by Paul Feig
“Okay, here’s a good one to open with,” he said as he brought over a three-by-five index card out of the kitchen recipe box that made up his “joke file.” He told me the joke, an acceptably off-color anecdote about an elephant eating cabbages in a garden, and I listened, laughed, and then memorized every pause and inflection he put into his delivery. I knew I was learning from the master, or at least the only joke master I had access to, and I treated him with the proper amount of respect and deference. Over the course of the next two hours, he and I mapped out a running patter for my magic act that would have made Myron Cohen proud. True, these were nightclub jokes whose comedic expiration date had passed about ten years prior, but to me it didn’t matter. I now had a full-fledged routine that I felt at least stood a fighting chance against the “Moonlight Sonata”s and the “I Got a Name”s that the music department would be throwing my way.
The following week, using a mod 1960s white and yellow plastic stool in the shape of an hourglass as a magic table—a stool that had stood next to the hamper in our bathroom for the past six years—I auditioned my comedy/magic act at the talent show tryouts. And, much to my delight, even though my auditioners sat and watched my routine stone-faced, I was accepted and put on the bill.
Overwhelmed, I spent the next week rehearsing and honing my delivery. Every morning I would awaken with the nervous realization that in just a few days, instead of lying in my bedroom, unobserved by the outside world, I would be up on a stage in front of hundreds of people trying to entertain them and hoping to win fifty dollars by out-talenting my fellow student performers. The idea that I could be under sheets and blankets in the privacy of my own bed at one moment during the day and then a few hours later be up on stage in front of hundreds of strangers, my every word and movement completely exposed and vulnerable to rejection by the masses, was both terrifying and enticing. I had alternating visions of doing my act and either being triumphantly hoisted aloft on the shoulders of my adoring fans or being pelted with tomatoes and rotten eggs, like a bad opera singer in an old Abbott and Costello comedy.
By the time the day of the talent show rolled around, I was both terrified and out of my mind with excitement.
That night, as I waited backstage, I heard performer after performer get up and launch into ballad after sad ballad, each indulging their artistic teenage depression with songs like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Send in the Clowns.” I would occasionally peek out at the audience from the edge of the stage. The show was being held in our cafetorium, which, as the name implied, was half cafeteria, half auditorium. The auditorium part was simply a crude stage that had been built into one of the walls so that if the lunch tables were rolled away and butt-numbing folding chairs brought in, the room could function as if it were a theater, albeit one out of a Third World country. The place was filled to capacity with parents and relatives of the performers, as well as all the students whose acts weren’t accepted into the show, there to see just how crappy the rest of us really were and how unfairly their own artistic skills had been rejected. Since my spot on the program wasn’t until second from last, I had a lot of time to get nervous and watch all the female performers, who made up the lion’s share of the bill, alternately crying on each other’s shoulders as they dealt with massive bouts of insecurity and hugging each other in support, even though it was clear that each one of them wanted the other to lose in order to secure her place in the coveted fifty-dollar spot. They weren’t hugging me, though, an unknown freshman dressed in a knock-off version of a pricey denim squares leisure suit, which was not made up of actual fashionable denim squares sewn together but of one single sheet of low-quality denim pinched and stitched to appear as an amalgamation of high-priced blue jeans patches. I was the lowest of the low in their books—a common variety performer, a populist plate-spinner whose only goal was to entertain the groundlings, not to move or enthrall or introduce an audience to new heights of art and emotion via the miracle of music. I was merely light entertainment to them, a diversion needed by the stage crew to fill time as they pulled a baby grand piano on stage in preparation for a soul-wrenching performance of Carole King’s “It’s Too Late.” I stood and politely held my ground, smiling at them supportively as I went over my 1950s cabaret jokes in my head. I mentally ran through my magician’s checklist, making sure I had loaded the secret compartment in my Drum O’ Plenty correctly, putting the single-color silks on top of the more elaborate floral print scarves I had taken from my mother’s fancy underwear drawer, so that the multicolored extravaganzas would come out last and amaze my audience with their supposed beauty.
