Personal essays
On learning to share the ultimate treat
Not funny*
In honor of Halloween, here’s a joke that we found funny when we were little.
“Knock knock”
“Who’s there”
“Boo”
“Boo who?”
“Don’t cry - it’ll be ok.”
It depends on you knowing the structure of the knock knock joke and getting the pun that we hear “Boo who” and “Boo hoo”.
Get it?
Of course you get it. But as adults it’s not that funny. Even if you haven’t heard it, you see it coming a mile away.
Hang on, I’ve got another one.
“Knock Knock”
“Who’s there”
“Hal”
I’ll just stop that one there. You can figure out that this time it’s “Hal-who-ween”.
Why isn’t it that funny anymore?
Not scary
Every once in a while when I worked in radio I’d get one of those gigs that was particularly fun.
One year I got to be one of the celebrity judges for area haunted houses.
I was the celebrity noone cared about because the other one was Cleveland Browns placekicker Matt Bahr.
We traveled around in a limousine along with two of the organizers of the competition and we went to several haunted houses.
The houses were excellent. But each featured the same stock items. Someone with a chain saw with the chain removed would approach you. You’d see zombies and witches and folks that had been maimed or dismembered in various ways. The usual stuff.
It was highly entertaining and you’d occasionally be startled - but you wouldn’t be scared.
It was a haunted house. You knew that something awaited you in each room and perhaps in the corridors in between.
I remember being scared by these when I was a kid - but not now.
Scary
Thinking back, it reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Inside the Actor’s Studio. In the second episode Paul Newman said, “You can’t make a point with a pause if you pause all the time. If you really want to make a point with a pause, you better be selective with how many time you want to use it.”
I think of that when I think of the scariest scene I’ve ever seen in a movie. Nothing intrinsically scary happens and yet it is the most terrified I’ve felt in a movie.
It’s the scene in “The Shining” where the wife sees what her husband has been typing hour after hour, day after day, as he was supposedly working on his book.
The scene consists of nothing more than her looking at page after page of him having typed “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.
Towards the end of the scene we see her looking through the manuscript from a distance and we see her husband appear and he asks her, “how do you like it?”
Out of context there’s nothing scary about that scene and yet I still feel the chills I felt the first time I saw it.
Hal who
I’ve just bought candy to pass out tonight to the trick-or-treaters.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to do it.
For a couple of years I bought a lot of candy and no one came down our street.
Last year I didn’t buy candy and left my porch light off and saw a bunch of kids going house to house.
Seeing kids trick-or-treat takes me back to the time when I was young enough to put on a costume and go around the neighborhood.
It reminds me of when my kids used to go out and see what type of candy they’d get from our neighbors.
Kim always took the kids out and I stayed home and gave out the candy.
When the kids were young a single loop around the block was enough. As they got older they rushed to hit one more street before the end of trick-or-treat.
Seeing the neighbor kids now takes me back to that time. Back to when I was scared of haunted houses and thought “Hal who ween” was a funny punchline.
Towards the end of his appearance on Actors Studio, Newman is asked how he works as a director.
He says, “The most important thing, of course, is to find out what it is that gives them confidence. And once you find that out it liberates them so they can dare to do things that they might not be willing to try under some other circumstances.”
Try that knock knock joke again, and when the other person says “Boo who”, replace the last line with something that gives them confidence.
What great advice for directors, parents, teachers, … all of us.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 188. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe