I sometimes think that I might have been a reasonably good stand up comedian. I have a bit of a sense of dramatic timing and I’m fairly good at telling a joke. People seem to laugh and enjoy themselves when I’m telling funny stories. And my family seems to me to often be a bit funny. I have a brother who is a bicycle activist. He travels mostly by bicycle, having taken several long continent-crossing bike trips. He participates in bike rallies and protests against our dependence upon private automobiles. What is funny about him is that when we were growing up, this kid was a disaster on a bicycle. He was the first person in our town to get a multiple-speed stingray bike. It had a banana seat, high-rise handlebars, 20” wheels and a t-handled shifter on the crossbar. It also had a speedometer that went up to 45 mph. Of course the challenge of pegging that speedometer immediately occurred to all of us. He decided to make his attempt on airport hill, a gravel road that came down a very steep hill. At the bottom of the road was a paved highway that required a fairly tight turn. On the day of his attempt, they were doing a major repair of the highway at the bottom of the hill so that there was a gravel windrow in the center of the road. He was confident that he could make it. He flew down the hill and never really even started to turn. He plowed into the gravel windrow and at the top of it he and the bicycle parted company, both landing crumpled in the ditch. After lying there for a few minutes, he shook it off, got up and hauled the bike home, quite a bit worse for the wear – the bicycle, not him. He was a little skinned up, but triumphant and claimed to have hit 45 mph. After that it was just one bicycle accident after another. He would be distracted when riding his bike. He ran into things. He put too many newspapers in the front basket of a bike and wasn’t strong enough to control it. When he became an adult he once went off the road and hit a tree hard enough to split a helmet wide open and get a helicopter ride to the hospital. He doesn’t remember the helicopter ride, but once told me that the helmet company replaced the helmet for free saying, “you’re the kind of person we make our helmets for.” I couldn’t agree more. They do make helmets for people like him.

I could go on and on with stories about my family that seem to me to be humorous. Most of my brothers and sisters have been divorced, some multiple times, and divorce is a ripe subject for comedy. In our family you can see divorces coming. Usually the ones involved are the last ones to know that the marriage is over. The rest of the family has known that the marriage was doomed for a long time.

The problem with being a comedian in a large family – or in any family for that matter – is that your family doesn’t want you to tell their stories. And all of the stories are perceived from a distinct perspective. We don’t share the same memories and when we tell of a particular event, it sounds like we might have had entirely different experiences. I sometimes comment that a conversation with my brother about the past might convince one that he is either completely crazy or the biggest liar or perhaps he didn’t really grow up in the same house with the same parents as I did. The way he remembers things seems to be very different than the way I remember them. Were I to stand up in public and tell stories about him, he might think I was making fun of him. And in our family there is no need for additional tension and disagreement. We can come up with enough of that in private without any need for public statements, thank you very much.

And a lot of the stories of my family aren’t mine to tell in the first place. It is easy to find humor in other people’s stories, buy that doesn’t mean that you should exploit them by twisting them for the best laugh line and telling them in public.

That is the problem with telling funny stories about my work as well. Life in the church is a constant source of humor. I meet people whose lives are comedy in motion. There are plenty of days when if you didn’t laugh, you’d weep. I’ve been told by a church member that I “micromanage” manage everything in the church and that I should apologize for mistakes in a church project in which I had no part in the same conversation. I’ve been told that I don’t keep sufficient distinctions between work and home life by the same person who was angry that I didn’t answer an e-mail message sent to the church account while I was on vacation. One member declared in a meeting that if we don’t have enough volunteers for a project, we should “hire volunteers.” People are inconsistent and we all have all kinds quirks. It would be easy pickings for a stand-up comedian to make fun of real events that take place in a church. But such jokes would be made at the expense of good and faithful people. The folks in the jokes would recognize themselves and resent that their experiences were twisted in the telling of the stories.

So the only field for comedy would be the purely personal stories. But who could compete with Tig Notaro when it comes to making a stand up routine of her personal life? "I got pneumonia, and then I contracted this life-threatening, deadly illness called C. diff., and it's this bacteria that just eats your intestines. I was in the hospital for a week, lost 20 lbs...and then it was my birthday a couple days after the hospital.... A few days after that, my mother passed away unexpectedly...a freak accident.... I got off of a relationship shortly after that, and then I was diagnosed with cancer.... This was all in four months." (from her Live – pronounced with a soft “I” – album)

You wouldn’t think that kind of story would be funny. But she is incredibly so. Or perhaps I just have a warped sense of humor.

Chances are I wouldn’t be as good at comedy as I think.

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