The year I turned thirty was farcically awful. In February, I got up to make toast one day, heard a high-pitched whine deep in my brain, and woke on the kitchen floor with a broken humerus. It never healed, so in June I had surgery, and the day after, morphined in bed, I felt a tickle on my arm: a flat red insect with a striped carapace, crawling across my elbow. I bet you can guess what it was.
After tossing the mattress and sobbing for a week, I hit the landmark birthday, the big three-oh. I was a magazine editor with a partial focus on food, and as often happens, a restaurant invited me to dine gratis in hopes of a feature. Being poor, I cannily scheduled the dinner for my big day, ordered wantonly with my then-spouse, and saw stars when they set down a bill for $200+. Too embarrassed to speak up, I paid with rent money.
This is the part where I’m supposed to say how hilarious I find this now, ten years on—how comedy equals tragedy plus time. Nah. That year was miserable. (Did I mention that two months after the bedbugs were finally eradicated, I got them again?) I also doubt I’ll ever see it as character building. Bad stuff happens—the end. As a witty former colleague often said, “What doesn’t kill me fucks me up for a long, long time.”
But you know what I do find funny? The stuff in which I partook to escape the flat-broke, creepy-crawly, bendy-boned morass my life was then. I have a memory of lying with my arm in a postsurgical cast on a new mattress, surrounded by a perimeter of bedbug-killing diatomaceous earth, cough-laughing at Four Lions, the Riz Ahmed film about a cell of bumbling jihadis. The Eric Andre Show flung itself into the world that year and saw heavy rotation at my house. (Sur la table! C’est la vie!) I read and watched and listened to a ton of gut-crampingly funny stuff as my apartment was fumigated and my stitches dissolved and creditors hissed into my voicemail. Though I can’t yet bring myself to laugh at it, I did laugh my way through it.
This is the year I turn forty, and for a hot second it seemed like I might be victim to some landmark-birthday curse. I was laid off some weeks ago, effectively ending—since nearly all of the magazines I’d want to work for no longer exist—a fourteen-year career. Despite an adequate safety net, poor-person-thinking dies hard. I felt reflexive financial terror (Mortgage! Kid!) with a soupçon of ego death (what will I say when people ask what I do???). But comedy helped once again. The evening of my lay-off, my husband ordered Taco Bell and put on The Office. By the time Ryan started the fire, I was fine. Within days, the universe and a vast network of goodhearted former colleagues had provided about 500 freelance gigs, and to my surprise I now earn more, never have to commute again, and can say no to shit I find boring. I got a haircut recently, and when the stylist asked what I do, I said “I’m a writer.” Not too shabby.
This time, I do find my misfortune amusing. I fell ass-backwards into magazine work in my twenties, but once I was in I spent unhinged volumes of time and energy climbing mastheads and adding titles to my “so-and-so has written for such publications as…” list. Now it’s gone and I…don’t care? I just don’t care. It feels lucky and healthy and very, very funny. So long, career, and thanks for all the swag. Life is absurd. And the best—the only—way to survive it is to take it easy.
Maybe I should find that wretched thirtieth year funny. Maybe it’s been long enough. All those problems have been solved and then some, which is how it pretty much always turns out. To dip a toe into possibly laughing at that idiotic era, I’ll tell you a ridiculous story. Every time the bedbug exterminators came, I’d have to get my cat out of the apartment for a few hours to keep her from being gassed. I couldn’t afford a kennel, but I had a car. So, we’d go on road trips together. Once, two hours each way to Northampton, Massachusetts to buy donuts. Once, to the Great Hunger memorial off the Saw Mill, commemorating those who died in the potato famine. (The cat and I napped in the parking lot.) And, most memorably, to Sleepy Hollow and its stately cemetery, where I parked us next to the sunny Rockefeller mausoleum and cried over the ordeal of being me. I told my cat, “I guess this is what life is going to be like.” And now literally nothing from that life is the same—not one thing. The spouse, the car, the cat, the apartment, the city, the state, the bugs, the poverty, the job, that old me: gone! It all seemed so serious and permanent! I really thought it had all been decided, set in stone—at thirty!
Pretty funny if you ask me.
Now, on to the syllabus. This month’s recommendations had to meet a simple but high-wire criterion: make me laugh. Also, none of the obvious stuff you already know—no Hitchhiker’s Guide, Jeeves and Wooster, Vonnegut, A Confederacy of Dunces. The below is where I landed, and I hope the list will ease and aid your journey to laughter, particularly if you’re going through hell. If not, there’s always Ryan’s cheese pita.
1.
“The Doctor Joke”
Author: Unknown
My favorite joke, which a friend told me nearly twenty years ago:
A guy goes to the doctor and lists his complaints.
“Okay,” the doctor says. “You’re going to have to stop masturbating.”
“Why?” the guy asks.
The doctor says, “So I can examine you.”
2.
Gulp: Adventures in the Alimentary Canal
Author: Mary Roach
Book; Non-fiction (2013)
Truth be told, all of Roach’s books are delightful, each maniacally reported, charmingly digressive—there is no rabbit hole too esoteric or tangential for this woman—and devilishly funny. I chose this one because I read it most recently, and because it involves farts, which are funnier to me than anything else in the world. And there is a good deal of farting herein, along with a compelling explanation of Elvis’ true cause of death, a history of chewing philosophies (hello, Fletcherizing), and a highly scientific exploration—with insights from an incorrigible prison smuggler—of how much stuff you can realistically store in your butt.
3.
“Sea Oak”
Author: George Saunders
Short Story; published in Pastoralia (2000)
Comedy and horror make for a disorienting mix, and while reading this profoundly strange story you’ll likely find yourself laughing through pangs of unease. Sea Oak is the apartment complex that houses our young narrator, an erotic dancer at Joysticks; his sister and cousin, teen moms studying (fruitlessly) for their GEDs; their babies; and Aunt Bernie, a sweet old woman, ever cheerful despite frequent shootings in the neighborhood and too little money and a life that would make anybody bitter. Not long after Bernie dies of fright during a home invasion, the kids get a call from the cemetery: Bernie’s grave has been dug up, her casket is open, and Bernie isn’t inside. “‘Typically it’s teens?’ one cop says. ‘Typically we find the loved one nearby? Once we found the loved one nearby with, you know, a cigarette between its lips, wearing a sombrero?’” But it isn’t teens: Bernie has risen from the dead. I won’t spoil it, but suffice to say that her return to Sea Oak is by turns hilarious, repulsive—and somehow hugely affecting.
4.
“Memphis Kansas Breeze sing their hits on Comedy Bang Bang”
Video; Comedy Bing Bong episode #616 (2019)
I’d initially resolved not to include videos here, because how could I ever draw the line? But this one deserves a position of honor. A few times a month, as my husband and I are readying for bed, he’ll quietly steer YouTube to this video of two honey-voiced (parody) country singers twangin’ about…trucks. Just trucks, and the fun things they do. For example, “Pickup Truck Birthday Party” is about what you think it is (“And instead of party hats the trucks wear traffic cones / and instead of birthday clowns they hire a mechanic…”), as is “Truck Prom Dance,” in which a jock truck invites a nerd truck to the prom to humiliate her, “but then the boy truck took off the girl truck’s glasses / and realized just how pretty she was…”
Now, listen closely: You’re going to watch those two songs and think “This is fun, but is it really so incredible that it deserves to be the one video on that syllabus?” Then you’ll watch the third and final song, “Truck Baby,” which is most assuredly not about whatever you’re imagining it might be and is likely a thousand times more grotesque. And then you will understand.
5.
Author: Linda Rosenkrantz
Book; Fiction (1968)
In this jolly recounting of three friends, Marsha, Emily, and Vincent, chatting during a beach vacation, there’s zero exposition—it’s all dialogue on which you, the reader, are invited to eavesdrop. It’s also taken from life, recorded in the summer of 1965, then edited into a narrative. In the trio’s banter (which is very funny, catty, and hyper-relatable to anyone who’s ever talked shit with a friend), you unearth whole caverns of subtext, get an intimate glimpse into each speaker’s psyche—and walk away with the lovely feeling of having relaxed with friends all day, your face sore from laughing.
6.
Author: Baratunde Thurston
Essay; published in How to Be Black (2012)
Here, Thurston—formerly of The Onion and The Daily Show—offers practical guidance for being the one Black friend in a group of white people, preserving your spot in the crew by carefully meeting its exact expectations of who you are. For example:
You must also be able to do black things. Ideally, you will be fairly competent in at least one of the following areas: rapping, dancing, grilling or frying meats, running or other stereotypically black sports. If you can back up your mental knowledge of blackness with an occasional Moon (or Crip) Walk and a semiannual freestyle rhyme, your value is assured.
It's also key during this mission to maintain a sense of humor:
One entertaining way to keep your friends on their toes is to occasionally play the race card for fun. For example, if you're getting in the car with them and you end up being directed to the backseat, you can yell, "Why do I have to sit in the back? Is it because I'm black!?" They'll be nervous for a moment, but then you'll laugh, and they'll laugh, and oh, the fun times you can have being the Black Friend.
