the sloppy copy

More groups need matching outfits. Those were the days.

“Papa Was a Rolling Stone” / the Temptations (1972)

I can’t tell a joke to save my life.

No, like – seriously. If I were laying in a hospital bed with some horrific, Venus-sized aneurysm just seconds from exploding, and the surgeon leaned over me and said “Julie, you can stop this if you just tell us that funny line from last night’s episode of The Office,” I would instantly die. The vessel would rupture and my insides would be immediately filled with nastiness which would then ooze from my orifices, and the surgeon would slowly look up at the nurses, and shake his head, and make one of those “tsk tsk” noises, and would slowly, dramatically, remove his gloves as he called my time of death, muttering “it was just an ‘That’s what she said’ joke!” under his breath.

When I hear a funny one-liner, or one of those “a guy walks into a bar” stories, I want desperately to share my delight with someone else. I try so hard to recreate the funny, but I can’t. Even if I literally read the joke – from a piece of paper, a Popsicle stick, the wall of the bathroom, whatever – I get nothing. It’s not that the funny is just lost in the retelling – it’s completely, bass-ackwards, up-a-fucking-tree lost.

And I know! I know what you’re thinking! I write things. I write things all the time! And sometimes these things that I write make people laugh. They are funny, some of these things that I write all of the time. But when I write, I have the luxury of a delete key. And the thesaurus function in Word. And time to go over what I’ve just written and cross everything out and start from the beginning. And if you think I don’t do that, that everything I post to this thing is just magically pulled out of my white Irish ass, then I’d freaking love to take a hit from whatever it is you’re smoking because that must be some good shit.

Or maybe you’re thinking of That One Time that I threw some real good zinger into a conversation. It was funny, and people laughed. And oh, haha, Julie is just a fucking riot! Oh, Julie! But if you break down these little zings, you’ll find that, most of the time, I’m just being mean. And it doesn’t take much actual skill to be mean at someone else’s expense. I’m kind of a raging bitch like that. Really.

So all I really got going for me is a wicked-bad case of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and more than a few enemies.