My heart was practically pounding out of my chest by the time the evening’s emcee, Ms. Owens, the music teacher, got up to introduce me to the crowd. My tricks were all crammed onto the top of my bathroom-stool magic table as I stood nervously waiting. As the curtains parted and the bright spotlights hit and immediately blinded me, my head filled with visions of myself picking up the stool to move it to centerstage and causing everything to fall off and crash destructively onto the floor. I could sense the crowd sitting in front of me, waiting to see what I would add to the already overlong proceedings, and I cautiously pulled my yellow and white plastic makeshift magic table out to the performance area. It shuddered and shook threateningly as I slid it across the wooden stage floor, and the five feet I pulled it seemed to consume several hours of time. Satisfied that I was in the right spot, I looked up and stared out at the invisible crowd. I could only see the outlines of their heads, but from their silence and lack of movement, I knew the time had come to try to entertain them.
I took a deep, nervous breath and began.
“Ladies and gentlemen, a lot of things that we see in the world are not really what they appear to be. This reminds me of a story . . .”
A graceless way to launch into a joke, to be sure. But I had stated my premise and was now about to elaborate upon it. Nobody at Toastmasters International could take me to task for that, I don’t think. I continued.
“There was a woman who owned a cabbage patch, which sat on top of a hill in her backyard. Well, one night, an elephant escaped from a circus that was passing through her town and, being hungry, this elephant wandered into the woman’s cabbage patch and started eating. The woman looked out her window and saw the elephant on top of the hill silhouetted by the moonlight, so that it was hard to tell which end of the elephant was which. The woman called the police and said, ‘Officer, there’s an elephant in my cabbage patch and he’s pulling my cabbages out of the ground with his tail.’ ‘Really?’ said the officer. ‘And what’s he doing with them after he pulls them out?’ “
I paused dramatically, as my father had taught me to do, and then headed into the punch line.
“ ‘Officer,’ the woman said, ‘if I told you, you’d never believe me.’ “
I waited for the laughs that my father had guaranteed would come.
They didn’t.
There was nothing but total and utter silence.
I stared out at the crowd in shock. Sweat immediately popped out of every open pore in my body. How could my father do this to me? I thought. Did he know that this joke was going to tank? Was this some filial revenge he’d been waiting to take on me for all the times my mother and I had gone against his wishes and bought something he considered to be ridiculous? Or had all my father’s friends and relatives simply been humoring him all these years, laughing at his jokes so as not to hurt his feelings, and I was now finding that I had such a bad sense of humor that I wasn’t able to distinguish an authentic belly laugh from a well-intentioned pity laugh? Whichever it was, I knew I was quickly seeing fifty bucks and my reputation in the school fly right out the cafetorium window.
I stood frozen.
And then, after a few seconds of silence, I heard something strange. From somewhere in the middle of the audience, I heard a teenage girl’s voice.
“Oh,” she said.
It was an “oh” similar to the “uh-oh” I wou
ld always hear someone in the audience say during reruns of I Love Lucy or The Brady Bunch. Whenever Lucy was about to put a vase on her head that we in the audience knew was going to get stuck or whenever Bobby Brady poured an entire king-size box of laundry soap into the washing machine that we all knew was going to flood the house with suds, some woman in the studio audience, whether laugh track or living, would always go “uh-oh” as the reality of what she was seeing on the screen dawned on her.
As soon as this “oh” was uttered, a wave of laughter swept through the audience. At first, I thought they were laughing at the “oh,” but then I realized the laugh was not a derisive one that reveled in my failure, but the sincere laugh of an audience who needed a few moments to realize that a kid had just told them a story about a woman who thought she saw an elephant shoving cabbages up its ass. The laugh was long and loud, and I immediately felt like Johnny Carson. Every insecure gene in my body transformed into superconfident strands of comedy magician DNA. As I pulled out my Color-Changing Shoelaces and made them do their thing, the audience laughed when they were supposed to laugh, gasped when they were supposed to gasp, and applauded when I had always hoped they would applaud.
