A few years ago, I attended an Oscars party on the Big Island of Hawaii. In attendance were Senator-In-Waiting Al Franken and his family, the late actor Peter Boyle (the Dad on Raymond) and his family, Franken’s book agent and his family, my daughter Anna and myself. (Dr. M, studying for a licensing exam, had requested our absence while she prepared.)
The Oscars party took place in the Boyles’ condo, adjacent to our hotel. It was nice to be invited. There was great food, an Oscars pool (which I co-won), and the “Big Show” itself on TV.
They come to the award for “Best Editing.” Before it’s presented, the producers inexplicably stage an elaborate production number, featuring The Lord of the Dance. There are smart people in the room. And one of them reasonably inquires:
“Why are they doing a dance number to introduce an Editing award?”
Without missing a beat, I reply,
“It’s a little known fact that when an editor does a particularly good edit, he gets up and he does a little dance.”
The room explodes in a thunderclap of laughter. And it just keeps going. An extended eruption of spontaneous hilarity. I am genuinely taken aback. Having never uttered the line before, I had no idea it was going to be funny.
It turns out it was.
I’ve thought that moment many times. Not about why it was funny. I’ll never know why it was funny. A happy confluence of I don’t know what. What I thought about was the line itself. Where had it come from? And why precisely those words, in precisely that order?
Where did the line come from? I have no idea. I just opened my mouth and out it came. I’m completely in the dark as to where the stuff that comes out of me comes from. To me, it’s magic. And I’m eternally humbled to be the medium of its expression. (Except when it comes out not funny, which it occasionally does. My brother once mused about that situation. Confused by a joke he had blurted that fell flat, he complained: “It felt just like the good ones.”)
Why precisely those words, in precisely that order? (Why does that matter? Because delivering the line precisely that way contributed significantly to its success.) At the risk of repeating myself, that’s magic too. Which I’ll return to in a moment. But first, I'll digress.
Someone once said, “Writing is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration.” Another guy explained about writing, “You sit down at the typewriter and you open up a vein.” They were both making the same point. Writing is really hard.
As a writer, you try to reproduce what your mind’s telling you, struggling to retain the original naturalness and spontaneity. Unfortunately, there’s this time lag due to the process of stenography that inevitably slows things down, at which point, you’re likely to start thinking, and when you start thinking, there goes the naturalness and spontaneity. Self-censorship aside, this problem does not occur when you’re talking.
Confession: On my best writing day, I could never write as intuitively as I talk.
(Another time, I’ll talk about how the computer brings a writer closer to “talk” than any medium of putting things down in history. Way closer than chiseling words into a tablet.)
Which brings us back to my “dancing editor” line. Mentioning it represents my oblique response to a commenter’s question about “funny numbers.”
The commenter writes that after years of marriage, his wife, a First Grade teacher, still “talks to me like I’m five.” The commenter proceeds to examine why “five” is the right and funniest number.
I’ll tell you why “five” is the right and funniest number.
Because it is.
Unlike the comedic “rule of threes”, which you ignore under penalty of “no ha-ha”, no number is inherently funny or unfunny. It depends entirely on the context. In his context, the commenter concludes that “She talks to me like I’m six” is not funny. He’s right.
However, in Neil Simon’s hit comedy, Barefoot in the Park, the lead male character, a starting-out attorney, reports that he just won a case where his client was awarded ten cents. As a result, his firm has now assigned him all cases valued at “six cents or less.”
The number six? Funny as heck.
The “funny number” rule does not exist. Getting it right involves surrendering to the magic. When you do, as with the “dancing editor” line, the right thing just naturally pops out.
And when it’s right, it’s funny.
That goes for talking and that goes for writing.