The Pickytarian talks about the perils of laughing out loud on public transportation. I was on a plane once reading Naked by David Sedaris, and I entered that state where you realize you’re making a fool of yourself laughing while everyone else is trying to sleep or keep a grip on their sanity in the face of profound personal phobias or not strangle the flight attendant who insists your messenger bag isn’t stowed securely under the seat in front of you. That state, of course, moves on to the next phase, trying not to laugh out loud while still enjoying the thing that’s making you laugh in the first place, so you look even more like an insane person, shaking and grunting. Had this been a post-9/11 world, the plane would have made an emergency landing and I would have been detained.
This also happened to me at a the wedding of an acquaintance. The event itself was extremely heartfelt. And, as you might suspect, I’m not good with heartfelt. When the maid of honor got up to sing Bonnie Raitt’s “Nick of Time,” accompanied by the best man on guitar, I just lost it. Not because she was a bad singer, mind you, but she was precisely the wrong kind of singer to attempt a Bonnie Raitt song. She had this high, reedy soprano with lots of vibrato. And I’m hearing Bonnie Raitt sing this in my head while “I played Jenny Lind in the senior production of Barnum!” is singing it in front of me, and that was just the end of it. I mean, I’m sitting here in some twee country church at the wedding of someone I barely know who’s just trying to pad the gift haul by inviting me, and I found out beforehand that the reception was going to be dry, so it all came crashing down at once. I was attending the wedding with my sister, and she’s even more caustic than I am, and we were very glad we’d arrived late and had to take seats in the back.
Oh, man, then there was the time in college when I got roped into helping out with a video project. (It happened a lot, the curse of the communications major who took acting classes.) We met with the director, and she’s giving her vision for the piece, and she’s telling us the theme is about how men oppress women in our society, and something just clicked in my head that this was going to be scored with Pat Benetar’s “Love is a Battlefield,” so I leaned over to a friend who’d been roped in, too, and told him my theory. (We were going to be playing brutal cops. Can’t you just see it?) So, then she says, “and the music will be ‘Love is a Battlefield.'” And, again, that was the end of that. Eyes watering, body shaking, the whole nine yards.
On the subject of things I’m ashamed to laugh at, have you seen Drawn Together on Comedy Central? I’m usually not one for gross-out, low-brow comedy, but this show makes me laugh the laugh of shame every time I see it. I’m particularly fond of the psychotic, violent Pokemon-ish character, Ling Ling. And my pets are sick of me looking at them and singing, “Go (insert pet’s name here)! It’s your birthday! Not for real-real! Just for play-play!” I shouldn’t like it, I know, but I do. My partner, who hates cartoons of every stripe except for maybe Spirited Away and The Incredibles, loves it too, which is unsettling.
Unrelated to any of the above, except for the fact that both of these gentlemen make me laugh often, Mike Sterling wants to know what your favorite currently-published comic book series is. (I went with She-Hulk.) Elsewhere in the blogosphere, Graeme has returned to the Rampage, and he’s hit the ground running.