I have a penchant for comedians with one liners that make one laugh. From the strange to the bizarre. Even old Bob Hope can make me smile sometimes. I recall Steven Wright saying he had just put a skylight in his new apartment and that the people upstairs were furious. There is something about making people laugh with the briefest of lines that takes immense skill. A sly eye on the world.
The Great Marx Brothers who brought their radio show to the big screen with Graucho’s ‘Every agreement has a Sanity Clause’ to which Chico replies something like, ‘oh we don’t need that I know there is no Sanata Claus.
The more modern Mitch Hedberg, “I used to do drugs. I still do but I used to do them as well.” And the incomparable Robin Williams when asking how as one man he gets to be on a major stage in New York responds to his own question ‘Money.”
Yes audiences want to be amused and no it doesn’t change the world a bit the way some of the comedians wish it would. But it does give people something else to remember besides the News. Something to share with others.
A rabbi in Minsk was on his knees in his garden when his pupil arrived. His Pupil asked him what he was doing.
“I am looking for my glasses,”he tells him.
Within an hour all his pupils are looking in the garden and after a while one asks
“Rebbe do you know roughly where you dropped them?”
“I dropped them in my study,” he tells them.
“Rebbe, “says one astonished, “If you dropped them in your study why are you searching in your garden?”
“Ah,” shrugs the Rabbi, “It’s lighter out here.”