Laughing Matters

by Ryan G. Van Cleave

You might be asking yourself, “Why does this Ryan Van Cleave person have a humor column in Sarasota Scene Magazine and I don’t?”

Great question. I’ve been asking myself this very same question for about two weeks now. I’ve come up with three answers.

• After a bout of particularly successful class clowning some years back, my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Birkeback (imagine the fun we had with that name!), cornered me outside the boys’ bathroom and confessed that I was “mildly amusing.” 

           I heard “wildly amusing.” 

           Like Silly Putty and the Sunday funnies, a heavenly match was made. 

• I’ve read exactly three Miami Herald pieces by humorist Dave Barry. Two of them made me laugh.
• I asked my editor, Julie Milton, if I could write a humor column for Sarasota Scene Magazine.

          “Are you funny?” she asked.

          “Not particularly,” I said.

           She shrugged. 

           I shrugged.

           And a column was born.

BOOM! Case closed. Not even Johnny Cochran could argue against evidence like this.

But here’s the thing. On more than one occasion, my wife has declared me to be less than hilarious. If memory serves, the latest evidence of this was when she said I was “as funny as a colonoscopy by a nearsighted proctologist.” 

This strikes me as a potential setback for somebody who DOES have a monthly humor column in Sarasota Scene Magazine, after all. It also got me thinking about sending my own proctologist a Pearle Vision gift card for Xmas.

A week back, long after the kids went to bed, I snuck away from a “Gilmore Girls” marathon with my wife to fetch a blueberry Pop-Tart from the kitchen…and en route, I stepped, barefoot, on a LEGO brick, generating about 18 zillion Pascals of pressure and, from the depths of my soul, let loose with a scream so loud that it might’ve launched shock waves all the way down to Naples. My wife told me to stop being a baby. I replied with “I’m pretty sure this hurt more than childbirth,” which caused her to bonk me on the head with a Bounty roll.

Clearly her judgment is way off-kilter, so her challenge to my humor IQ can be dismissed. Whew! Crisis averted. 

Here’s something I’ve discovered about having my own humor column. People want to share their best LOL stories and jokes. Often unsolicited. As in pummeling me with material cribbed directly from online sources like “Another 40 OMG-Good Jokes” while my mouth is full of croutons and Romaine lettuce.

What could I reply with but “Mmhph!” right?

So just in case they took that as an affirmative “Mmhph!” here are some of the gems I’ve been assured are slam-dunk knee-slappers.

From my parents: “Talk about that time with the breadbox. You know. The thing. With the other thing? Hilarious.” (They’ve mentioned this “thing” so many times over the years that I’m not too embarrassed to ask what the heck they’re talking about!)

From my two-desks-over colleague at work: “Trump and toasters and I forget the other thing. I had it a moment ago. Hmmm. I’ll email you when I remember it. But it was so, so awesome. Terrific stuff. Trust me.”

From Daughter #1: “What do you call a seagull that flies over the bay?” (“A bagel.”)

From Daughter #2: “Where does a king keep his armies?” (“In his sleevies.”)

From Daughter #2 again after gathering her composure after that “sleevies” hit: “Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl in the bathroom?” (“Because the ‘P’ is silent.”)

With material like this, the column pretty much writes itself! It really makes me wonder if Lenny Bruce, Jerry Seinfeld, and Chris Rock all were equally blessed with such first-rate source material. Surely, odds are that we all can’t be so lucky.

It only seems fair, though, to give you a clearer sense of the things I do find funny. So here are some of those things, listed in the precise order that they come to me as I sit here in a Cheetos-induced haze, laptop propped up by three never-opened Yellow Pages books, as I watch Thursday Night Football in Mandarin because my TVs SAP button is messed up.  funny funny funny funny funny funny funny

•    Penguins wearing hats
•    Quinoa
•    British protest signs (“What do we want? Evidence-based change! When do we want it? After peer review!”)
•    Spouses who say “I was just going to start that chore that I notice you’re already doing.”
•    People who pick the seeds off a strawberry.
•    Yellow Pages (my kid once saw one of those  dinosaur-age things in our driveway and asked, 
• “Daddy? Why are people leaving trash in our yard?”)
•    Wives who ask husbands what they want for dinner . . . then tell the husbands that they’re wrong.
•    Shoving 45 gummy bears in my mouth at once
•    Flavored nail polish
•    Sports haiku
•    Slowly replacing all the photos in the house with pictures of Ryan Gosling

Now that I’ve shared a bit of what makes me tick, I trust that we’re beginning to understand each other. But just to make sure I have a solid sense of what YOU find funny, please do feel free to come up to any person wearing a brown t-shirt next month (it’s probably me—my wife just alerted me to the fact that I now own not one, not two, but THREE brown t-shirts and if I don’t start wearing them, consequences are forthcoming) and list away as many things as you can think of that make you chortle. Bonus points if the list of these rib-ticklers includes the word “chortle.” funny funny funny funny funny funny funny

So I’ll see you back here next month. And in the meantime, rest assured—I’ll look into finding out who invented the traffic roundabout, and who invented the inter-office memo. If I were a betting man, I’d say it was likely the same jerk.

Have something special you want to share with Ryan about life, liberty and the pursuit of laughter? Email him at ryan@scenesarasota.com.