comedian

Laughter is a tangible evidence of hope.

People who are not blessed with the ability to make others laugh compensate for that by saying (or trying to say) things that are profound.

What is she doing here? I wondered. Hasn't she had enough green-upping?

The Mob essentially created the term 'stand-up comic'__ccording to eighty-six-year-old comedian Dick Curtis: 'The Outfit used to manage fighters. A stand-up fighter is a guy that is a puncher. A stand-up guy was a guy who was tough and you could depend on. The Outfit managed fighters and they managed clubs that booked comics, so the term found its way into the lexicon of nightclubs. A guy who just stood there and punched jokes__oke, joke, joke__e was a stand-up comic.

Every night was improv.

Theater owners dodged construction costs, cutting corners and employing nonunion labor. Shoddy methods caused the death of vaudeville comedian Rube Dickinson in Kansas City. Booked at a brand-new venue, Dickinson stepped outside to have a smoke and was standing underneath the large wooden marquee advertising him when it collapsed. As the marquee caved, so too did his head__illed under the weight of his own name.

No small part of the club's audience consisted of would-be comics, as well as the leading comics of the day. In fact, there were so many gagsters around that it was difficult to know who was part of the act and who was just sitting in.

Comedy to me has always seemed a social tightrope for the comedian. For all axioms intellectually sound the general public would prefer to be amused, but in those emotionally sound, it then chooses to get offended.

You know it's time to do the laundry when you dry off with a sneaker,

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.