One day soon we will learn to speak to each other sans serif.

Until then, I will continue to hold back punchlines from my Top Ten list of second-hand humor as we struggle to hit upon some common fluency in the grammar we lob at one another. I try to make you laugh but time after time you hear the subject after the predicate and inevitably you are anxious once again over what you perceive as a lack of proper punctuation between us. Semicolons fly. Asterisks lodge like ninja stars in the pale fleshy meat of my ass. Deconstructed one-liners lie in steaming jumbled piles at our giant red rubberized feet.

There on the highway: a busload of severely challenged children who keep themselves amused by making offensive, politically incorrect remarks about deceased Knights Templars of the local chapter of the Shriner organization. The busdriver, a lapsed Catholic who once aspired to the rabbinate, later incorporates some of the more clever comments into his Tropical-themed stand-up comedy act at Big Louie’s Shut Yer Laugh Hole out on the Turnpike near Route 7. Then, the next day, for no apparent reason, the bus careens off the road and slams into a sign advertising a psychic hotline dating network for young professional singles on the go. Several of the children are killed in the accident, but most of the passengers, including the driver, escape unharmed. Later, this experience becomes the basis for a wildly successful situation comedy show starring the busdriver and three young, thin, Vicodin®-addicted actresses from Eagle Pass, Texas.

"They're Quick and they're Down and they're Dirty!"™

A rabbi and a priest are fly-fishing knee-deep in a stream when the rabbi says, "I need to take a leak something fierce." So the priest says, "I am afflicted with a tendency toward aposiopetic articulation, but that's not--oh, I should--I. Oh--" And the rabbi says, "That’s not holy wa--" And so the priest says, "A rabbi and a priest are fly-fishing knee-deep in a--"

What did one guy say to the other guy when he needed to communicate something?

In the crowd tonight is a heckler who keeps laughing at inappropriate moments. It's a very bad approximation of audience participation and response--he is like a poorly socialized foreigner trying desperately hard to make friends in a new language. Later, in bed, the heckler will tell his U.S.-born mail-order bride that it was the funniest, most hilarious thing he ever saw in his whole entire life. He will re-enact parts of the show and then stare at her until she laughs with him. Then he will roll over and dream in broken English about a vivid childhood memory of something that actually never really happened. The dream will involve Lenny Bruce, and a bad case of lateral epicondylitis.

Clowns--clowns are funny. Clowns are always funny. Clowns are hilarious in fact. Unless they are sad. Sad clowns are not so funny, if they are truly sad. Then they are tragic. Mean clowns are scary. But sometimes funny too.

In this episode the wacky next-door neighbor realizes he is an eggplant, and his lover is a strand of DNA unraveled in a bowl of Fruit Loops. Hilarity ensues. A conflict arises; is resolved. Then, credits roll at an unreadable speed over irrelevant tack-on scenes while a silicone-inflected voice describes the evening's up-coming top news stories with an all-too-familiar tone of equal parts urgency and barely contained mirth. This is followed by a commercial for investment services, and then another for adult diapers--and this, finally, is how I hear about your Emmy nomination, and the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Quickly, I check my cellular telephone for columbite-tantalite. Sure enough, it's full of it. I sniff my fingertips and detect traces there as well. Hands shaking, I speed-dial my mother, but she has been replaced by a canned laugh track that loops every five seconds. So I sit and listen for two hours and thirty-seven minutes, until the rechargeable lithium ion battery wears itself out. I have decided to buy something. Soon.

My voicemail has nothing more to say to me.

PILOT--SUPER HAPPY HOUR FUN SHOW
Scene: Int. afternoon/evening, late autumn. Two fully nested Matryoshka dolls carry on a somewhat distracted conversation while clipping the toenails of a human who remains silent and off-screen throughout.

MATRYOSHKA 1
Here: an economy-sized box full of Extra-Large Ribbed-For-Her-Pleasure common reference points--for you!

MATRYOSHKA 2
I step out into the gray-white culdesac glow of dawn, and quickly take on the shape of my surroundings.

MATRYOSHKA 1
Eventually, we resolve the stand-off by simply disagreeing to agree.

MATRYOSHKA 2
Who do you think you're kidding, anyway?

MATRYOSHKA 1
You know, I really think we could use a Ronco® laugh track to fill in these awkward bursts of dialogue that keep bubbling up between us.

MATRYOSHKA 2
This is what happens when none of the actors have taken the time to properly determine their own character motivations yet.

MATRYOSHKA 1
During the parade protest, I control the mouth portion of a giant papier-mâché effigy of myself. As we march, you furiously scribble Marxist knock-knock jokes on bright yellow 3M™ Post-it® notes, stick them to my forehead, then force me to guess punchlines as I make the puppet deliver hilarious anecdotes about those five years we spent assembling whoopee cushions and chemical warfare delivery mechanisms in a sweatshop at Disneyland’s California Adventure.

MATRYOSHKA 2
Afterward, I spend several hours editing one scene after another from our history; the past quickly becomes a massive red pile of second-guessed strikethroughs and deletion marks.

MATRYOSHKA 1
In the evening, I meet a woman at the bus stop. "You are just another temporary suspension bridge of disbelief waiting to be burned by my relentless history of insecurity and unhealthy socialization," she says to me. There is a drum roll, and cymbal crash; I immediately fall in love.

MATRYOSHKA 2
Halfway through the joke, you realize the characters have changed completely. Then the setting shifts suddenly from the corner of Wilshire and Vermont at night to the exact life-sized replica of a clean suburban driveway, early morning, circa AD1978. In the end, over three million civilian lives are lost in the delivery of the punchline. Rebel forces move in quickly and assume de facto control of the royal palace, while government officials and high-ranking military are summarily tried and executed on live television. Ratings shoot through the roof. You buy and sell the remainder of your reality-based life in thirty- and sixty-second increments.