Inevitably, we heard a shuffling noise behind us, and when we turned to look, the Second Goofy Man was standing there. “Hey, that's a real laugh,” he said, showing a good two dozen teeth. “Joke's on me. Maybe you folks should get some work done now. Or am I the only one with a job to worry about? Gotta pay the old bills, right?”
The resemblance was uncanny.
The Second Goofy Man has been the show's host for the last two seasons, ever since the Ken and the Barbie who replaced our original host, the First Goofy Man, were fired by the network. “Do we hear each other?” the Second Goofy Man asked.
Karen answered for the group of us. “Aye, aye, mon poltroon.” She's usually pretty deferential toward the guy, if not actually respectful, but occasionally she lets one slip through. Of course, the Second Goofy Man would never admit that he didn't know the word. “Okay,” he said. “Good deal,” and went scuffing off down the hallway, hands jammed into the pockets of his blue jeans.
Let me tell you, the First Goofy Man was a prince—generous, smart, with a natural amiability about him that made him seem compassionate, vulnerable, and only slightly absurd. The Ken and the Barbie were a bit flimsy in the head, perhaps, but essentially harmless; you got the sense that their beauty had gradually rendered them inept, like those luxury cars that sit so long in the showroom their tires go flat. But the Second Goofy Man is a terrible human being. Completely, irretrievably terrible. I once saw him hurl a stapler at his personal assistant, Rachel. We listened for his footsteps to fade away, and then Leo asked Karen, “What did you call him? A poltroon?”
“Poltroon,” she said, “from the medieval Latin pultro, meaning ‘a worthless wretch.’ ”
Pram had removed the videotape from the player and was preparing to put it in his sorry-but-we-must-decline box. “The video. What's the name on the package?” I asked him.
“So to speak?” He turned the cartridge over in his hands. “Well, the tape is unlabeled, but—” He fished a bubble-envelope out of the trash. “Here we go. Ann Wilson. No return address.”
“Let me see that.” I took the envelope from him. Sure enough, there was only the name: Ann Wilson. The mailer itself was empty, with no notes or shipping instructions enclosed, despite the fact that the show requires an address and telephone number from all its entrants, along with a description of the clip under consideration. There was, however, a cancellation stamp in the upper right-hand corner of the envelope. It was perfectly legible: AUSTIN, TEXAS. 08 SEP 2003.
Two hours later and we'd found exactly four yeses and one maybe. The maybe was a near duplicate of one of the yeses, both of them examples of that dismal subcategory of videos in which babies use their fingers to eat things that are normally eaten with silverware—in the one case chocolate pudding and in the other spaghetti with marinara sauce. Since there was no return address on the Ann Wilson video, I put it in the top drawer of my desk, thinking that we might want to watch it again one day when we needed to be reminded that there was honest-to-god comedy in the world and not just thousands upon thousands of cute animals and hammy little kids, and I took the five videos we had selected down the hall to our production coordinator, who would edit them, splice them together, and return them to us the next day so that we could come up with some voice-over patter for the Second Goofy Man, which he would invariably reject in favor of his own threadbare gags. Then I left the building and got in my car and drove to the planetarium.
It was one of my favorite rituals. The planetarium presented its Wonders of the Visible Universe show every Wednesday and Saturday night, and I tried to make it out to the park for one of the early evening screenings as often as I could. Sometimes, it was true, I would miss a week or two during sweeps period or when I was dating someone, but I never went longer than a month without driving up to the big dome of the observatory, buying a ticket, and leaning back in one of the deep, yielding seats to take in a show. It was a comfort to me, a restorative. Some people have basketball games, some people have opera, I had the Wonders of the Visible Universe.
The program always began with a close shot of a blade of grass, an insect the size and color of a pumpkin seed crawling along the broad part of the leaf, filmed with such remarkable clarity that you almost imagined you could touch it. Then the camera would lift off in a dizzying ascent that allowed first the neighborhood and then the city and then the entire continent to take shape. The blue-white marble of the Earth would come together from the edges of the projection dome, spinning and receding into space, and you would see the moon sailing around it like a tiny paper boat, and suddenly everything would seem to slow down as the vast expanse of stars came into view, and, if you were anything like me, a tremendous, full-bellied feeling of contentment would wash over you. After the opening shot, the film would gradually make its way through the solar system, one planet at a time (Mother Very Easily Made a Jam Sandwich Using No Peanuts), before it ventured out into the wider universe, traveling straight into the core of the Milky Way, then skipping out through the girdling of stars into the deepest regions of space.
This was was why I came—this last half hour of footage. The planetarium updated it every few months to incorporate the newest images from the Hubble Space Telescope, pictures of brilliantly colored nebulas and stars with great quills of light extending from them. Have you ever seen these images? If you have, then you might understand what I mean when I tell you that that's where I want to go when I die.
This particular night a woman had brought her son to the show. The pair of them sat directly across the aisle from me, a thirtysome-thing Hispanic woman and her thin-limbed ten-year-old boy. Even before the lights fell and the kid began asking his two thousand questions, I could tell that he was blind. It was something about the way he held his face, as though all of his features had been permanently kinked toward his ears. It made for a nice little theory—that people's faces become concentrated around whichever sensory organ they use the most. I wondered briefly if my own face had been hitched toward my eyes from so much watching.
