Funny is Relative

My wife won’t read  my blog.  She says it’s not funny. I’m writing during the least amusing time of my life while my daughter sleeps nearby recovering from seven hours of spinal surgery, in order to amuse myself.

OK so not everything I say is keel over belly laugh pee yourself funny. Like when the cashier at the mini-mart asks if I want my Doritos in a bag, and I say,  “No thank you, it’s already in a bag.” But that’s no reason for my wife to say I’m not funny.

Stick with me here this may start slow

“Don’t use my name!” she warns me every time I start to write. 

This is from a woman who has joined every social networking site on the planet where she’s posted photos of our entire family on each one. There are Taliban in Kandahar that can pick my four year old out of a kindergarten class picture, but I shouldn’t use her name in my stories.

See, now that right there would really get her mad.   And as I write that, I giggle a little and she responds immediately:

“Are you using my name!?” 

“No, did you use your name on Facebook.com/AlQueda?”

“You’re so not funny.”

This is the support I get.

Sometimes I really think I do have something amusing to say that gets no response whatsoever and I’ll call my brother in North Carolina to repeat it just to see if I’m crazy or if I’ve really stumbled upon a hilarious thought.   Generally, he’ll crack up – unless I catch him at a bad time,  in which case he’ll just call me a schmuck and hang up.

Jeff – he doesn’t care if I use his name – used to have an Instant Messenger problem with his computer where whenever I sent him an Ichat it would automatically open into a full screen window.  This was a minor annoyance to him because he’d never know when he’d be working and I’d unexpectedly pop in. 

Only a minor annoyance until one day he was in the middle of a Powerpoint presentation to a group of businessmen in their conference room.  I’m sure he was discussing something about banking programs and real estate partnerships, when I interrupted with this question that suddenly filled the large pull down screen:

“Have you ever noticed that the urgency with which you have to take a crap is directly related to the traffic coming into and out of the bathroom?”

“I have illustrated this with a simple formula mathematically for your perusal:

Sx = UT²       

Shit (Variable x) = Urgency (Traffic) squared”

Jeff had to stop mid-sentence to address his captive audience -- which thankfully had a better collective sense of humor than my wife – about his brother’s “issues.”

I suppose if my wife thought I was funny, I would have spared Jeff this classic moment in business meetings, but then again if Einstein had Ichat I bet he’d have shared his theory with his brother, even if it opened a full screen window on his computer.

Besides, every one in that room that day could relate to Sx =UT²

In fact some of them might have experienced it that very day.  But, how many people think E=MC²  is even relative to them?    (Relative….get it?)

Maybe my wife is right.  I don’t feel very funny today.

I recommend one of my posts written prior to my daughter’s surgery.