Laugh All You Want
Somebody had to lose it. Somebody had to find it.
Somebody had to lose it. Somebody had to find it.
At first, Harry thought it was a diary. A slim, black, softcover notebook lying on the rain-slicked road beside the driver’s side door of his 1989 Dodge Dakota. He picked it up, shook the water off and flipped the pages that weren’t soaked together. Neat handwriting in blue pen that went from margin to margin on some pages, bullet points on others. Harry tossed it onto the passenger seat and drove to work. Harry thought about the book when he wheeled a dumpster out of a cinderblock alcove so that the sanitation truck’s hydraulic lift could tip it over and dump its contents into the hold, shaking it out like the last crumbs from a bag of cheese puffs. Harry had rolled the notebook up and stuffed it into one of the deep pockets of his orange and yellow coveralls when he got to the Transfer Station down by the Fraser River to join his crew. For the rest of the morning it rubbed against his leg as he moved, not enough to chafe, just enough to remain front and centre in Harry’s mind as his crew rode through one East Vancouver alley after another. Harry kept a lookout for the increasingly rare Cathode Ray Tube TV sets. Harry remembered Boxing Day, 2007, when he was still fresh on the job, still on Mattress Patrol—also known as the Bug Beat for the chief occupants of the mattresses they found—a roving rig with no assigned route, in search of random oversized trash. The alleys were overrun with the newly obsolete TV sets. Junior, his first riding partner, liked to crank AC/DC and run the truck over as many sets as he could. He could tell you the brand of TV from the sound it made—better brands had more glass, which crunched and tinkled; cheaper brands had more plastic, which snapped and cracked—or so he said. Junior said a lot of stuff that didn’t necessarily add up. Harry hadn’t paid him much mind, he’d just been on the job until summer, or until his stand-up career took off. Whichever came first. Ten summers later, Harry felt relief as the full truck eased back into the Transfer station. There was a municipal garage there that served as a breakspot for a lot of different city workers. Jas, the senior member of Harry’s three-man crew, went to void the truck while Harry and Carlos took five. Harry plugged a fistful of small coins into two separate vending machines. He sat down alone at a corner table in the corrugated steel break room with his honey-roasted peanuts and canned iced tea. At home, Arlene always bothered him about packing a lunch, or even a snack. Harry would shrug and say he just liked vending machines. He liked the display cases and the spiral mechanism and the sound the food made with it dropped. He pulled the notebook out and separated the pages with a plastic knife. This was no diary. This was a comedian’s notebook. Harry had owned plenty of similar notebooks. It was what he had come to Vancouver for in the first place. Sure as shit wasn’t any stand-up scene in Lethbridge. With each page, Harry recognized the evolution of the act. One-liners turning into bits. Bits becoming themes. Harry felt electric. He knew he had been meant to find this book, to remember who’d he’d meant to become. “You know about police dogs, right?” Harry asked Carlos on their way back to the freshly voided truck, idling outside the ramshackle break room while Jas vaped something smooth and fruity. “And police horses? What if they’ve got the wrong animals? Why not police raccoons? They’ve got those tiny little hands.” “Why you talking like that?” Carlos asked, looking away. “Forget it,” Harry said. He stuffed the notebook into the glovebox of the sanitation truck. As Jas wheeled them out of the yard, an Animal Control truck pulled in. Jas lined his cab up with the AC cab. Harry and Carlos nodded at Raff, the Animal Control foreman. Jas and Raff leaned out their respective driver-side windows and spoke in low voices. Harry couldn’t hear shit over the Punjabi music Jas always had cranked on the radio anyway. The two foreman bumped fists and returned to their seats. Jas put the truck into gear. “Why do you even talk to those guys? Fuckin’ dogcatchers,” Harry said. Jas turned up the radio. He held his palm out to Carlos and Harry but they knew better than to make noise during the news. “There! See? This is what I’m talking about!” Jas often forgot, or merely didn’t care, that the rest of the crew understood zero Punjabi. “Another raccoon attack, this time in the West End. Maybe now that it happened to some rich white lady, they’ll do something about it.” “Man, Animal Control’s s’posed to be protecting people from animals,” Carlos snorted. “But I think they got it the other way around.” “Those are your union brothers you’re talking about,” Jas said, taking his hand off the gearshift to make the universal jerk-off gesture, keeping his eyes on the road.That night, once his wife had gone to do her nighttime things, Harry pulled out the notebook and leafed through it. Quietly he read some jokes out loud. “Are you talking to someone?” Arlene called from the bathroom. “Just talking to the TV,” he said. “I hope you’re not talking to anyone prettier than me.” “Jimmy Fallon,” he called back. “Too close to call.” Later that week, when Arlene was out at dinner with friends from the bank where she worked, Harry dug out his own comedy notebook from a plastic Tupperware box that slid under the bed. It was between the marriage certificate and a brochure for a locksmithing course. He set it out on the coffee table beside the notebook he’d found. Even slightly water-damaged, the found notebook with its stitched binding and fine handwriting outclassed his spiral-bound Hilroy with lined paper and more empty space than words. The old stuff wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Harry stood in front of the bathroom mirror, same as he’d done when he was 25, and went through the act, looking up occasionally from his notebook to make eye contact with himself. “The only thing worse than hearing your upstairs neighbours having sex all the time is knowing that your downstairs neighbours can hear you not having sex. All the time.” That one didn’t feel as funny as had 10 years ago, when he and Arlene were newlyweds. All of his best jokes had once been far-fetched exaggerations of his insecurities. Laughing at his fears had been a way to ward them off. Now felt like spotlights on his failures. Once he’d stopped telling the jokes, they all came true.
Laughing at his fears had been a way to ward them off. Now felt like spotlights on his failures. Once he’d stopped telling the jokes, they all came true.He still had lots of other old jokes, ones that didn’t sting, enough to put together a 10-minute set he could take around to open-mic nights to clear out the cobwebs. And, man, they were old jokes. The thunder from his bit about Batman being a capitalist running dog, so fresh once, had been stolen by half a dozen 100-million-dollar blockbusters. His jokes about Stockwell Day and Paul Martin were even less relevant. He checked out the listings in the Georgia Straight. He was still too raw for comedy clubs, but open mic nights at cafes or microbreweries or anarchist bookstores full of slam poets and singer-songwriters seemed more his speed. No one was expecting to laugh there. The stakes were low. He circled a posting for one at a vegan cafe. Harry told his wife he’d been asked to join a committee at the union and he’d be out some nights during the week.
“What’s the deal with sesame seeds?” Silence. Empty stares. What kind of a crowd is this? How was Harry supposed to follow back-to-back intimately confessional poets and a juggler? “I mean, when was the last time you chomped into a Whopper and thought, now that’s some good-ass sesame seeds!” Harry could hear keys and coins jangling in people’s pockets as they shifted in their seats. If he’d known he was following a juggler, he’d have come up with a more suitable opening bit. Something less intellectual. “I just think we get worked up over so many useless details that don’t really matter. In the end, was it worth clearcutting the Amazon rainforest just so you could have sesame seeds on y—” “That’s not where sesame seeds come from!” Harry squinted into the darkness. For a crusty, rundown vegan café, this place sure had bright stage lights. The heckle could have come from anywhere. It could have been the juggler. Fucking jugglers. “Poppy seeds, at least poppy seeds you can catch a buzz off. Sesame seeds just get stuck between your teeth,” Harry held up a hand to illustrate weighing his options. “Stupid little seeds stuck between your teeth… or the sweet bliss of a heroin trip?” “You can’t get high off poppy seeds, dumb ass!” It had to be the juggler. “Hey, you had your turn. How about you shut your face, buddy?” “I hope a raccoon eats your face!” “Uh, so, anyway…uh, when was the last time you heard of somebody who lost their job because they pissed hot for sesame seeds? Okay, that’s my time. Thanks, you’ve been great.” “You suck!” Harry came off stage, out of the spotlight and surveyed the crowd. Where was that fucking juggler? He looked for the maroon-beret-blue-scarf understudy for the Doobie Brothers outfit the juggler had been wearing. He walked to the back of the coffee house. A breeze turned the sweat-soaked back of Harry’s t-shirt cold. He turned and saw a dreadlocked café employee carry two garbage bags out the propped open back door. Harry thought he saw the juggler/heckler standing with the dreadlocked guy at the dumpster and was about to make a move when he felt a hand on his shoulder. “I really liked your jokes,” said a tall, lanky kid in an oversized Lionel Richie t-shirt. He held out his hand for a shake. “I’m an empath.” “Uh-huh.” The door closed and the café employee was back behind the counter, washing his hands. The juggler was gone.
