing
about men you have to understand,
we’re not really ever happy or unhappy.
We’re just guys.
* * *
Men just do what we have to do until
someone comes up to us and says,
“Hey, come here. I got something
else for you to do.”
We go, “Okay,” and then we do that.
Two Things
The drive of the male is to simplify.
All men put all things into one of two categories.
It’s either, “That’s my problem,”
or “That is not my problem.”
That’s all we know.
All we want to know.
We got two boxes.
They’re marked,
“Problem.”
“No Problem.”
* * *
And this is why men secretly love being married even more than women.
It’s a perfect fit with our normal state of,
“God damn it. Son of a bitch.”
* * *
I could not have flowed more smoothly into being a husband
and having a family because I
already understood life to be a nonstop, twenty-four-hour repetitive cycle of,
“What? What the hell? What the hell is going on now?”
* * *
So then,
what does a man want from a woman?
A man wants the same thing from a woman that he wants from his underwear.
Certain amount of support and
a certain amount of freedom.
Dogs Playing Poker
And I know the women here are looking
at me like, “You know Jerry,
we know you always like to talk like
you know what you’re talking about,
even when you don’t.
But the way you describe it,
you make men sound so simple.
It can’t be that simple.”
It is.
* * *
A man is really nothing more than an extremely advanced dog.
Why did someone paint a picture of
dogs playing poker?
What kind of twisted, dog-man,
freak-breed, mixed-species metaphor
is even going on there?
Why did my father and every one of
his friends see this picture and instantly go,
“I’m putting that up in my garage.
Because that is a place where I can
put up things that I want
without anyone questioning it.”
* * *
Forget about if dogs could even sit in chairs and get
human clothing, it is impossible
to play poker with paws.
The shuffling, the dealing,
the arranging of the cards in your hand.
No way to do it when all you have is three black circles.
We all teach our dogs how to shake
but it’s not a real firm clasp, is it?
Paw.
Very limited in what it can do.
Men as Dogs
Or to look at it the other way,
if it’s men that became dogs,
they’re not going to want to play poker either.
The reason men play poker is
because they cannot have the
100 percent food-sex-sleep lifestyle of dogs
that we envy so very much.
Now, does that mean if I could,
I would spend my life investigating
crotches with my nose?
Catching Frisbees with my mouth?
Relieving myself in public and
eating out of a giant bowl of food on the floor?
No.
But it’s not the craziest idea I ever heard.
All I’m saying is, if dogs
ever do start playing poker
a lot of other interesting possibilities
could open up.
Guard Gate Filtration System
“So, Jerry, we would like to understand in a little more detail,
how you made this transition in your life.
Because we saw you do it.
You were a single, bachelor guy for 45 years.
Then you turned on a dime.
Marriage—wife—kids—family.
How’d you navigate that?
How’d you acclimate?
Cohabitate and procreate?
Learning to accommodate so as not to aggravate?”
It’s a very good question.
Because a man in marriage will not survive
if he does not have a strong
Guard Gate Speech Filtration System.
You don’t just talk in marriage.
It’s risky.
When I’m with my wife,
who I love so dearly,
and a thought enters my head,
the first thing I think is,
“Well, I know I can’t say that.”
Maybe I could say I heard someone else say it.
And then she and I can share a warm moment together,
agreeing on what an idiot that person must be.
Look Fat
My wife is very smart.
So, I have to be thinking all the time too.
Because the bored female is a very dangerous individual.
They will invent games to play to alleviate the boredom that are not fun games.
A wife will say,
“I’m going to put on an outfit that is completely wrong for my body type,
and I would like to get your opinion of it.”
Oh no, I don’t want to play this.
“Why? It’s not a difficult game.
I’m just going to move these different shells around a little
and you simply have to pick the right one.
I’m just asking if you think this makes me look fat?”
“No, I don’t.
Because you are not fat, so that would be impossible.”
“But if it did make me look fat, would you consider lying to not hurt my feelings?”
… “Well, I would never want to hurt your feelings.”
“Then you might be lying.
I could look fat.”
That’s it.
Game over.
You lose again.
“Would you like to play
‘Do you think my friend is pretty’ roulette?”
And that’s not even Russian Roulette.
There’s a bullet in every chamber of that game.
Marriage Kit
Marriage comes in different size do-it-yourself kits.
I went for the full-size wife, kids, in-laws, pets complete gift set.
If you do that, it is a lot to assemble.
A lot of small, very intricate moving parts.
Not labeled.
Sharp edges.
Choking hazards.
Missing pieces.
There are many, many pages of instructions that are not written down anywhere.
And if you did go back to refer to them, they’ve been changed.
For no reason and without notification.
“Now when you turn the wheel left, the car goes right.”
So you have to learn quick and remember that everything you have learned is wrong.
Childhood 1960s
I grew up in the ’60s.
I see a lot of beautiful, young people here tonight.
Clearly enjoying your beautiful, young lives of infinite potential and opportunity.
Well, let me tell you something, you little punks.
You didn’t even have a childhood compared to what we had in the ’60s.
You had garbage.
You had nothing.
You know why?
Your parents paid attention to you.
Our parents didn’t even know our names.
They were ignorant.
Negligent.
Completely checked out.
On nutrition, safety, education.
Can you even imagine the world I’m describing?
We grew up like wild dogs in the ’60s.
It was magnificent.
No seatbelts.
No helmets.
No restraints of any kind.
Anything came to a stop, we just flew through the air.
I was either consuming 100% sugar or airborne.
That was my childhood.
And it was fantastic.
My parents didn’t know where my school was.
What my grades were.
Where I was.
I was like a raccoon to my parents.
You know there’s one around…
But no one’s really tracking the whereabouts.
Good Humor
I loved getting ice cream from the ice cream man.
You’d stand in line behind the truck.
They had a little menu of the different ice creams you could get.
It was placed right over the exhaust pipe of the truck.
Our eyes were watering.
Coughing.
You had a Dixie Cup, it was the equivalent of smoking a pack of Camels.
Nobody cared.
These were good times.
And no matter what you asked the guy for, he’d reach in and pull it right out.
He never had to look.