The Funny Thing Is... (12 page)

I boxed up my clothes, prepared to give them to Goodwill, and then thought,
In ten years I might want to look at these again
—not with regret, but with confidence that the clothes I will be wearing then could just as well be the clothes I wear now—only dirtier and with more pockets.

Lhe funny thing is, to fully understand how and why I chose the title
The Funny Thing Is
… for my book, we need to go back in history. Remember the year “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero” was a huge Top 40 hit? Well, luckily we have to go back much, much further—all the way, in fact, to 1454 or 1620 or the early or late fifteenth or seventeenth century. I can’t really say for sure because I’m getting all of this secondhand.

Anyway, sometime, a real long time ago (about a decade before the introduction of books on tape), the Bible became the first book published for the masses. Who knew this amazing achievement would one day result in books with such titles as
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and Jesus for Dummies
. Yes, it’s been a long, strange journey.

Over the years, as more books were published, it became necessary to name them. Today, just as in 1454, if you stroll into a Barnes & Noble you need to know the title of a book in order to find it. I wanted to be sure, so I decided to test my theory in an actual bookstore:

BOOKSTORE
CLERK: Can I help you? Are you looking for a particular book?

ME: Yes, I am.

BOOKSTORE
CLERK: Do you know the name of the book?

ME: Actually, it doesn’t have a name.

BOOKSTORE
CLERK:
Please
, leave my store.

Interesting. Next, I tried the same experiment but this time I asked for a book by its title:

BOOKSTORE
CLERK: Can I help you? Are you looking for a particular book?

ME: Yes, I am.

BOOKSTORE
CLERK: Do you know the name of the book?

ME: Yes. Do you have
The Complete Illustrated History of Cinnamon-Flavored Dental Floss
, the waxed edition?

BOOKSTORE
CLERK:
Please, please
, leave my store.

Very
interesting.

So what did I learn from my experiments? Well, nothing really. Yes, they did reinforce my hypothesis that a publication with a name fares far better than one without. But I wanted to do things a little differently—to truly distinguish my opus from the others on those crowded bookstore shelves.

What if my book had a title like the Beatles’
White Album
— just a color instead of a name? Let’s say “purple.” (I hope you didn’t just say “purple” out loud, because if you did you’re missing my point.) I imagined this interaction might take place:

BOOK
BUYER: Do you have Ellen DeGeneres’s new book, it’s purple?

BOOKSELLER: (a different one than before): It’s called
It’s Purple
?

BOOK
BUYER: No. It’s purple. The book is the color purple.

BOOKSELLER: You’re looking for Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple
?

BOOK
BUYER: No, the color of the
book
is purple!

BOOKSELLER: Oh, yes, we
do
have it. Go past the mauve section and you’ll find the purple section on your right.

If my book got popular enough, I reasoned, booksellers all over the world would start organizing their books by color. I thought it would be revolutionary, like that Prince fellow who just came out with his highly acclaimed novel
The Book Formerly Known as Volume I
.

Then I had yet another groundbreaking idea. I thought about that saying “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Well, what if, I wondered, a book judged
us
instead? I came up with a few judgmental titles that I thought would incite interest in my book:

• My
God,
You’re Boring

• You Wouldn’t Understand

• It’s Over Your Head

• Your Mother Swims Out To Meet Troop Ships

• Hey, You There, In The Ugly Shirt

The success of this idea would depend heavily on people valuing the opinion of inanimate objects.

“Wait one minute. Why does that book think I’m wearing an ugly shirt? The nerve of it judging me, just because it’s got on that ridiculous book jacket! Hey, Mr. Book, what’s with the paper blazer? Goin’ to the prom? Where’s your cummerbund?” But curiosity and self-doubt would soon set in: “Judge me, will ya, you highfalutin pile of parchment? I’ll show you!
I’ll buy you and read you
!”

Ka-ching!

I also toyed with the idea of having a one-word title. Like Madonna did. Her book was all about sex so she called it that. I could have called my book
Funny
, or
Funny
!, with an exclamation point, to show people I really mean business. Exclamation points are extremely useful; they give titles energy and vitality. Remember that book a couple years back?
Croutons
! Or the bestselling
PVC
Piping
!

Ultimately my journey led me to
The Funny Thing Is
. I liked this title because when you hear it you know you’re going to hear an entertaining story. Perfect for essays written by a comic or even a book on the state of Social Security. But it also has another meaning. It’s used to explain an ironic situation. Like someone might say, “John just asked me for the money I owed him. Funny thing is, I already paid him back.” In this case it’s
not
funny because John may have just forgotten the debt had been paid. Or if someone says, “The funny thing is, when I deliberately set fire to the house, the couch was the first thing to go up in flames”; again, that’s not funny. That’s arson, and it’s a felony.

See how versatile it is?

The finishing touch was the three dots after the title (the ellipsis, as we say in bookbiz). My first stab at it was “The Funny Thing Is Dot Dot Dot,” but in the end I put real dots instead of words.

The final result:
The Funny Thing Is
…

My hope is that this chapter has helped you have a greater appreciation for book titles and a better understanding of all the trouble I went through so you can walk into your neighborhood bookstore, sporting goods outlet, or pawnshop and confidently ask for
The Funny Thing Is
… The funny thing is, you probably already did.

Did you know we have seven hundred TV channels now? It’s a wonder we get anything done.

Seven hundred channels—when did this happen? I can remember when I was a kid, we had five channels. And we didn’t have a remote. You had to hate something so much that you would be willing to get up and walk five feet to change the channel. If that wasn’t enough, you had to guess at the volume, because it was different when you were up close than when you sat back down again. “Damn
Bonanza
—those horses are so much louder when they run!”

It was a different time, it was a simpler time. We were entertained so easily. We would watch anything. We’d watch a flying nun. We’d watch a talking horse. We are so much more sophisticated now, watching people eat bugs and marry strangers for money. Almost makes you miss
Mayberry
, doesn’t it? I loved Andy Griffith. By the way, did anything ever happen on that show? When you’ve got time for whistling, you’ve got a lot of time.

Commercials used to be six minutes long, and they told us how delicious cigarettes and alcohol were. Man, they were happy smoking and drinking, those people. They’re still happy, but they’ve concentrated all their happiness into thirty seconds now. People in commercials are happy all the time. Especially that woman in the shampoo commercial. She’s
too
happy. I don’t think our children should see people that happy on television. I fell for it, though—I bought the shampoo. I’ve got to tell you, I was shampooing for a good half hour…and I never got that happy. Finally I just had to fake it.

I get so invested in the lives of those commercial people. Thirty seconds and suddenly you care. That old man who can eat corn on the cob again … I’m happy for him. He couldn’t eat it for a while. He can now. That woman on jury duty—”Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go right now, gotta go, gotta go, gotta go”—she’s gotta
go
! And the judge doesn’t understand. I’m so happy by the end of the commercial. “And I don’t have to go right now.” Ah—fantastic.

So many of the commercials on TV these days are for anti-depressants. There are so many—Prozac… Paxil… And they get you right away. “Are you sad? Do you get stressed? Do you have anxiety?” Yes, yes, and yes. I have all those things. I’m alive.

I don’t want to take a pill. If you want to understand real stress, I say, go to Africa. Go follow some Bushman around. He’s getting chased by a lion.
That’s
stress! You’re not going to find a Pygmy on Paxil, I’ll tell you that right now.

But I understand why people need help. The world can be a depressing place. If you want proof, just turn on the news. There you go. Depressing. I was watching the news the other day, “brought to you by Paxil.” (That’s smart advertising. You watch the news, and suddenly you need it.) When I was a kid the news was on once a day. You either caught it or you missed it. Now the news is on twenty-four hours a day. And that’s not enough. There’s a guy talking, and there’s a crawl going along down there. But that’s not all. You’ve got the guy talking, you’ve got that crawl going, you’re online, you’re typing in your opinion on their poll—”No, I say to that, no!” Suddenly youve stopped paying attention to the crawl and you start listening to the guy, and then you look back at the crawl again. You catch the end of something—”Madonnas left foot.” What about Madonna’s left foot? What happened? You’re waiting for it to come back around again, and it goes to commercial … “Are you sad? Do you get stressed …?”

There should just be one crawl that goes around over and over again. “Things are getting worse.” That’s all we need.

