A Spoonful of Comedy helps the Bully go down.

Most of my life I’ve been told that I’m funny. I usually just smile and say thank you, or in a lot of cases, laugh it off. But not too long ago someone asked me if I’d always been funny. I had to think about it before I could answer. Well surprise, surprise, surprise. Don't things like this somehow always go back to one of our parents?

I was a little runt in grade school. I had little gangly arms and legs, mountains of tangled curls, and terribly buck teeth. Weighing in on the same scale as a toddler, I was asked often how old I was or if I was lost and needed my mommy. But, after Kenda Stallings beat me to a pulp with my own Sigmund and the Sea Monsters lunchbox in the second grade, I learned pretty quickly that the way to ingratiate yourself to even the biggest of bullies, was to be able to make them laugh; and most of the time it worked. The times that it didn’t, after the tremendous pounding that I knew was to follow, I would go home and brush up on my self deprecating humor. Not that I knew at the time that that is what it was, but it seemed making fun of myself before giving her the chance to do so defused her somewhat and so armed with this knowledge I would go forth to throw my self esteem into the oncoming path of the Mack truck of bullies on the playground every single day. Eventually she and I would come to an understanding. She was big and not very bright. I was tiny and pretty damn funny. We made a great team. I won her over by making her laugh and even if it was at me, and not with me, I felt that I was making great strides in the right direction.

He was always quick with the joke; my father. Even as a small child I remember how he sounded when he laughed. It was a big, booming laugh straight from the belly. And his face would soften and his eyes would crinkle. It’s that face that always made me smile and one that I never saw often enough as a child.

He was the guy that would ask you to pull his finger. The father that would tell my brother that he had Dumbo ears. He was the guy that would tell the knock-knock jokes everyone had heard a million times, but to my father, they were just funnier when he told them. He’s the guy that told me that I could eat corn on the cob through a picket fence.

After many years of observing him I came to realize that whenever he was in an uncomfortable situation; he was quick with the joke. It was his protective shield. It was his way of dealing. I sucked my fingers until I was in fourth grade; hence the buck teeth. Even though I knew that I was too old to be sucking my fingers, whenever I would get nervous or anxious, in the mouth they’d go. One of my younger sisters wet the bed until about fourth grade. Again, even though she knew that she would get spanked and made fun of, it kept happening. And yet another sibling had the blanket. My father it seemed had a blanket of his own. One, that apparently, I would trade up to.

And so, I kept on joking. And they kept on laughing. The older I got the easier it became to make them laugh. And soon the self deprecation would make way for tongue in cheek with a little slap stick thrown in when warranted.

I would spend hours sometimes listening to my parents old Bill Cosby records, laughing at his different voices and his sing-song story telling and then try to incorporate my own Cosby-isms into my school day.

I became known as the class clown. Even my teachers would eventually be won over by my humor. My father however was not the least bit amused.

As I grew older I came to realized that if I tried too hard, I just wasn’t funny. But when I would find myself in an uncomfortable situation, like meeting someone for the first time that intimidated me, or was simply nervous or anxious, the humor would just spill out of me like a fat man jumping into the shallow end of the pool. It was as if it would take on a life of its own, my humor. It was then that I knew where it had all started.

Somewhere along the way it had become an amalgam of all the best qualities that my parents could offer in the way of a funny bone. My mother was very intelligent and well read, and so could be quite witty. My father was not what I would have ever called well read but he had that ole' country boy thing going for him as well as a sophomoric sense of humor, so to him, farting was a great ice breaker.

And from the ashes of my broken self esteem rose the great phoenix that would become my own sense of humor. I’m sure that you can understand how well this went over......... once I enlisted into Basic Training.

As much as I knew that I wanted to be in the Army that did not change the fact that I was nervous as hell the day I stepped off the bus at FT. Dix New Jersey. Having no idea what to expect the humor rose to my throat, ready to spew out like Linda Blair during an exorcism. As I stepped on to the ground I was immediately introduced to a slight woman, standing no taller than 5 foot, but who had the biggest mouth I’d ever seen. And when she started to scream at me to get in line she looked like she had a flip top head and resembled a Pez dispenser. I mentioned this as we all shuffled to line ourselves up in front of her and the few who heard me started to giggle. Pez dispenser heard us. The crew was then asked who the “f'ing comedian” was. All of a sudden my partners in crime turned on me and were all pointing their fingers my way. From that day on she called me the “fucking comedian” and made me tell a joke whenever she saw me. Like the day that she tossed my bunk out of the third floor window into the snow because I’d not tightened my blankets enough. I stood down on the street in formation with the rest of my unit and watched as my bunk and all my linen went sailing out the window. She poked her flip top head out of it and yelled down, “Hey f'ing comedian! Tell me a joke now about your bed!“ And so it went. Had my saving grace become my own worst enemy?

On one of the last days of training we had to go to the grenade range and we were going to throw two live fragmentation grenades. I was excited! This was gonna be awesome! We were finally going to get to blow some shit up. They lined us up alphabetically and having a last name that starts with a T meant I was almost last out of 321 girls. We stood outside waiting to get to the foxholes to have our turn. It started snowing. And it got worse and worse and the wind started blowing. By the time they called my name I was a frozen Texas string bean.

I’d put my gloves on to try and keep my hands warm reminding myself that once I got my turn to take them off. The instructors told us to never, ever throw a grenade with gloves on. So my turn comes and I get in the foxhole and the Drill Sergeant asks me if I’m ready. I say yes.

He puts the flak jacket on me so as to protect me from any flying debris and then he slaps the first grenade into my hand. I rock back, pull the pin and then let that bitch fly. He shoves me down into the foxhole and over my head I hear the loudest freakin ka-boom I’ve ever heard in my life. I did that! It was awesome! I immediately jumped up and upon witnessing the destruction I’d done to the jeep that I’d been aiming for said, “Damn that thing went down quicker than a cheerleader on a quarterback”. He started laughing. I started laughing. I’m not sure if it was nervous laughter or he thought I was just plain funny but we both just started to crack up. And then he slapped the other grenade into my hand and noticed that I was still wearing my gloves. All at once he starts screaming at me “what did I tell you about the gloves”? “Take them off, take them off, take them off!” As he screams at me I fumble with the grenade in my hand and the pin gets pulled and goes flying across the foxhole. It was like slow motion after that. He screams at me again, his eyes all of a sudden as big as saucers. “t h r o w t h e f u c k i n g t h i n g!” And in my great desire to have that damn thing out of my hand I did a little toss with my right arm and lobbed it barely over the wall. He shoved me down and lay on top of me and then the ground shook as it rained snow and dirt and rocks on top of both of us. After about a minute he jerked me up by the straps of the flak jacket and kicked me in the ass and told me to get the hell out of his foxhole. He definitely wasn’t laughing now.

I graduated two days later. When I walked across the stage to receive my diploma the Drill Sergeant was standing there. He handed me my diploma and told me that he honestly didn’t think that I was going to make it to becoming a soldier. He did say however, that he expected to see me doing a comedy show one day AND, grenade incident aside, that he was happy to have known me in his life. As I walked back across the stage, diploma in hand, I knew that I had done it. I had conquered a beast even bigger than the one I’d left at home all those years before. I WAS somebody.

Stepping off the stage, I accidently farted. It was loud and everyone heard it and so what are you gonna do? I laughed; harder than I’d done since getting there and soon the whole front three rows were in hysterics. The fucking comedian had struck again. It seemed no matter what I accomplished in this life, or choices that I made, there would always be a little of my father in me.