Harry nearly packed it in after that first night with the heckler. He’d been too demoralized to even do his bit about the ninja who wears corduroy. That killed them in 2004. The day at work seemed to go by twice as slowly. The anticipation of his return to the stage had buoyed his spirits and bombing had sunk him down even lower than his starting point. Harry barely paid attention when Carlos told him that someone had broken into his locker and stolen his watch. “Probably one a them Animal Control assholes,” Carlos said. Harry looked around, trying to make sense of what he’d just half-heard. “Hey, Harry,” Jas shouted over a raga on the radio, as the garbage rig rumbled through the endless back alleys of East Van, “you ever seen that Youtube where the kid was at the dentist? That’s how you look right now.” “Is this real life?” Harry horsed around, but fuck, was it?
Harry kept at the open mic nights. He kept bombing, hecklers or not. He decided it was the material. The younger comics talked a lot about online dating. Energy drinks. Stuff Harry could barely follow but the audiences devoured. So he started to write new jokes. He sat down to write at the table after Arlene had gone to bed at 10. Most of his old material had been written while waiting to go up. Harry woke up with his face on the table. In his notebook he had written “what’s the deal with” and then scratched it out. Late one morning, between runs in the Great Pumpkin—the last of a fleet of orange trucks the city had used to collect garbage in the 90s—while Jas voided what Harry had collected, Harry tapped his pen against blank page in the break shack at the Transfer Station. “What’s up with,” tap tap tap, “four-way stops? Is that a traffic thing or a swingers club?” Ugh. There’s nothing funny about four-way stops. Harry looked around. There had to be something funny. Starbucks. Yoga pants. Dogs in strollers. The crew had pulled a Kitsilano route that morning. None of it was funny. It just made him mad. “What are you, sketching nudes over there?” a voice from the vending machines called out. It was one of Raff’s Animal Control guys. “Still life with hard-on!” the guy said, then dry-humped the Pepsi machine. “Fuck you, dogcatcher!” Carlos yelled. “Where’s my watch?” Within seconds everybody was outside, Carlos and the Animal Control guy breathing up in each other’s faces. A crowd was gathering. Carlos already had his coveralls down around his waist. It was on. Then there was a tooth-rattling blast of bass. Raff’s Animal Control truck, inexplicably equipped with a horn like the Queen Mary 2, like nine double bassoons, pulled up. “Simon, let’s go. Don’t fuck with these trashmen. The stink will rub off.” It wasn’t Raff behind the wheel. It was some skinny dude in a maroon beret. The gears turned slowly in Harry’s head. Simon climbed up into the cab on the passenger side. The guy in the beret took a long look at Harry. “What’s up, Joke Man?” the juggler called. “What has four wheels and flies?”
He’d been overthinking it. What is a joke anyway? What’s the deal with observational humour? He wasn’t smart enough to do meta-comedy, and he wasn’t dumb enough not to care that he wasn’t smart enough. Harry stopped trying to write jokes but he kept going to comedy shows. He went to comedy clubs with headliners he’d seen on TV. He went to open mics at workers’ co-op microbreweries. He ate a lot of nachos, but he never got drunk. He wasn’t there to laugh. He was watching for what made other people laugh. He was watching for what made all these comedians different from him.
