The Duffer

by Ian Robinson

DUFFER ……..let's not forget how to laugh

By Ian Robinson  

It was about three days after the attack on the World Trade Center that the morons who write for newspapers and the TV talking heads started saying humor was dead.  Irony was dead.  Life was so serious; we wouldn’t make fun of thinks any more.  Nope.  Not us. 

            For a minute, I thought they had a point.  Before I started to snicker.  Because about three days after the attack, I went to work and found a note on my desk. For this to make sense you need to know what I look like.  (Except for the gut and the look of indolent laziness, not much like the picture illustrating this column.)  Despite my British and Scots heritage, and the name Ian Robinson, I have dark, curly hair, swarthy skin, a fair-sized nose, dark, brown eyes and a black, curly beard.  In short, Moammar Khadafy’s secret lovechild.  With a checkered dishtowel on my head, I could be one of the guys behind Osama bin Laden in the videos, scowling and carrying an AK-47.  If not total Taliban, I come across as Taliban-Lite.

            Anyway, about three days after the WTC came down (and it shook me; I’ve got friends who work in Manhattan I couldn’t contact for a week) I went to work and found the note.  It read:  “Ian:  Some guy phoned for you.  Funny accent.  Said he was your Uncle Binny.  You have to get the heavy aircraft instructional videos back to Blockbuster by 6 p.m.  If he’s late one more time, they’re going to pull his card.”

            I thought, my God, that’s in bad taste.  Just AWFUL.  What sick, twisted, evil moron wrote THAT?  And then I laughed my ass off.  That’s a lot of laughing because I carry around a fair amount of ass.  And then I kind of wished I’d thought of that first.

            Two weeks later, somebody left a white powder on my computer keyboard.  Another note read:  “Ian:  Some guy with an accent and an attitude dropped by.  Said he wanted you to test this stuff.  Said I should sprinkle it on your desk.  Was that OK?”

            Unlike every other moron who spilled icing sugar from a doughnut onto the mail and called the police, I laughed.  Then I tasted the white powder. Sure enough.  Icing sugar.  I don’t know who left me notes, but, if I find out, I might just kiss them.  Even if it’s a guy.

            Because, let’s face it, if you want to annoy somebody, REALLY get under their skin, you laugh at them.  It’s why Charlie Chaplin didn’t get invited to Berlin to meet Germany’s favorite Uncle Adolf – because Charlie made a movie called The Great Dictator that made Hitler look like a twit.  It’s why Gerald Ford didn’t have Chevy Chase over.  Why Dan Ayckroyd never had a sleepover with Richard Nixon, why Andrew Dice Clay never got invited to lead a Gay Pride Parade, and why I never get invited anywhere.

            Because laughter’s a sword.  It cuts the legs off things, brings them down to manageable size.  If you forget how to laugh, bin Laden is a giant boogeyman, Satan personified.  You laugh at him and he’s a worm.  Little man.  Big grudge.  You still want to squash him, but he take up less space in your head.  If you forget how to laugh, you’re one of those people who buy a nuclear/biological/chemical warfare suit and gas mask.

            Hear about the RCMP searching for Arab terrorists in Newfoundland?  They’d captured bin Drinkin and bin Sleepin, but they couldn’t find bin Workin.

            Making fun of stuff is a big part of how I live.  I come by it honestly enough. My dad keeled over three years ago.  His heart just quit beating while he was at a farm getting hay.  Luckily, the farmer’s wife was a nurse and she brought him back.  My dad woke up with this woman leaning over him, whacking his chest, yelling, “Don’t you die in my yard, you sonofa…!”  Being a keen observer of the human condition, he noticed she had removed her shirt (to wipe goop off his mouth before doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and her enormous hooters were swaying back and forth in front of his face.  He said something like, “I thought angels had wings.  But this is definitely better.”  And she said something like, “Shut up, you old pervert.”

            He had another heart attack this year.  I flew back east and waited until doctors said he’d live.  Before I left, I told the old gentleman that I was mad at him.  “Get in line,” he said, looking at my mother.  (Mom takes it personally when Dad tries to die on her.  She figures it’s a plot for him to get peace and quiet.)  He asked me why I was mad.  I told him, “The airline said if you died and I showed them a death certificate, they’d cut 40 percent off the price of the flight.  But you had to go and live, so I’ve got to pay the full fare.”

            He laughed.  I laughed.  And coronary heart disease just had its legs cut out from under it.  You know what is wrong with Osama bin Laden and those morons he convinced to fly into tall buildings?  No sense of humor.  If you have the capacity for laughter, at yourself and others, nobody can convince you to do something profoundly stupid.  You have irony on your side.  So, if somebody says, “…and then fly the plane into the big building…” you don’t say, “Sure!”  You say, “Osama, airline food sucks, but isn’t that a little extreme?”

            The tall foreheads on TV say Osama and his buds hate us on this side of the Atlantic because we’re decadent and they fear contamination of their culture.  Well, I personally never forced a Muslim guy to drink rum and coke, watch Bruce Willis movies or download porn.  I never forced a Muslim woman to wear outfits by Donna Karran or Fredericks of Hollywood instead of clothing that looks suspiciously like a fitted tarp I throw over my gas barbecue when it rains.  If they embrace our decadent culture, maybe it’s because they want to.  Maybe the 21^st century is more fun than the 12^th.

            There’s been talk about our decadence from people who live here that oughta know better.  Jerry Falwell has already blamed the attack on boys who like to slow dance cheek to cheek, which so annoyed God that he lifted the mystical veil of protection that America enjoyed.  And someone will suggest Americans have to renew traditional values and get more like their enemies (you know, religiously obsessed and with that ban on Playboy) in order to prevail in this war.

            Nothing could be further from the truth.  Decadence is what we’re fighting FOR.  It’s what we’re about.  It’s about the right for most of us to have 2.8 children and a dog and jobs and a stay in a cardiac care unit in our future.  It’s also about the right to live in a cabin in the bush and accrue an arsenal of guns in case the world ends.  It’s about the right to pierce your nipples, hook a chain to the rings and be led down the streets of San Francisco wearing a studded leather thong during a gay parade.  And mostly, it’s about being able to laugh at stupid, weird stuff.

            But my next biggest wish?  That we don’t stop taking vacations by air.  That we look at the white powder and laugh because it fell off our doughnut.  That we don’t let that little fellow with the big grudge live inside our heads.  That we tease the Newfies about bin Sleepin and bin Fightin.  Cause if we don’t, they win.    

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