FUNNY GUY

FUNNY GUY

When I was a boy, I didn’t have any friends. It never really concerned me because I was quite content with my own company. Also, the fact that I was a sickly boy probably had a lot to do with it; no, definitely, had a great deal to do with it.

We lived at the top of a three family house; an Irish three family house on 5th and San Pedro. Times were hard, not that I really knew what that meant but I heard my parents saying it all the time, so I figured they had to know what they were talking about. We were considered fortunate by the other two families that occupied the house: the Delaneys in the middle and the Murphys in the basement, on account of the fact that we had an indoor flush toilet; one with a cistern high on the wall, with a chain you had to pull to activate. They had to share a toilet outside in the backyard. I guess toilet paper existed back then but we wiped our butts with old newspaper.

We tended to keep ourselves to ourselves, or tried to, even though everybody knew everybody’s business as there was no door, at the top of our stairs, to divide us from the Delaneys on the floor below and the same applied to the Delaneys and the Murphys below them.

The whole house had only cold water; bathrooms, back then, were definitely only for those with money. If we wanted to wash, we’d have to boil some water first. On hooks, in the backyard, were three tin tubs, one belonging to each of the families. On a Saturday evening, my mother would put several saucepans on the stove to boil and she would haul our tub up two flights of stairs so that she could bathe my two older sisters and I, one after the after. As the youngest, I was always last and that water was none too clean, and none too warm, by the time I got my turn. Yet, in this way, I, at least, always considered myself to be cleaner than the Delaney kids whose mother hauled their tub only on special occasions such as Easter or Christmas. The Murphys, in the basement, remained something of a mystery to us.

Despite my perceived, superior hygiene, I was unfortunate to be that child that most families tended to have; the sickly one. If there was something going around, I was sure to catch it and I spent more time at home than I did at school. When I was sixteen years old, I contracted a disease that almost killed me when I fell in the street and cut my knee, an infection entering my blood system and, untreated, somehow, getting into my bone. I was hospitalised for eight weeks, given the last sacrament by our parish priest, so sure were they that I was going to die, and, after a short remission, became re-infected and spent a further eight weeks in hospital.

It was after that second attack that, as I lay in bed one day upon my release from hospital, weak as a kitten, the doctors having said that several more months of home convalescing would be needed, I heard a knock on the door of the bedroom that I shared with my mother and father. That, in itself, surprised me as nobody in my family ever knocked. I was too stunned to answer and, for a moment, thought I had imagined it but, slowly, the door opened and a bespectacled face appeared, followed by the rake thin body of Johnny Murphy, the boy from the bowels of the basement. As I stared at him in bewilderment, for I knew him by sight, of course, but we had never spoken, he said:

‘Knock, knock’.

Receiving no answer, just a bemused stare, he repeated: ‘Knock, knock’.

Once again, slightly annoyed that he was interrupting my precious re-reading of Superman’s latest adventures, I stared at him, unsure of what I was supposed to respond. Coming closer, he admonished:

‘You’re supposed to say: “Who’s there?”

Finding my voice, finally, I said: ‘But I know it’s you, now. Nobody knocks in my family’.

Exasperated, he sank himself down on the end of my bed and it was then that I noticed the package in his hands, wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper though it was now July. A present, perhaps? Seeing my gaze, he proffered the gift.

‘From the Murphy family, wishing you a speedy recovery’, he repeated the words he had been told to say by his mother; word perfect.

I tore open the packaging, hoping, praying, to discover some wonderful treat such as chocolate or the like but I could tell from the feel of it, as my fingers delved deeper, that I was going to be disappointed. It was a book! A book of jokes. To be more precise: a book of knock, knock jokes. Opening it and reading the very first of them, I realised, immediately, what Johnny had meant by his opening, twice stated, gambit.

“Who’s there?’ I belatedly asked.

Brightening, he answered: ‘Jesus’.

‘Jesus who?’

‘Jesus, they said you were better but you look like death’.

For a second or two, I hesitated, caught between an intuitive realisation that this was a joke that I would not find in any book; one that Johnny, himself, had invented, and the profane use of Jesus’s name for laughs for, in our family, Jesus’s name was sacrosanct, being solely responsible, according to my mother, for the saving of my life.

