Funnyness

A quote from a conversation:

-I wanna have a farm when I grow old, with horses and shit. Wanna move to Finland?
-Okay. Do grapes grow in Finland?
-No, it's too cold there. Why?
-I wanna grow my own grapes and make wine.
-Well, they have all kinds of berry wine in Finland. You could make berry wine?
-Okay. Does pot grow in Finland? It grows in Scotland and Canada...
-Pot grows in basements.

Yeah. I've been thinking about comedians. Comedy is tricky. You get up on a stage and talk about random stuff that people can relate to, but with a twist and in a really funny way. People can make anything funny if they just tell it the right way. I read this quote by the great comedian George Carlin:

New rule: just because your tattoo has Chinese characters in it doesn't make you spiritual. It's right above the crack of your ass. and it translates to "beef with broccoli." the last time you did anything spiritual, you were praying to god you weren't pregnant. you're not spiritual. You're just high.

It just cracks me up... Being funny seems so easy. 1. Get up on stage 2. Say something funny 3. people laugh. But have you ever seriously tried to write ten minutes worth of funny things to say? Like a short stand-up routine? It's freakin' impossible. You walk around all day with your head boiling with ideas, you see all kinds of things you think would be hilarious if you just wrote it down, and you're absolutely convinced you're going to become the next Robin Williams. But the instant you get home and find a pen and paper to write stuff down, your mind goes completely empty and you feel like a tourist in the sahara desert with a map made of sand paper. No clue whatsoever. Why is it so hard to write stuff down? You can talk to people on the phone or over a meal for hours on end, and sometimes you even feel like you've reached a really clever conclusion about something (which you of course can't remember the following day), but just try sitting down and writing something really clever. You know, the kind of thing you can put up on your website so you can nudge people and proudly say "Hey, how's it going. Oh, by the way, I'm the guy who wrote that." You'll draw a complete blank. It's like Murphy's law. Things will always go to hell in exactly the way they can.

So why is it so hard? Maybe I can't be hilariously funny because I don't really have that much to say? I don't really talk all that much, generally. Doesn't seem right, I think everyone has things to say. Some people go ahead and say it, while others don't. I don't know why the people who don't, don't. Maybe they think that what they have to say isn't interesting enough for someone to want to listen to. I dunno. Things don't have to be interesting to be funny, nor funny to be interesting. Sometimes things don't even need to be interesting to be worth reading or listening to. Someone might want to read it anyway. Take this blog entry, for example. I bet this probably isn't the funniest or most interesting thing you've ever read. But you still read this far, didn't you? So there.

Cats are often funny. And ducks. According to a survey, jokes are always funnier if they have ducks in them instead of other animals. Go figure...