About twenty minutes into the program, long after the blade of grass with the insect crawling toward the tip had fallen away, I heard the blind boy ask his mother the first of many questions: “What are they showing now?” He waited out her answer in the quiet of the theater.
“That's Andromeda. It's a galaxy, like the Milky Way Galaxy—a big group of stars all crowded together in one place. It spirals around in space like water going down the drain.”
“Where does the drain go?”
“It's not a real drain, honey. It doesn't go anywhere that we know of.”
“Oh. Now what are they showing?”
“Now they're showing the Crab Nebula.”
“What's a nebula?”
“It's a big dusty cloud in outer space. Sometimes it's dark, and sometimes it's full of colors.”
“Oh. What's a crab?”
“Crabs live on the beach and scuttle around in the sand. They have claws that snap together like Auntie Nina's salad pincers.”
“Like Red Lobster!”
“No, a lobster is bigger than a crab. You take a hamburger and put lobster claws on the end of it, and then you have something like a crab.”
“That's funny. That's a good joke. ‘Knock-knock. What do you get when you take the claws off a hamburger? A lobster!’ No, wait. How does it go?”
“Now they're moving on to a bunch of galaxies near something called the Great Attractor. It's—oh!”
“What? Mom, what is it? What are you looking at?”
“The stars. It's hard to believe how many there are. You live in the city so long, you forget what's up there.”
They went on like this for a full half hour, until the footage dead-ended against the Great Light Barrier and the camera made the reverse journey back to Earth, stopping at the same blade of grass from which it had started. I had closed my eyes for a few minutes to see if I could use the mother's descriptions to picture what was happening on the curved ceiling
of the planetarium, but the test was rigged in my favor. The truth was I knew the program so well I could have visualized the entire thing without any cues at all. After the lights came back up, I heard the boy ask his mother, “Can we stop for hamburgers on the way home?” to which she said, “Grammy's already got something cooking on the stove for us.” Then their voices were lost around the corner as they filed out of the theater.
I sat there for a while, as I always did, while the aisles emptied out and the doors closed and the silence crept back into the room. I let my eyes rest on the starmaker that stood in the center of the floor, that curiously tilted mechanism with the thousand-eyed globes at either end, as alien as any creature I was ever likely to encounter, until the ushers began sweeping between the seats and I knew I had to leave. Then I drove home and made a late dinner for myself and went to bed.
The next day was the last of this month's broadcast cycle. There is always a two-week lag between our work in the production office and the actual telecast of a show, which means that the videos we select one week will be screened for the in-studio audience a week later and aired during prime time a week after that. Nevertheless, we had to finish the packaging process by the end of the day, and we still had a good six minutes left to fill. There were weeks when we found more than enough material for the show, but usually, come Thursday morning, we were faced with anywhere from two to twelve minutes of empty programming time, and this led, perhaps inescapably, to a falling off in our standards.
I suppose I should tell you about the difference between funny ha-ha and funny peculiar. These are the two most comprehensive varieties of humor on our show. Funny ha-ha is exactly what you would expect it to be: videos in which children drop their pants at weddings, tuba players suffer accidents involving clumsy waiters and meatballs, construction workers get their feet jammed in buckets of paint. Funny ha-ha usually involves some small element of human suffering, though never anything too permanent or deeply wounding. Funny peculiar is a different animal altogether. The funny peculiar video is distinguished by its lack of an obvious comic trigger: it's more odd than ridiculous, more playful than farcical; you're not exactly sure why you want to laugh when you see it, but you do. After such a video has ended, you're likely to think, or even say, “What the—?,” take note of its absurdity or incongruity, and then, after a few seconds have passed, experience a slowly rising feeling of glee that will plateau in a single vocalized “Ha!”
Funny peculiar is often, strictly speaking, funnier than funny ha-ha. My favorite of the many thousands of clips we have broadcast, for instance, is a funny peculiar video in which a McDonald's cashier, obviously a trainee, keeps putting an absentminded look on his face and wandering away from the register whenever a customer approaches. He must do this a dozen times before the camera finally cuts off.
In addition to funny peculiar and funny ha-ha, there is also funny adorable—i.e., not funny. Think of the sort of greeting card you would be likely to send your favorite aunt. It might feature a photograph of a baby clapping his hands together or a puppy wearing a birthday hat. Inside, the message would read, “Wishing you the best on your very special day.” Funny adorable.
By the time the office shut down for the evening, we had managed to come up with twelve yeses and a promising maybe—a good day. Nine of the videos were funny ha-has, one was funny peculiar, and we rounded the selection out with a couple of funny adorables. The best of the lot was a video that Leo discovered, a funny peculiar in which a minister was delivering the sermon at his church's Easter service. The minister paced in front of the altar with a tack-size microphone clipped to his collar, testifying, “With Jesus, there's no need to be sorrowful, brothers and sisters. With Jesus, there's no need to feel weighed down. For two thousand years ago, Jesus, our Lord and Savior, Jesus defeated the grief of this world. Jesus cast aside the stone and ascended into Heaven. Jesus rose, brothers and sisters! Jesus rose!”