Then, unable to stop myself, I burst out laughing and, from that awkward moment, Johnny and I became the best of pals. Each evening, upon his return from school, up he would come to keep me company. He loved my parent’s bedroom with it’s double windows that spread such light, unlike the dim room that he and his sister shared with his parents down below. For the first time in my life, I felt a sense of pride. When he realised that we also had a toilet on the landing, he was almost star-struck.

‘I wondered why you never used the one in the backyard. I thought, maybe, you all shit in a bag or something’.

His profanity, aka street talk, was new and exciting to me though I dared not speak like that in front of my mother. Johnny fascinated me with his tales of school life and the games that he and others would play on the street. How I longed to be able to join in. Together, we worked our way through that joke book until we knew every single pun-inside and out. It got so that we each began to invent our own versions to surprise each other with and, in doing so, made a great discovery.

‘You’re funny’, said Johnny to me, one evening.

‘So are you’, I replied.

‘No. I’m lame. Some of my jokes are pathetic, though I spend all night and day trying to come up with something that will make you laugh. But you...you’re really funny. I bet you only think of something when you hear me coming up the stairs’.

My face betrayed the fact that it was true. As soon as I heard his familiar footsteps on the stairs, my brain would spin into action.

‘I knew it! Goddamn, Patrick. Go on, hit me with some’.

Without thinking, I let rip, one after the other:

‘Knock, knock’.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Boo”.

“Boo who?’

‘Hey, no need to cry’.

‘Knock, knock’.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Cash’.

‘Cash who?’

‘No thanks, I’ll stick with peanuts’.

On and on I went, I was like a comedic fountain with this stuff pouring out from inside of me. Johnny stared at me in wonder.

'You’re a natural born comedian, man. I want to be your manager’.

And, as unlikely as it sounds, that is how our business partnership began. At the beginning, we thought to compile a hundred original jokes that Johnny would try and get somebody to publish but, with the advent of comedy on radio, he changed tack quickly. The only family in our building that owned a radio was the Delaneys and Johnny would often sit on the staircase and listen to programs and it was with immense excitement that he reported to me his introduction to one, Jack Benny.

‘He’s got his own show, Patrick. His own show! Canada Dry. But his jokes, they’re not snappy one-liners, they’re more like he’s talking, you know? With a funny ending...’

‘A punchline, you mean’.

‘Yeah, a punchline. This guy is so funny, man. He’s hilarious’.

‘Boy, I’d give anything to hear him, Johnny’.

That very night, though my mother would not, yet, allow me to venture out onto the street, she permitted me to join Johnny on the staircase and we listened in awe, outside the Delaney door, as the great comedian, still in his infancy, wowed his listening audience and forced us to stifle our laughter for fear of alerting the Delaneys to our illicit eavesdropping.

I was inspired. I dashed off monologues, one liners, punchlines that could be used in many different situations. Johnny, for his part, found out that Jack Benny was playing a stand up spot at the Orpheum in downtown LA and he set off to try and sell one of my jokes.

‘Five bucks?’

‘Per joke, Patrick’.

It was unbelievable. Jack Benny had loved my stuff and wanted to tie me to him exclusively but this was where Johnny had showed his genius. The success of Benny’s radio show was sure to lead to a prime spot on the new marvel of the age: television. And, Johnny figured, there would be many more comedians looking to follow in Jack Benny’s wake. Johnny hatched a plan to have me write for all of them -and at a much better rate than five bucks per joke.

At the age of just seventeen, thanks to Johnny Murphy, I began to write for the likes of Moms Mabley, Bob Hope, George Burns, Fred Allen, Milton Berle and, of course, Jack Benny. It was the golden age of comedy, never to be repeated. These days, most stand up guys depend on the addition of profanity to a punchline in order to get a laugh but, back then, a punchline had to be funny. TV and radio shows were sponsored by big corporations. Any suggestion of impropriety reflected badly on a company’s sales and would not be tolerated so clean, funny was paramount.

