Humor by Michael Finley

I love the fall. I love the crisp air and falling temperatures. What a great time to be out with a good dog, driving the late-model, fire engine red Taurus your mom bequeathed you when she went to winter with family in Kentucky the day before.

So I'm down at Hidden Falls with old Beauregard. He is looking sheepishly up at me, which is my signal that he needs to take a dump. So I stop walking, take out my plastic bag, and wait for him to execute his ablutions.

Poodles are, how do you say, fastidious about these matters. Beau's typical dump means finding the right spot, often after investigating three or four other spots. Or, maybe he's just waiting for the feeling back there to be just right.

Then, he squats in a very primitive shape -- Kodak moment -- and, as he does his thang, he rotates to the right, or counter clockwise. I don't know why he rotates this way -- again, maybe to keep on eye on what he's doing, and on any predators that might swoop down on him while bent to this task (poodle-snatching owls?), and make off with his curly blue bod.

In any event, all these things come to be, just as they have happened 2000 times before. But there's a disgusting hitch in the action, as Beau can't quite seem to shake completely free of the thing he's getting rid of.

You see, poodles are unlike most dogs in that their hair never stops growing. This is OK on their coats, because you can shave them. They catch more burrs when their coats are long, and that's a drag. I have spent many an afternoon picking elephant-ear burrs out of his $600 coat.

But the deal is, poodle hair grows everywhere. Coat, ears, and yes, your hairy hindquarters. And today is the day his hair back there has grown to just the right length to obstruct the free flow of his poop.

So, hunched over like a hissing black cat, Beau looks back at his butt, at the offending poop, and then back again at me, eyes imploring me to intervene.

Then things go from bad to worse, as, still turning, he stumbles into a copse of burr bushes. As he turns, they spool onto his curly coat. Wherever they touch, they stick, like nature's Velcro. Within seconds he has seventy burrs stuck to every part of him including his ears, face, eyebrows, and paws.

"Oh, Beau!" I cry out in dismay. I am looking at two horrible jobs in need of simultaneous emergency action.

[Early warning to the squeamish: things get even worse as this goes on.]

It is not that he or I enjoy intervening. He is shamed by it, and I naturally am repulsed. But it's a job that can't be done without using some sort of buddy system. And the way things are, I'm it.

Usually I have something like toilet paper handy with which to perform the procedure. Sometimes I have to improvise. I have used a decaying newspaper found in the woods, an empty McDonalds coffee cup, even a set of three check deposit slips with my name and address in the upper left-hand corner, fanned out to maximize their surface: deposit here.

I used a handful of fresh-fallen snow once. Beau crossed his eyes over that one.

But today, all I have is the plastic bag. I use it for a few seconds, then for some reason I don't want to keep using it, and the problem is still not solved, and all I got left is two twenties, which I don't feel like breaking.

Exasperated, I uproot a fistful of grass, and use that to midwife the birth in progress. It is a mess, but at least we succeed in getting the main elements out of the dog and into the world at large.

Beau is about to express gratitude to me. He is a vain creature generally, but he can be very touching when he is thankful about something.

So we're limping back to the car, him on the leash, his butt still rather badly blotched. I am damned if I am going to lead him through the woods in this ridiculous condition.

But then I remember: I'm driving my mother's new car. I see it ahead of me, gleaming brick red in the first rays of October sun, like in a commercial. What a beauty!

And I don't know everything about this cockamamie thing we call life, but this much I do know: My mom won't like it if I smear dog shit all over her upholstery.

So I open the trunk, take out a blanket I was saving for deep-winter survival, tuck it around the back seat. There isn't enough to cover the backrest part, just the seat cushion. So I leverage the dog, very slowly, onto the blanket and sit him down.

"Now you stay there!" I tell him sharply, climb into the front, start the car, and head up the 150-foot high hill leading back to the river road.

Almost immediately Beau stands up. I glance at the upholstery, at his butt, at him.

"Goddamnit Beau, you get your ass on that blanket and lie down right now!"

He is paralyzed with uncertainty. Oh, we have only practiced the "lie down" command all of 10,000 times. But now he's frozen in the high beams of my fury, and he can't recall what it means. "Lie ... down ...?" Is that the one involving chicken? Where's the chicken?

I stop the car, put it in park, open the front door, get out of the car, open the back door, grab the dog by his neck and hindquarters and force him to his knees (and elbows).

He lies down. And he stays that way, like a shitty-assed sphinx, all the way home. Whereupon I lead him inside, take him down in the basement, fill the laundry tub with warm water and soap and load the curly blue animal in, and spray, and sponge, and scrape, and brush, and then finally, both of us exhausted, I let him out.

He dashes up the stairs, shaking the water from his legs and butt, and makes a beeline for the studio couch. And I let him go.

I mean, I really do love the fall. I love the sense of the seasons gathering, and the crunch you feel when you step on dead leaves.

But I hate those elephant-ear burr plants. And I hate when the hair on a poodle's ass begins to cling.

It's hard writing about humor. jmhm, the voice of "Sysyphus Shrugged," is really good at it.

I have a piece somewheres here that is about my failed career as humor commentator ...

and I tried to get at what is funny. But I think the very striving for that epiphany undercuts the epiphany. Like an academic symposium on the future of irony, or the recent "Best Internet Joke of All Time" by some British outfit -- no way could it live up to that build-up, and it didn't.

It's the one where the 911 dispatcher advises the hunter to make sure his friend is dead before giving up on him, and the next sound heard is a gun firing, then the hunter is on the phone again and asks, "OK, now what?"

I used to enjoy old books by Stephen Leacock. He was before Groucho and Benchley, but only a bit. What strikes me about him is that he is inventing humor for the masses, and not quite getting it right. There are hints of the potential of pop culture in his pieces -- but they are formative, because so was pop culture at that time.

When he was really on, he could take you to a completely made-up place. Which could be very charming, but which had its limitations. Leacock was light, and often floated away on that lightness.

Like, what if every Beatles album were perfect and baroque like Sergeant Pepper -- after a while you would kill for a blown note.

You can tell when you study this stuff that great comic minds have certain identifiable tropes or tendencies -- like Woody Allen's compulsion to combine a serious, weighty first phrase (afterlife) with an idiotic followup (apartment).

Mark Twain's basic joke was to appear to be saying something acceptable and upright and commonoplace, but to have the subversive real feeling leak out the sides, like a sandwich with too much special sauce.

Like in the piece where he describes taking a turn at woodbut map-making, and then you see the map (of Paris and surrounds), and it is backwards. Despite being endoresed by the crowned heads of Europe, the mapmaker remains a consummate booby.

Twain was roped and bound and weighted with bricks on those perfect parallel lines, which I believe was revolutionary to human consciousness at that time. It's fun to reread him now and see him working the same trick a thousand times, like an old spitballer. here it comes ... oh perfect ... splat!

Most humor memes arise from personality and a quick whisk of self-loathing. Henny Youngman had to have loved his wife, or that split-second, dogfaced callousness could not have worked. It was the wretchedness of those short jokes, the poverty of pulling them out of a box like a prehistoric Carrot Top, that made them work.

Milton Berle (and Red Skelton, in a Readers Digest sort of way) radiated such happiness, you laughed before you heard the joke.

I know a writer who has tremendous chops for being funny. Everyone admires his gifts, but the laugh is always for him in some way, it is not freely given. The reason? I think it is because this guy is so awesomely talented, but something in the spirit is missing. Deep, deep, deep down, he just isn't funny, he's a gentleman show-off..

Billy Crystal, from the look in his eyes, always seems sealed up in a private lock-box of fear and narcissism. Deep down, his humor is lodged in pathos and unhappiness. Which may be why he does not quite give joy very often.

I am talking about that whole pathetic coterie of Robin Williams-like, Billy Crystal-like clowns who are really just doing comedy until something better opens up in being loved like a puppy.

Funny Bits

Michael Finley

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