He wasn’t there to laugh. He was watching for what made other people laugh. He was watching for what made all these comedians different from him.It wasn’t the material. There were guys—four out of every five comics were dudes, which was a significant move toward equality since 2003—with amazing jokes, jokes that belonged in Woody Allen movies or HBO or wherever amazing jokes went, who could barely catch a laugh. Other guys had them rolling with laughter with the most obvious, most on-the-nose platitudes. It was confidence. A comedian who had confidence in weak jokes got more laughs than a palpably nervous comic with killer material. Audiences didn’t want to be dazzled by well-constructed, aesthetically-sound jokes. They wanted to be given permission to laugh at shitty jokes. Harry sat with this for a long time. For two weeks he stayed out of the clubs. He left the notebook alone. He went to work, he came home, he rubbed his wife’s feet at night while they watched real estate shows on TV. They talked some more about having a baby. Then on his day off, after completing a short list of mundane chores and renewing the insurance for his truck, he pulled out the other comedian’s notebook. He used the free pen he’d received from the insurance company to transcribe jokes from the Found Notebook into his own. Just to see what it felt like to write good jokes. Just to see what they’d look like in his own handwriting. A couple of days later, he tried reading them out loud. It didn’t sound like himself. It sounded like someone else. A character. He sculpted 15 minutes worth of jokes from the book. He could do the whole set twice in his truck on the drive to work if he hit enough red lights. His voice went just a touch higher with the found material. He was getting into character. He was having fun with it. One Thursday, he stayed in character his whole shift. Nobody noticed any difference, of course, because Harry rarely said anything anyway, until the Animal Control guys caught him reading Stanislavski in the break room. “What you reading, Fifty Shades of Grey?” the juggler with the maroon beret heckled him. “You want to torture your old lady in bed, tell your shitty sesame seed jokes.” The Animal Control guys laughed. Harry didn’t move. He closed his eyes and silently ran through the routine he’d learned from the found notebook. He felt peaceful. That night, Harry debuted the new material at a West End basement wine bar that normally hosted tasteful jazz trios. The local lore was that the neighbourhood chapter of Narcotics Anonymous met on Thursday nights and that’s why they had a comedy open mic night that night. Harry killed. It wasn’t just that the material from the Found Notebook was funnier and more topical than his own jokes, Harry was genuinely a better performer when delivering the stolen jokes. He wasn’t up there talking about his own failures, he was lost in a role. “Bro,” a dreadlocked white guy approached Harry after his set. “You gotta come down to the Ping & Pong next Wednesday for the Pro-Am night. You’re too good for this dump.”
Wednesday night, Harry showed up early an East Side nightclub that was a table tennis gym during the day. The green and white tables were all folded up against a wall beside the stage. He put his name on a clipboard and sat at the bar drinking watered rye-and-gingers while the bartender sliced lime wedges. He tapped his Found Notebook with a pen the way he would if it was his own. He didn’t usually drink before a set, but he was feeling good about feeling good. Bro with the dreadlocks came in with a few others. Harry was on his fourth drink. He waved and the group came over. “This is that guy I was telling you about,” Dreads said. “You gotta hear his jokes about his Filipino grandma.” “You got a Filipino grandma?” asked one of the guys. Harry met the guy’s stare. Harry had lived in Vancouver long enough to know better than to think he was an expert on ethnicities, but this guy looked like, maybe, he might be Filipino. “Doesn’t everyone?” Harry laughed it off. “Yeah, man. I got two.” “That’s more than me,” Harry slid off his stool, surprised at how much he felt the alcohol once he was standing. “Nice to meet you guys.” Harry kept his feet steady at the urinal but rested his head against the cool pipe, wet with condensation. Can’t I have just one night? Harry splashed water on his face and slicked down his hair. Dreads and his pals were still hanging around the bar. Harry saw it. His notebook laying open on the counter. Harry wondered if the maybe-Filipino had seen it. “Shitfuckdamn,” Harry said out loud. He went outside and bummed a smoke. Harry hadn’t had a cigarette in years. The blast of