Honestly, I could cut and paste the whole thing because it’s all just as lacerating and hilarious as these excerpts—but you should really get the whole book. There isn’t a weak page in it.
7.
“Table 8: Discredited Styles”
Author: John Hodgman
Chart; published in The Areas of My Expertise (2005)
You have to be nerdy to find this book funny, but you also have to be nerdy to read this newsletter, so I suppose it works out. Constructed like an almanac, it’s a compendium of faux-pragmatic nonsense delivered with deadpan authority, and this chart about now-abandoned male haircuts of yore is among my favorite selections. You’ve got your Sink Cut (1900s-1930s, North America), which involved “putting your child’s head in a sink and cutting around the edge. The sink caught the blood handily. During the Depression, when many families did not have sinks, a dirt hole would be substituted…” Then there’s The Shot Glass (1930s, U.S. Military), in which “a shot glass was placed on the new soldier’s head and the rest of the hair was shaved off without lather,” leaving a handsome tuft. You’ll also find a list of 700 hobo names (Whitman Sampler, Terry Gross), lycanthropic transformation timetables to help you gauge how quickly men become wolves during this moon phase, and guides to all 50 states (New Jersey’s official motto: “We Are Defensive About Our Faults”).
Extra Credit: Just want to include a brief ode to unapologetically geeky humor like this, which is just so pure. It puts me in mind of my four-year-old son’s current favorite song, “Doctor Worm,” by They Might Be Giants—inarguably the dweebiest band ever formed—which is about a worm who is not a real doctor but is an actual worm, and who plays the drums; “I think I’m getting good, but I can handle criticism,” he says. It’s doofy and wonderful and somehow not one of the songs on their album for kids, and it handily illustrates a useful comedy maxim: Great humor often results when you abandon the exhausting burden of looking cool.
8.
“Ollie the Owl”
Author: Benjamin Nugent
Short Story; published in Fraternity (2020)
In 2007, I was an intern at a literary quarterly, reading fiction submissions. Most got a post-it on which I wrote caustic criticism; on a few, I offered praise. And then there was this story, which got no post-it at all because I shoved it at my colleague and demanded he read it then and there. How we laughed (and laughed, and laughed) at this story, knowing it could never make it into the magazine—except, to our enduring shock, it did.
The story (from a collection of linked stories) concerns a frat house full of typical frat guys. One day, a middle-aged alumnus and former brother pops in to upbraid them for a recent incident: “I heard one of you made a little bozo of himself during a protest march. Some kind of song and dance where you showed your downstairs.” Annoyed, Swordfish, the frat brother who did indeed show his downstairs at the march, grabs the strap-on he wore on his head that night and defiantly affixes it to the frat’s cherished mascot, a wooden owl named Ollie. You know how in Frosty the Snowman, putting the hat on Frosty is what makes him come to life? The dildo possesses similar powers, and, well, Swordfish’s transgressions are avenged. There is a moment on the penultimate page that made me laugh myself stupid—both in 2007 and just now. You’ll know it when you see it.
Extra Credit: Speaking of dweebs, check out Nugent’s amusing and well-researched American Nerd: The Story of My People (2008), which blends memoir and reportage to paint a portrait of an oft-misunderstood archetype.
9.
Author: u/NoahtheRed
Reddit comment (2015)
This now-eight-year-old post is legendary among we losers who frequent the bizarro, blisteringly funny universe that is Reddit. I came upon it a few years ago, have returned to it at least a dozen times, and it still destroys me at every read. For context, the guy writing the comment is a former teacher answering the question, “Who’s the dumbest person you’ve ever met?” Everyone, I present to you the evolutionary marvel that is…Kevin.
10.
Author: Ian Frazier
Quote; Originally published in O, The Oprah Magazine (2010-ish?)
A dozen or so years ago—I wish I could be more specific, but I worked there for four thousand years and they all run together, and Google was no help—O published a terrific advice issue. One chunk of it was this tiny quote, which no longer exists on the Internet other than in this Google Books link, because I later included it in an O anthology. (So, in that sense, Google was helpful. Apologies to Google.)
I talked the quote out of Frazier over the phone, and we joked about the general “what can you do but laugh?”-ness of life. I’ve never stopped thinking about this principle of bemused acceptance he describes, this resigned joy in the face of small misfortunes. I think of it whenever life seems intent on snagging my belt loop on the door handle or shoving a nail in my tire or, you know, destroying my career in an impromptu Zoom. It’s the right attitude, I think, a most openhearted and sanity-preserving one, and I hope you find it helpful, too.
Next time: What to read when you’re married…