Prophet and laughs

I've long had a conception, immaculate enough as these things go and perhaps even emasculate to boot, for a stand-up comedian after my own black heart.

The audience, seeing my 1978 Sears studio portrait on the poster, expects as it should an everyday middle-American man who looks more or less like Pierce Brosnan or Peter Gallagher in everyday evening wear jauntily cradling a martini in one hand and a Dunhill in the other.

Instead, out comes the grimmest-visaged and whitest in flowing locks of Old Testament prophets, clutching period stone tablets authenticated by the Franklin Mint and delivering a scorching sermon of a sort that in its indictment beyond appeal of everything every last member of the audience lives by, dies by and kills by reduces the entire house to blubbering for forgiveness and a second chance, and to the certitude of imminent swallowing by a floor and an earth beneath it alike due at any second for terminal and flame-borne opening.

Then, as the crinkling traces of an avuncular grin play about the crow-footed corners of my eyes, first I and then they melt into an accelerating wave of howling laughter in beatific brow-mopping relief, a were-all-in-this-together, but-I-kid-in-damnation testament to "the resilience of the human spirit", &c., blah frickin' blah, in ecumenical laughter, showing them all that the joke was on them twice running and now in whipsaw form, first in brickshitting theocratic terror, next in anodyne womblike restoration to the slightly more hopeful hell of everyday life back on earth just outside the hall and its proverbially and mercifully-brief "willing suspension of disbelief".

Then, as the wave of comically-relieved humanist solidarity washes at last over even the most rockfaced of them all, I have the Sound department trigger a sudden and terrifying thunderclap, Engineering switch on the release of stage blood trickling through tiny cracks in the walls, Sound, again, play the unearthly howls of the damned through the high-def speakers, along with the sternest and most basso profundo of male voices hurling scorching terminal anathemas and maledictions at our entire race, of sorts that indicate that he is, at the least, a tad disappointed in us all of late, and, as the audience turns its newly-frightened gaze back to me for reassurance, all trace of mirth departs my features and is replaced once more by blazing moralist fury of sorts not susceptible to appeal save for that of renewed thunder.

Then, after a second or two of fateful silence, the G-d voice from the speakers commences to soft giggling and then to an almost adorably-tickled gurgling, as from the rafters fall sudden showers of confetti, balloon animals in all colors, lighter-than-air air-popped popcorn, and hundreds of tiny watch-battery-propelled seraphim and cherubim fluttering about the hall softly blowing "Ode to Joy" through gossamer trumpets.

As the wildly applauding throng, red-faced in renewed hilarity - "He's done it again!" - rises to file out at last, each row of the departing, upon passing through the doors to the lobby, thanks again to Engineering, chutes down into a waiting brimstone underworld through suddenly-slanted trap-floors, though not a one among them in time to howl warning to any among those still behind.

In comedy, you've got to keep them in constant suspense, right up to that final punch-line reprise; and maybe someday "I killed in Keokuk" and "Damn, you're funny!" and "You send me" could finally take on meanings any comedian worth his pillar of salt, truly deserving of his Lot's wife in life, would send his fans to die for.