nicotine didn’t help his nausea and he had to lean against the brick wall when the vertigo hit. “You left this at the bar,” the Dreadlocked Guy’s Probably Filipino Friend waved the notebook in front of Harry, who struggled to focus his eyes. “I’m Geoff.” “Okay,” Harry said. “I used to have one just like it,” the Almost Certainly Filipino guy said. “Huh,” Harry said, trying not to let on that the brick wall against his back was all that kept him upright. “I’m looking forward to seeing your set.” “Thanks.” “I’m doing a set tonight too.” “Good.” “I had to write all new material after I lost my notebook a few months ago.” “Sucks.” “I don’t know. I think it made me a better comic. I heard Louis CK throws his jokes out after a year. Not that anyone wants to be like Louis CK anymore.” “I guess.” The booze and the cigarette made Harry woozy. He couldn’t maintain his character. He felt the smallness of his own life creeping back in. He thought about the way his wife had looked at him when he got out of the shower this morning. Harry needed to get his head on straight. He walked around the corner, found a Starbucks, got a short Americano. The caffeine just sloshed around in his gut with the booze, so he ate a panini. Geoff was waiting outside the club when he got back. “You’re not going up, are you? You must know how wrong this is. The worst thing a comic can do. You can’t steal jokes. And you want to tell them here? In this club, where I built my act? Straight-up colonial bullshit.” “No, but I’m, it’s like Andy Warhol,” Harry had worked this all out in his head. “It’s like that guy who painted all the romance comics. The guy who painted—there was that airplane. I’m doing pop art comedy. I take the stuff I find and I give it new context. It’s post-modern. You probably don’t even understand it.” “Roy Lichtenstein,” said Geoff. “You know what? Every comic book artist hated that guy. Everybody hates that guy. Everybody’s going to hate you.” “Just nerds hate him. I don’t fucking care if nerds hate me. Nerds hate everything they can’t control. You guys are just a bunch of comedy nerds doing comedy for other nerds. Nobody cared about your jokes until I did them, did they? You didn’t even care enough not to lose them. What did they fall out of your little backpack while you were riding your bike?” “You’re a loser,” Geoff said. “You’re pathetic. You found my notebook? You don’t think I had that shit locked in my head? You don’t know what you’re in for.” Harry pushed past him into the club. Checked the line-up. He was fifth out of nine comics, but the clipboard listed Geoff Ocampo as seventh. Whoever said the jokes first won.
Whoever said the jokes first won.Harry sang to himself as his found a spot in the back to wait out the other comics. The first comic was a young Indigenous woman. Harry hissed through his teeth at her youth, but had to admit she was pretty funny. Fresh jokes on familiar subjects. Then, four minutes in, her material shifted. “You know they call it when your Filipino granny invites your boyfriend over for tea without you?” Harry coughed. He looked over and saw the table where Geoff and Dreads were sitting with their friends. Their numbers had grown and now included a guy in a dark beret that even in the dark Harry knew was maroon and probably smelled like raccoon piss. The next comic came from Geoff’s table. He rambled on about drugs and getting high in the suburbs and then, again, the material shifted. “You ever notice they only show white people working at Tim Hortons in the commercials?” The next comic also slipped a few of the jokes Harry had gathered from Geoff into their act. Harry sagged against the back wall of the club. Even if the fourth comic wasn’t in on it, he’d already lost most of his act. He should just bail. Harry rubbed his temples and the idea landed. He didn’t need Geoff’s material anymore. He had just needed it to bolster his own confidence. It was never the jokes, it was their delivery. He’d conquered that. He was ready. The fourth act, the one before Harry, was the Doobie Brothers Animal Control juggler. Harry was annoyed but pulled his focus inward to organize a set of his own material on the fly. He barely noticed when the juggler called for a volunteer from the audience, but he turned his full attention to the stage when Geoff walked on. Geoff stood in front of the microphone. The juggler stood behind him and pushed his arms under Geoff’s; an old theatre sports game, with the added gimmick of juggling knives. It was an awkward fit. The juggler was much taller than Geoff. Geoff spoke into the mic, his words punctuated by the swish, swish of twirling Ginsus. “What’s the deal with sesame seeds?”
