Entertaining the Masses

"It starts when we’re kids, a show-off at school. Makin’ faces at friends, you’re a clown and a fool. Doing pratfalls and birdcalls and bad imitations; ignoring your homework, there’s that dedication. Working the mirror, you’re getting standing ovations...."
The earliest vivid memory I have of that is the first impression I ever did, of my fourth-grade social studies teacher Mrs. Walden. You know the type- soft-spoken Southern woman who lives in a book and has no life. Oops, that could almost be me. Moving on. I learned to mimic her voice perfectly and made all the kids laugh. Heck, I still laugh whenever I think about it and that was eleven years ago now.

My sister Janna is a born comic as well, and whenever we weren't trying to kill each other we could be pretty amusing. Despite our young ages, we never cared if people stared at us as we produced the most annoying sound in the world. Even now, she can always crack me up. And when I make her laugh, I know that I must be really funny.

I have a larger audience now, but my sense of humor isn't what you'd call typical. I laugh at Whose Line, and the Golden Girls, or just at the random Chipmunks song on a burned CD that I've heard fifty times before. I do wonder what I must look like wandering through the store, headphones in ears, laughing to myself at my own thoughts of Super Wal-Mart Man. But I still don't care what people think of me.

Because it doesn't bother me when other people don't understand why I find funny the things that I do. They tell me that almost dying-again- shouldn't be funny. Sure it is. You just have to look at it the right way. Force me to be serious and I can do a good job at that. But why should I be? If nothing else, I do a pretty good job of entertaining myself. And if I'm really as funny as I think I am, you, too.