There's nothing particularly funny about this, I know. But the minister was battling a truly alarming case of the hiccups, and each hiccup landed smack on the word Jesus, so that his sermon sounded something like this: “With Ja-hupsus, there's no need to be sorrowful, brothers and sisters. With Jesa-hup, there's no need to feel weighed down. For two thousand years ago, Ja-hupsus, our Lord and Savior, Ja-hupsus defeated the grief of this world. Jesa-hup cast aside the stone and ascended into Heaven. Ja-hupsus rose, brothers and sisters! Ja-hupsus rose!”
“What do you think?” Leo asked after he had screened the video for us. “Can we air this on a Sunday night? We won't piss off the family values crowd?”
“It seems pretty benign to me,” said Pram. “Hiccups are a family value. I say we run with it.”
“Run with it,” Karen agreed.
I told him, “Take that sucker and run with it.”
We received the next Ann Wilson video early the following week. It arrived exactly as the first one had, bearing no return address, only a gray cancellation stamp in the upper right-hand corner: AUSTIN, TX. 11 SEP 2003. Another arrived two days later, and another the day after that. We clustered like beetles around one another's monitors to watch. The videos were simultaneously amusing and disquieting, even a little gruesome, “like a bear humping a Volkswagen,” as Leo put it, by which he meant more interesting than the sights you usually saw, but not the sort of thing you could broadcast on network television.
One of them presented footage of a small girl trying to suck what we thought was a raisin through a straw, until the raisin started to crawl. Another showed a team mascot of some kind, a man in a pirate costume, weeping uncontrollably into his hands. In the final video, a man with wire-rimmed glasses sat talking quietly into the camera. “People say that it must be craziness, which is what Aristotle thought, but that's not necessarily true, in my judgment. I think you have to ask yourself, on balance, do you bring more joy or more pain into the world? If the answer is pain, and pain is the only foreseeable answer, then you have every justification in the world, I should think. Notice that it's the pain of others I'm talking about, not your own pain. But even then, if you can posit a world where the suffering of any one individual is experienced by every other, your own pain would be reason enough. It's a principle I call ‘the contamination of suffering.’ ”
Though he never used the word, we gathered that the man was talking about suicide. A gumdrop was affixed to the shining center of his forehead.
I put this video along with the others in the top drawer of my desk.
It was late on a Friday, that time of day when the afternoon becomes indistinguishable from the evening. We could hear the Second Goofy Man excoriating the interns who worked across the hall from us, peeling the flesh from their bodies in his folksy, mild-mannered, horribly exacting way. “Now, who heard what I said about my car? I count eight ears in here—nine if I include that growth on your cheek—so somebody must have heard me. What I said was five o'clock, by the front door, without fail. And what time is it now? It's sure as heck later than five, I can tell you that. You know, three people can accomplish nothing just as easily as four. A little food for thought. So who wants to hop outside and get that car for me?”
One of the interns came scrambling out of the office with a set of silver keys in his hand. A short time later, the Second Goofy Man strolled out wearing a little smile on his face. He was tending his hair with a small black comb and patting it into place with his palm.
“Witling,” Karen muttered as he walked past our window. Leo didn't even have to ask her this time. “ ‘A person who fancies himself a wit,’ ” she said. “ ‘Chiefly derogatory.’ ”
I thought about the First Goofy Man as I made the commute home that evening. One of the things you remembered about him was the way he seemed so entertained by the little irritations of the world, never bullied or affronted but honestly amused by them, as though life were just the rags and sticks of an old traveling carnival and you couldn't expect anything more from it. I missed the guy.
> The lights of the city, some four thousand square miles of them, cast a pale orange glow over the highway, thick enough to obscure even the brightest stars, and only the moon was powerful enough to burn through.
I made a dinner of salmon and wild rice for myself when I got home, and I ate it listening to one of my Iris DeMent CDs. I enjoy cooking—I always have. I've often thought that if I hadn't gone into television, I might have become a chef in a French restaurant, or even a short-order cook in some dive across the street from a pawn shop and a gas station—anything, so long as it gave me the pleasure of feeding people who were hungry.
I went to bed after the late news. The next morning I did some research. There were five Ann Wilsons in the Austin, Texas, phone directory.
“Hello, is this Ann Wilson?”
“Yes, this is Ann. Who am I speaking to?”
“This isn't by any chance the Ann Wilson who's been sending the videos?”
“Videos?” I heard a powerless little noise of escaped air. “Look, I don't want to receive any telephone solicitations at this number. Please place me on your do-not-call list.”
“But—”
“I'm not interested. Don't call this number again.”
“But I'm not—”
“Thank you,” Ann Wilson said, and she hung up.
The second Ann Wilson supposed I was somebody named Rabbit. Try as I might, I couldn't disabuse her of the notion. “When are you coming by to see me again, Rabbit honey?”
“No, this isn't Rabbit,” I said. “You don't understand. I'm looking for the Ann Wilson who's been shooting videos for television.” I told her the name of the show. “Does that ring a bell?”