And then there’s the local news. They want you to watch every single broadcast they’ve got. It’s not good enough that you’re watching the one you’re watching. They slip in these teasers that are just so incredibly cruel to get you to watch again later. “It could be the most deadly thing in the world and you may be having it for dinner. We’ll tell you what it is, tonight at eleven.”

Is it peas?

I feel so sorry for newscasters, because they know we can turn off the news. We don’t have to watch, but the news is their job. Not only do they have to read the stories, but they don’t know what’s coming up next. They’re just reading the prompter, and they’ve got to go through a huge range of emotions. They have to jump from one thing to another without flinching. “There were no survivors … And next up: Which candy bar helps you lose weight? Still to come: Is an asteroid headed toward earth? But first, where to find the cheesiest pizza in town! Also, a disturbing new study finds that studies are disturbing.”

The newscasters are practically schizophrenic by the end of the broadcast. No wonder they snap by the time they talk to the weatherman. It’s like a fantasyland that they enter all of a sudden. “And now let’s go to Johnny with the weather. Johnny, when are you gonna stop this rain and bring us some sunshine?”

“I’ll stop the rain when you stop the carjackings, Colleen.”

The weather is the happiest part of the news. It really is. You know, weathermen are usually very happy people. And at some point they’re going to say, “It’s a beautiful day” or “It’s gonna be a beautiful day.” Usually that moment’s associated with the weather and sunshine, but it’s nice to hear that positive reinforcement even when the crawl underneath the weatherman is telling us unpleasant news. I’d like it if they could incorporate “It’s a beautiful day” into the crawl. Horrible news wouldn’t seem as bad if it read, “Get out your sunglasses, ‘cause it’s a beautiful day for the ozone layer to deplete!” or “It’s a beautiful day for the world to explode.” That sounds much better.

It seems to me that the crawl actually takes the focus off the entire news team. Back in the days of the “five channels,” the anchormen and the weatherman had the spotlight—they were the stars. It was their show and the crawl was something babies and swimmers did … on a beautiful day.

I’d like to take a moment to talk about you, reader. I think it’s safe to assume that you have an active imagination. (You’re reading a book, that’s why I assumed that. And that’s also why I’m calling you “reader” and not “Carol” or whatever your given name is.) The imagination is very important in reading. Books are not like television, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. You have to do a lot of imagining when you read. I bet that’s why more people watch TV than read books these days. It’s so much easier to have a machine do your imagining for you. But then you have to wonder,
is the easier way always the better way for me
? (I know the answer, but I’m going to let you figure out for yourself. It will be more rewarding for you that way.)

In this chapter I’m going to take advantage of that imagination of yours and take you on a literary tour of my private home, and in the process, I won’t have to get my carpets dirty.

Unfortunately, most celebrities don’t devote chapters in their books to describing their homes in detail to their fans. So they end up being listed on a “Map to the Stars’ Homes” here in Hollywood. Now, I understand why people want to buy those maps. The idea of getting to see where your favorite movie, television, and/or vaudeville star lives is thrilling. I’ll admit to you, reader, I bought a “star map” once myself. Ever since I was a girl, it was my lifelong dream to see Ernest Borgnine’s driveway from fifty feet away.

The day I moved to Hollywood, I made my dream happen. I saw that long stretch of asphalt partially obstructed by that huge, iron gate and I thought I’d never recover. I mean,
the
Ernest Borgnine! Even his name sounds famous.

I mention this to point out that there’s nothing wrong with curiosity. I’m curious to know what your home looks like, too, reader. You, I have a pretty good idea of what you look like. Jean shirt, khaki pants, curled up on your couch with a parrot on your shoulder and your Pekinese, Muffin, panting furiously in your lap. Man, those dogs breathe a lot, don’t they? I mean, I know they have to breathe, but I think they overdo it just to get attention. It works, too. Look at how much you ignore that nameless parrot and pay attention to Muffin. And why are those dogs’ tongues purple? Or am I thinking of pugs? That’s a silly question. How could you know what I’m thinking? You can’t; you can only imagine what I’m thinking. But I know what you’re thinking right now:
How could she know exactly what I’m wearing and what I’m doing? Is she some kind of wizard
? I know it’s creepy, but it’s not wizardry. You don’t win an Emmy for comedy writing by
not
knowing your audience.