Fucking Hilarious

Back about five years ago I was at the Myrtle Beach airport, going on vacation with my wife. A happy occasion. I should point out that I love to travel, I probably fly about twice a month, enough that some of the American Airlines ticket agents know me on sight.

Not this time. We get up to the counter and the ticket agent is a young black man, who looks—and talks—like Chris Tucker, with the squeaky-ass voice. Since I’m a frequent flyer, I’m in the priority lane, which doesn’t typically earn me any special treatment. We hand him our passports and wait for him to do his thing.

At this point, I have to fart. The thing about farts is that you never know what kind of fart is going to come out. Some farts genuinely don’t smell—you can rip ass over and over again with no ill effects. Some of them smell like a bowl of chili that has been sitting on your back porch in the sun for two weeks. You just don’t know. I’m an expert on this, so I carefully do the one-cheek-sneak and emit a tiny amount of gas—maybe a few cubic centimeters. What harm could come of that?

A second later, I knew it was a mistake. This fart didn’t smell like chili—it smelled like roadkill. It was fucking awful. Maybe the worst fart in my entire career of farting. I was hoping it wouldn’t travel, since it was such a tiny poot. I was wrong.

At this point Chris Tucker scrunches up his face and yells in his squeaky Chris Tucker voice: “What is that SMELL?” My wife has moved a few feet down the counter. She’s eyeing me suspiciously. I’m not owning it. There’s no way I’m owning up to this fart. This is too bad. I’m just going to let everyone around me marinate in it. The amazing thing about it was that it smelled so bad to the ticket agent guy that he didn’t even think it was a fart.

As we walked away from the counter, I started laughing hysterically. I couldn’t breathe. It was the hardest I had ever laughed in my entire life. My stomach hurt. I was doubled over in pain in the TSA line. I was laughing an hour later. I was laughing a week later. As I’m writing this right now, five years later, I’m still laughing.

Farts are funny. They never stop being funny. I’m going to be 49 in two months, and I still think they’re hilarious. Keep in mind that I have a long history of doing this. On my farewell plaque from the Coast Guard Cutter Active is inscribed: “SET THE TOXIC GAS BILL.” I used to eat a bowl of oatmeal, go up to the bridge for watch, and blow everyone out onto the bridgewings, except for the poor helmsman, who had to sit there in my stew. My farting has improved over the years, which is to say that I don’t do it as much, but every once in a while, I’ll drink some milk before going to bed and my poor wife ends up sleeping by herself, downstairs.

I spent nine years in the military, and military people tend to have a warped sense of humor. I’ll be watching a movie or a TV show and there’s some straight-down-the-middle joke that’s supposed to cue up the laugh track, and I just sit there, mute. The stuff that other people find funny, I don’t find very funny.

I will tell you my favorite joke of all time:

Q: How do you get a nun pregnant?

…

…

…

A: You fuck her.

There is a word for this: anti-humor. I also find Wheel of Fortune very funny, how Pat Sajak rips on the contestants all the time, and it goes right over their heads. I also find Peanuts (the comic strip) laugh-out-loud funny. Peanuts is a beloved comic strip, but most people would not say that it’s particularly funny. I think it’s amazing.

I really used to like George Carlin when I was a kid. Yes, not only was I exposed to Animal House at age 8, but I was exposed to Carlin at age 11. I also watched a lot of Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, and Andrew Dice Clay, with the occasional Sam Kinison. Generation X definitely has its own brand of shock-jock humor, that many younger people find unappealing. Generation Z has a fucking weird sense of humor. I don’t get it at all. Like, I seriously don’t get it. I don’t get 90% of the Tik Tok videos that are supposed to be funny. Most of the sitcoms (the ones that are left, anyway) that are on TV these days are just incomprehensible. The Office. I watched The Office a couple of times. Not funny.

Jackass, on the other hand, is fucking hilarious. I saw Jackass 2 in the theater with one of my option trader friends we used to call Hollywood. I was laughing so hard, I was dry heaving. Turds, snot, barf, penises, slapstick: all funny. I will say that the most recent installment of Jackass, Jackass Forever was not up to snuff. It was a bit too self-consciously upright. I read somewhere that before they started filming, they had to all take sexual harassment training. Then the cameras were rolling, and all the wangs came out. You could tell.

Dave Chapelle is just a genius, obviously. I never had really gotten into him, and the first show I saw was the one for Netflix that he took all the heat for about transgender people. It wasn’t funny, per se, but it was a brilliant and touching spoken-word performance. Then I started digging into his back catalogue. Amazing. I will confess that I’ve always had a desire to try stand-up comedy. Just to climb the mountain, because stand-up comedy is the hardest thing in the world. I actually wrote up a routine about porn. Myrtle Beach has a comedy club (they used to have two, one closed) but they have a strict rule prohibiting X-rated material. This is a family-friendly vacation destination, after all. I think the routine is pretty good. I can see myself going to Atlanta to try out open mic night. But one problem is that I have absolutely no short-term memory. I can’t memorize lines. I think it is from the years and years of writing—somehow it rewired my brain and I can’t remember shit anymore. The opening line for the bit: “My doctor asked if I was sexually active. With another person? Of course not!” I have been told that I am funny. People tell me that all the time. Doing it on stage is another matter altogether. And there is nothing worse than bombing at stand-up comedy. One guy I know that bombed stayed in bed for a week and never did it again. Another relapsed into alcoholism and cheated on his wife. It’s one thing to get booed on Twitter—that’s bad enough. Getting booed on stage is another thing altogether.

A good organization has humor. The Coast Guard wasn’t my cup of tea, but there were some funny ass times. I lost my squash plenty of times at Lehman, but every day I had a good laugh about something. There was something tragic about it. Through the course of my business, I have spent time in the offices of many banks and brokers and hedge funds. It doesn’t take long to get a sense of the culture. I’ve been in a few places where nobody laughs, and everyone is serious as a heart attack. I couldn’t survive in a place like that. I was doing the old spurs trick on people at Lehman, for crying out loud. One guy made it all the way into the subway before he noticed that he had paper spurs attached to his heels. The fake mouse trick was another good one. You hide someone’s mouse behind the turret and you get another mouse that isn’t plugged into anything and put it where the old one was, and see how long it takes for someone to pop their cork. We used to rickroll the shit out of each other back then. Every day, there was something to laugh at. We still go out and tell stories about it. The more humor there is, the stronger the friendships.

I don’t see myself getting a job with a big organization again. But in the off chance it happens, my first question in the interview is: is it fun? Because if it’s not, then what, exactly, is the point? I’ve pissed my pants in an elevator. I accidentally drank a soda can of my own piss in the car. I once wiped my ass with poison ivy. Money is nice, but all I care about is that we’re not so damn serious all the time.