The rest of my performance was a blur. Every one of my father’s old-time jokes worked, every one of my store-bought tricks worked, and even the fancy silk scarves my mother let me produce from the Drum O’ Plenty worked, receiving the proper amount of oohs and aahs. By the time I got to my final cornball departing line, “Like the mother cow said when her baby boy calf fell off the tall cliff, ‘A little bull goes a long way,’” I could do no wrong. The audience burst into whistles and applause as I waved to them in what felt like slow motion. I was Elvis. I was Sinatra. I was the Beatles. And I never felt cooler in my life.
I ended up winning first place, even though the girl who came out and sang after me also brought the house down. Her very adult rendition of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” definitely moved the audience, but I think, at the end of the day, the judges were so tired of hearing kids sing that they gave me the prize out of gratitude for any kind of nonmusical diversion. I didn’t care what the reasons were. I simply knew that I had hit a home run on stage that night, and now I had fifty dollars and the admiration of all my peers and their parents to prove it.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. All I could do was replay my performance in my head. My mother had brought along our clunky portable cassette recorder and taped my act, but she made the mistake of having my uncle Ferd hold the recorder in his lap, so that all I could hear on the tape was the faint sound of my voice telling jokes from what sounded like the inside of a toilet and my uncle breathing, laughing, and clearing his throat. This was fine with me, however, because my memory of the event was much better than the tape could relate. On the tape, my voice and delivery sounded halting and tentative, my joke delivery rushed, and the laughs of the audience not as all-encompassing. But I knew what I had heard and I knew what I had felt, and I slept with the envelope that contained the fifty dollars and had the words FIRST PRIZE written on it in green felt-tip marker under my pillow, so that I could touch it during the night and reassure myself that I had actually won and not dreamed the whole thing. My body felt more tingly than it did the night after Pam McGovern kissed me on the cheek for giving her that copy of “I Honestly Love You.” I slept the sleep of kings that night.
In the morning, I awoke to the sounds of singing birds. It was Saturday and I was supposed to go in to work at my father’s store, as I had done every Saturday for the past six years. Normally I dreaded it. But today I couldn’t wait. I wanted to tell everybody about my triumph and bask in their approval and work side by side with my father, the man who helped me have the best evening of my life.
As I got on my green Schwinn ten-speed and pedaled off for his store, I was lighter than air. The victory of the previous night hadn’t lost any of its luster. If anything, it had grown. I knew I could now buy fifty dollars’ worth of new tricks and expand my routine. I started thinking about my shining future in show biz, about how I would take my act out on the road, how I would perform on The Tonight Show and travel to all the state fairs in the country and possibly end up with my own variety show. If Doug Henning could do it, why couldn’t I? After all, I was funnier than he was. And as long as my father had jokes in his joke file, I would have an unbeatable, show-stopping act.
As I rode along through the undeveloped section of our neighborhood, which was made up of overgrown fields and deep drainage ditches, I was whistling a happy tune. I truly don’t think I’ve ever felt happier in my entire life than I did as I rode along that day, with the sun shining and the sound of an audience’s applause and approval playing on a loop in my head. As I coasted down the incline toward the main avenue my father’s store was on, I heard a car coming up behind me. I pulled my bike closer to the shoulder of the road and considered whether I should give the people in the car a little “good morning” wave, just to share my good mood with the world. It was then that the car pulled up next to me and before I could turn to look at it . . .
THWACK!!!
A huge, softball-sized glob of paper towel that had been soaked in ice water hit me full force in the side of the face. The impact was so hard that it knocked me clean off the side of my bike. My green ten-speed and I crashed onto the asphalt and then tumbled violently down into the drainage ditch, landing in an algae-thickened pool of stagnant water.
As I lay there in the ditch, my clothes soaking up the scummy pond of drainage, my face pounding and throbbing from the projectile’s impact, I was completely stunned. It felt as if I had been hit in the side of the head with a baseball bat. I had no idea who threw it or what car they were driving. I didn’t even hear anyone laugh or shout or see them drive away. I only knew that it hurt like hell and it had knocked every ounce of happiness out of me.
