Tag archives: funny
The woman up the aisle from me was staring at the floor of the LUAS tram, now speeding toward Dublin. I followed her gaze and spotted the three large drops of blood she was fixed on. Would she call the police? Would Cassie Maddox and Rob Reilly of Dublin Murders television fame be the ones […]
Chris Shurland, one of the improv instructors and company members at both Santa Barbara Improv and the recently revived Carpinteria Improv at the Alcazar Theatre, has a confession. He really doesn’t like doing musical improv. Or, it turns out, singing at all. “I’ve done karaoke one time in my life, and that was literally the […]
One line I remember from the many years I spent listening to radio comedy was this: “You know I think the world of you . . . And you know what everybody thinks of the world these days.” Be that as it may, we can probably agree that, if anything is certain about what we […]
There was once a common expression, “This is where we came in.” The meaning was originally quite literal. In the early days of movies – and at least into my childhood in the 1940s – when movies, especially new releases, were still something most people went out to, rather than seeing them at home – […]
“Why are you grimacing?” my wife asked. “Shhh. I don’t want the others to know I’m injured.” Pat looked around. “By the others, you mean…” A couple of eight-year-olds walked by. I quickly stopped rubbing my shoulder, smiled confidently and whispered, “that boy was good, but his sister caught a dozen pom-poms in a row.” […]
Our plane from LAX to Charlotte was late. “We will begin boarding as soon as the arriving passengers are off the plane,” the gate attendant announced. “What’s the holdup?” I asked. Before he could answer, the scheduled departure time advanced by 30 minutes. “It needs to taxi to the gate… as soon as it actually […]
…to drop a moose from an airplane. Seriously! It’s the law. Apparently, the Moose Union is strong up north and parachutes are not. How did this law come about you may wonder? Years ago, a small town in Alaska came up with a contest that involved painting a bunch of moose poo(s?), putting numbers on […]
…proceed to the route… proceed to the route… proceed to the route. I took out my gun and I shot Siri. “Actually, it’s against the rental car company’s policy to shoot holes in the dashboard,” my wife informed me. “According to page 15 of the rental form, they charge extra for that.” I looked at […]
Interviewing Paula Poundstone is a little like binge watching a comedy series on Netflix: you hit the start button once and autoplay keeps the episodes rolling, and everything is interesting enough that you don’t really want to hit pause. Poundstone’s tendency toward stream-of-consciousness rants and musings is a big part of her appeal, of course, […]
I’ve always wanted to be taller – I still remember getting measured for my high school graduation robe. “Five feet, eleven and three-quarters inch,” the gown guy yelled out to the gown sizing note taker. “Come on,” I said. “Put me down for six feet, willya?” But no. Gown measuring administrators take their measurements seriously. […]
Why do we like watching the sun set? Is it the beauty of changing colors and shapes? Or is it rather the emotional impact of experiencing the passage of time, the ending of another day of our lives? These two closely interwoven themes, the sad and the beautiful, permeate our culture. Three of my favorite […]
Joel Murray has been in the “bullpen” for the long-running improv TV series Whose Line Is It Anyway? for almost a decade, but the actor and youngest brother of Bill Murray and Brian Doyle-Murray has never actually appeared on an episode. But Murray has had many memorable moments elsewhere on television, including on Mad Men […]
I was staring blankly at a shelf in the garage. I’d been on a quest for something when I left the house some 15 steps earlier, but my mind stopped working at about step 12. I moved some boxes around for inspiration. That’s when I found the Monopoly game. It was an early edition. Still […]
The first place to look for treasure is within yourself. Don’t dismiss me as some kind of inspirational motivator if I start blathering about your internal riches. It’s a simple fact that unused, unexploited, almost unknown resources lie inside every one of us. Sometimes it takes a crisis or catastrophe to reveal our hidden strengths. […]
I know that many people are now touting that 70 is the new 60 and 40 is the new 30. Does that mean that 10 is the new fetus? They also say that telecommuting is the new work standard. Does that mean we should all get water coolers with life-size computer screens so we can […]
You never know what huge, unusual things you might see when you go to a new beach (that’s new, not nude). “Wow! Looks like that ship sank just before it got to the pier!” We were in Aptos. That’s not a stunned condition, it’s a small beach community just south of Santa Cruz. We were […]
“Holy ice cubes, Batman,” I said, as a breeze wafted its way up my shorts. “Fifty-seven degrees?” my wife said. “It was in the 70s when we left Oakland Hills.” “Guess it’s like Mark Twain said: ‘The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.’” “Experts claim that Mark Twain never actually […]
The Library of Congress categorizes all published books which are submitted for registration, according to their contents. When my first book, I May Not Be Totally Perfect, but Parts of Me Are Excellent, was published, I had no idea how they would classify it. I had thought I was writing a new kind of one-line […]
I nodded at the approaching hikers. “We’re the official counters,” I said. Pat, sitting beside me, pretended to log it into her phone. There was a steady stream of hikers both coming and going, but we weren’t really counters of course. And the only thing officially we were – was out of breath. We were […]
“Oh man! There are thousands of them.” “What species are they?” “They are Delphinus delphis,” the captain said. Seems like during every Star Trek movie there comes a scene where they hit the dashboard button that says WARP SPEED. Then they can only hope that the coordinates they set don’t deliver them into the middle […]
