I like funny. Maybe more than anything, I like funny.
Interesting to think about how a sense of humor forms. We all like to laugh, right? Most of us, anyway. But how does it start? Certainly, I’m no child-development expert. But at least from when my long-term memory kicked in, I know I liked cartoons. When I could read, comic strips joined the mix. Sitcoms, for sure.
At some point—certainly not a conscious decision—I thought, I’d like to try that myself. Draw some funny things. Write some. Say funny things in front of other people. In whatever field, we all ape our influences, and if we’re lucky, we tweak and combine them into something original.
But of all we’re exposed to, why do some things stick—and stick hard—and not others? I heard a report on the radio this week, that when you’re 11, 12 years old, your brain has way more synapses than it needs. They’re firing like crazy. As time passes, some of them fall away. But the info that gets stuck in the brain briar patch during those years, it can stay there forever. You might not remember something you learned in 10th-grade social studies, but some 7th-grade Spanish is in there for good. ¿Comprendes?
Maybe it’s like that for me and comedy.
When I was 9 (this is pre-super-synapse situation, so who knows), my sister and I had that Steve Martin A Wild and Crazy Guy album. And oh man did I love that. Listened to it over and over and over again. Didn’t understand everything but didn’t even realize that. It was hilarious and made me laugh so much.
And it’s interesting to me to learn now that Andy Rooney—yeah, I was planning to mention him eventually—joined 60 Minutes that same year, 1978. (I would’ve guessed that he’d been there from the start.) Like so many others in those days of few channels, we were a 60 Minutes household. So, I don’t know, I sat there and watched it. And this grey-haired, ruddy-faced complaining guy at the end was pretty funny.
Now, I certainly wasn’t alone in this discovery. He quickly became sort of a national phenomenon. Joe Piscopo would impersonate him on Saturday Night Live. But for me, or at least for someone my age, Rooney had a bigger impact. I remember checking out his 1981 book A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney from the Princeton library. It was that exciting, kind of scary stretch of time when you’d still feel more comfortable in the children’s section, but… there was the occasional grown-up book on those mysterious other shelves that caught your attention.
It seems weird to me now, especially from the belated perspective of today’s Disney Channel-driven extreme youth culture, that 12-year-old me would be drawn to this whiny dude in his early 60s. But he was a key element in the blend for me.
I have vague recollections from my single-digit years of randomly catching a Monty Python sketch on TV. Somber men were slowly carrying a coffin down the road. An exhausted pallbearer collapsed. The others put down the coffin, opened it, and placed their fallen comrade within, before continuing down the road. Until another pallbearer dropped dead… and so on. That stayed with me—synapses be damned. But it wasn’t until their Flying Circus show was rebroadcast on channel 13 in my early teen years that the Pythons really had an idelible effect on my psyche.
Likewise, I stumbled upon David Letterman during the summer of 1980 on his short-lived morning show. That had a huge instant appeal to me, but again, it wasn’t till high school, when I could tape his late-night show on the VCR and watch the week’s worth over the weekend, when I truly become a devotee. (Hmm, Piscopo impersonated him, too.) And that program probably had the biggest lasting impact on what I consider humor.
Maybe the appeal of the Letterman show was that it combined the smart absurdity of Steve Martin and Python with the comedic-critique-of-everything vibe of Andy Rooney. Those who don’t appreciate Letterman often bring up his snark. Sarcasm. Cynicism. Curmudgeon. Some pie-in-the-sky folks do not care for these concepts but I love them and live by them. Those words have followed me forever and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
And I think it’s this aspect which leads right back to Andy Rooney. I hadn’t watched “A Few Minutes With…” on anything resembling a regular basis since high school. The handful of times I’ve caught a Rooney segment on 60 Minutes in the years since, he’s seemed, you know, old, out-of-touch. A relic. But still, that spirit is always with me. Maybe I was drawn to him at a young age because I was a 12-year-old curmudgeon. Hey, it suits me.
Many seem to confuse cynicism with pessimism. But I’ve always thought the true optimists point out idiocy wherever and whenever they see it, because they hold society to a higher standard. If you turn a blind eye to the madness around us, or quietly accept it, then you’ve given up, and maybe you’re the pessimist. So thank you, Andy Rooney, for speaking up, speaking out, and helping shape my worldview, you cranky bastard, you.
Jack Silbert, curator