After a few minutes, I got up and pulled my bike out of the muck. The bike that I had so diligently washed and polished each week was now dirty and scraped. The front wheel was bent and the seat had torn on the side from its impact with the asphalt. Dazed, I clambered back up to the road and started walking my bike back to my house to change my clothes. As I walked, all I felt like doing was crying. The win at the talent show now seemed more like a burden than a triumph. Was the person in the car who threw the paper at me one of the other competitors? Was it one of their boyfriends or brothers? Was I now a marked man? Was this the other side of success, suffering the revenge of those you’ve defeated? After all, in order to win and succeed, a lot more people have to lose and not succeed. I had won the talent show and the fifty dollars, but it was now starting to feel like my victory, like most other things in life, carried an unpleasant price tag.
Or maybe they were simply some random jackasses knocking kids off bikes with ice water–soaked balls of paper towel. Either way, I felt like the universe had decided to knock me down a notch, making me pay a painful price for feeling so good about myself.
When I got to my dad’s store later that day, I had a huge red welt on the side of my face. This became more of a topic of conversation than my win at the talent show. People whom my dad had told about my victory congratulated me and I thanked them. I tried to get my excitement back again, but the moment had passed. I put the fifty dollars in the bank on Monday and ended up spending it not on more magic tricks but on fixing my bike and a record-buying spree at Peaches. I figured that listening to records in the privacy of my own room was something that would at least allow me to hide from the outside world and hopefully not upset anybody enough for them to come after me with more balls of water-soaked Bounty.
I continued doing magic in retirement homes, worked on my comedy patter, and eventually bought some new tricks with the money I made working at my dad’s store. I performed again the next year in the talent show, but this time safely out of competition, coming back as the previous year’s winner to entertain the audience as the judges tallied up their scores. My dad had helped me put toget
her a whole new set of jokes and my act got another great reception. As I stood there soaking up the crowd’s applause, I felt good that I was only entertaining people and not trying to defeat any of my fellow performers.
After all, the fifty dollars I won had long been spent, and winning the talent show hadn’t made me any more popular with the people whom I thought I wanted to impress. But doing my act made me happy. My dad and I had found something we truly enjoyed doing together, and it was the first time in my life that I actually thought of the guy as not just my dad but my friend. And so, I figured, that had to be more important than trying to convince an audience that I was more talented than the swing choir’s Kerry Reynolds singing “Seasons in the Sun.”
But I still always looked to see who was driving up behind me whenever I rode my bike. I mean, being friends with your dad and feeling good about yourself are all well and good, but taking a wet paper towel in the side of the face is something you should always strive to avoid.
’TIS THE SEASON TO AVOID DATING
There was a couple in my freshman class, Cathy and Dan, who were more mature than the rest of us. Or at least I thought they were more mature than the rest of us because . . . well . . . they made out with each other all the time.
In school.
In public.
The idea of knowing a girl who liked me so much that she’d make out with me in front of other people simply blew my mind. Just the thought of getting a girl to kiss my fourteen-year-old acned face in the privacy of her bedroom or a backyard fort or even a tent in her driveway seemed about as attainable as my childhood dream of being able to fly by flapping my arms. Patty Collins may have misguidedly wanted to kiss me when we were six, but now that I was actually old enough to do it, I simply couldn’t imagine putting my face that close to a girl’s and not having her scream in terror. And if she did let me get that close to her, I figured a quick peck on the lips would be about the most I could hope for. Or handle, for that matter. I liked the idea of holding hands with a girl as I walked down the hall and of kissing her good-bye in front of the open door to her next class, with my fellow students seeing this as they thought to themselves, Wow, Paul’s really cool. He’s got a girlfriend and she’s kissing him in front of us. She must find that ring of pimples around his mouth really sexy. But the idea of making out heavily with a girl, in public or otherwise, was both terrifying and off-putting.