13. My First Pratfall
The Memory: I remember the first time I attempted to make other people laugh.
I was eating dinner with my family--my parents and three older brothers. Sometime later in the meal, I excused myself from the dinner table for a moment, and slipped down from my chair. I left the room and went through the hallway to the basement stairs. No one could see me, but it was close enough that everyone could hear me. I went about halfway down the stairs and stopped.
At this point I waited for a moment, and listened to my family talking. When there was a brief lull in the conversation, I banged my fist on the wall of the stairwell, and stomped my feet on the steps, in a short, loud noise that I meant to sound like someone falling. I stopped, and waited.
After a brief silence, one of my brothers called out, 'Are you all right, Stephen?'
And after just the appropriate beat, I answered as I had planned all along, 'No, I'm all right!' (Pause) 'I landed on my head!'
I waited, and there was silence at the dinner table for two or three or four seconds. And then there was a burst of laughter.
I had made my family laugh.
The Context: That's it. But of course, I'm not going to let it go there. I have questions that only context can help to answer.
Why? I was living in a house filled with people who were much older--and larger--than I was. My brothers were ten, twelve and fifteen older than I was, and my parents were at this point middle-aged. I have no idea how old I was, but I would say I was under ten years old.
I'm not going to say I was starved for affection--on the contrary, I was a fortunate child in so many ways, and 'adults' of all sorts spent considerable time with me. On the other hand, I was rarely a part of any conversation. I was a listener, passive and not active. I do remember attempting to take control of the conversation in my own way, by asking questions that I hoped would drive a conversation I could then take credit for. I asked once if there was life on other planets--I like to think dinner lasted a bit longer that evening.
But any such sense of control was rare. I was the centre of attention, really, only if I didn't finish my meal....
And so I plotted a disruption, a way to take control of the conversation, by any means possible.
Where did this take place? Dinner was still at this time a sacrosanct time and place for this particular family to gather, to eat a full meal, to review the day's activities and to discuss the world as we knew it. Not surprisingly, I didn't understand all that was being discussed, and I was looking up (in more than one way) at everyone around me. It was the only time of the day when everyone in the house would be together, and so--to be pragmatic--it was a natural audience for any planned performance.
What did I do, and where did I get it? As I write this, even I think this was a strange thing to do. Clearly I had created a plan, waited for what I considered the right moment, 'devised' the scenario, complete with sound effects and punch line. The only possible place I would have seen this was on television, which was in the house, in the basement, and was on a great deal at that time. It was still relatively new, less than ten years in our lives, and much of what we watched, in the afternoon and in the evening, was comic, either situation comedies or variety shows, with a good deal of old film 'shorts' in the afternoon. 'The Three Stooges,' a physical act performing what was called 'knockabout' comedy, were on the televeision a great deal in the afternoon. These performancer had created a large number of short films to fill out the bill in the movie theatres in the previous twenty years, and these films now filled an empty space on early television. Many younger viewers watched them every day, as they hit each other with heavy objects, slapped each other, poked each other in the eyes, and made a great many extraordinary (and quite artificial) comic sounds. It was delightful--and terrible, of course. I'm surprised we didn't all seriously injure ourselves. Perhaps we did.
I have to believe that I saw someone--likely one of these entertainers--slip or trip and fall, perhaps just off-screen, after which someone asked the question, 'Are you all right?' along with the answer, 'I'm all right. I landed on my head.'
This Too is Performance: I don't think it will surprise anyone to read this memory here. There was an audience, a performer, a rehearsal period and a staging. It was a piece of physical comedy without the danger, created only through sound, by someone who knew his audience.
My family--that is, all the male members of my family--engaged in a good deal of verbal humour. Jokes, witty comebacks (or so we all thought), and longer stories. But to the best of my knowledge, there was no real physical humour in my house. We were talkers.
I believe this kind of humour was left to me, because I didn't yet have the skills to be a talker. I was a 'Stooge,' and that was all right with me. Indeed, thinking back, I think that physical humour has been a saving--can I say 'grace'?--in my life. There are so many things I cannot do. But I have a long history of pratfalls. Some of them were intentional.