By the time I was twenty years old, it’s fair to say that I was the most sought after free-lancer around. Johnny handled all of my contracts and never tied me to anybody exclusively. My rates just kept climbing and both Johnny and I moved our parents into better neighbourhoods and had more money than anybody could ever need. We spent virtually every waking hour in each other’s company and no two guys could have been closer. I might have had the gift of being funny but, without Johnny’s chutzpah, I would have become just another writing hack spewing out wisecracks at five bucks a time, spending my working day locked in a smoke filled writing room with a dozen or more others. I knew it only too well and I had so much to be grateful to my pal for.

Instead, I could work from home gazing out on the ocean while, in an adjoining sea facing office, Johnny would handle all the business side of things. One day, in a TV studio, we both got talking to the pretty Anderson sisters, a singing duet, and one thing led to another. I married Abigail and Johnny married Jolene in a joint marriage ceremony attended by the comedic greats. The wedding was perfect. Life was perfect. Johnny and I had come a long way from Skid Row.

One day, I was acting out my latest skit, one of many that I wrote for Rodney Dangerfield. My sole audience was Johnny. The sketch involved a Martian who crash lands on Earth and finds himself wandering down a high street when he sees a laundromat, mistakes a washing machine for a spaceship and ends up spinning round and round. You had to see it to really get it. Johnny was rolling around on the floor, dying from laughing so much that our wives came running in alarm, only to end up joining Johnny in their laughter. A week later, when Dangerfield performed the same piece on the Merv Griffin show, we and our wives tuned in to watch expectantly...and it wasn’t as funny.

‘It’s you, Patty. It’s you. You’re funnier than all these guys’.

And that’s how my stand up career started; telling my own jokes. Within months, I was on national TV with regular spots on Merv Griffin, Joey Bishop, Mort Sahl, you name it. Then came my own show, a weekly, thirty minute show loosely based on our own family lives with the two girls. My piece, famously, or infamously, copied later by Lucille Ball, when the two girls, through a misunderstanding, end up in a large vat, treading grapes, won the Primetime Emmy for Best Comedy.

Then, disaster struck and Johnny became ill. At first, it seemed to be nothing major but, as more tests were done, the worst was confirmed; it was the Big C. As brave as ever, he took the news on the chin but I was devastated. I could not imagine my life without my best friend. Now it was my turn to visit my pal in his bedroom.

‘You know, Patty, the one place I’d like to see once more before I go?’

‘No. Tell me’.

‘The old place on 5th and San Pedro. For old times sake. And you know what I’d like to see, right up there, where your old bedroom used to be? You remember that room, Patty? I always loved that room; so bright compared to mine in the basement’.

‘Sure I remember, Johnny. What would you like to see, pal?’

‘A plaque that says: The greatest living comedian, Patrick O’Donnell lived here. A real funny guy’.

‘Well I don’t know about that last bit but, if you want to see the old place, Johnny, then I’ll arrange it. Leave it to me’.

Johnny died that same night so I never did have a chance to take him home. A huge chunk of me died with him. Life continued for a few years but I never, ever performed, or wrote, again. I was offered great chunks of money but, without Johnny, comedy just wasn’t funny, somehow.

I climbed the rickety staircase of the old place, now vacant. It was Johnny’s birthday. And he’d have been fifty years old. Everything seemed, somehow, so much smaller. I marvelled at the indoor toilet, just as it had been all those years ago. How, I wondered, had my dear mother ever managed to raise a family, cook and wash with such a lack of privacy?

I climbed the last small flight and, tentatively, pushed open the door to the bedroom that I had shared with my parents, the sunlight, as ever, streaming in through the double windows but the wallpaper now faded and peeling. How Johnny had loved spending time up here, I recalled. I regretted so much that I had never managed to bring him back for one last look. There would also never be a plaque on the facade as he had wished for the building was due to be demolished any day and, after so long out of the limelight, my name was long forgotten.

The tears flowed freely as I remembered my best, my only, pal. How far we had come together. I’m here today for you, Johnny, I thought.

Those footsteps, that tread, so familiar.

‘Knock, knock’. His voice.

I turned joyfully as the door slowly pushed open. This time, I knew how to answer.

‘Who’s there?’