the line

There is a line that every person who has ever tried to be funny knows well.

The line between offering up something funny after setting a scene or letting the reader fill in the blanks themselves. Having the confidence in your material to deliver your coup de grace or trusting that the reader knows better what makes them laugh.

For all my life I believed that everything ever written sits on one side of that line or the other.

And then out of nowhere I had the following thought and suddenly realized I had flipped a coin and had it land on its side.

No head.

No tail.

I had come up with the one joke that made me laugh and I truly didn’t know why. What’s more, there was no punchline to be had. There was nothing I could say to follow up it up and certainly nothing that a reader could add to make it any funnier. Or even explain why they found it funny.

It was funny and would hang there in space until I moved onto the next thing I wanted to say.

What is this observation you ask?

“I adopted a highway.”

…pause

“It didn’t work out.”

A myriad of images of ‘adoptions’ that haven’t worked out flutter through my mind like so much confetti. Images of different kinds of roads, short and long and scenic and dirty, race and tumble in my subconscious, desperate to come up with the words that could possibly follow.

Nothing. Zip. Zero.

But I laugh anyway.

It’s fucking funny and I don’t know why.

“The road to salvation is narrow and as difficult to walk as the razor’s edge.”

– W Somerset Maugham