Something Funny

A silly little column by request

I don’t always take requests, but I don’t mind entertaining them. Recently, a friend suggested,“You should write something funny,” adding, “People need that.”

I agreed and then, momentarily, checked out. Had I been an old laptop, I would have started to overheat, you could have heard the fan whirring, my mind struggling to perform the task at hand, barely able to keep up, immediately trying to cycle through old stories and recent memories, searching for anything that had made me laugh.

“Funny,” it occurred to me, isn’t what it used to be, and not in that comedy bro with a podcast “you can’t joke about anything these days” kind of way. More like — when I hear someone call something “funny” it’s often followed by, “Well, you know, funny — not funny” before going on to describe a recent event that could be anything from mildly peculiar to completely insane — the spectrum upon which I’ve noticed recent events tend to fall.

Still, there are things that make us laugh — whether it’s because they genuinely strike us funny or because we just don’t feel like crying.

In my opinion, comedy’s greatest weapon is the element of surprise. Some of the funniest moments, the ones that really get us in the giggles — we never see coming — whether it’s an expertly-delivered punchline or a patch of black ice.

Comedy’s second best accomplice? A serious, quiet environment. Everything is funnier when you should absolutely not be laughing.

“Don’t look at me,” I can still hear my sisters and I hissing at each other at our mother’s funeral.

Put a serious situation together with the element of surprise and it’s simply all over.

When I was anchoring the news in Albany, I had to read a breaking news story for our partner station in Syracuse. It was late, nearly time to go home. I didn’t bother to look at the copy first. Knowing it was a simple read, no more than about ten seconds, something I had done a million times before, I just dove right in.

What happened next is seared into my memory.

The story went something like this: fire crews were on the scene of a fully-involved fire at a business somewhere in Central New York. Pretty standard stuff. As I read on, I discovered that, okay, it turns out it was a strip club and, what’s this? Uh oh. Advancing the teleprompter to the next line, I revealed the name of the club: “Tops Off, Bottoms Up.”

I was done.

I immediately burst out laughing and recovery was not even close to being in the cards. Tears formed, then fell onto the desk in front of me. I vacillated between breathless wheezes and a full-on cackle. The only saving grace: we were not live on the air. Looking back, it might have been better if we were, only one shot to get through it. Instead, I made countless attempts, dissolving into laughter take after take. All of this was less than amusing to the producers who were more than eager for me to get it together so they could get the story in the 11 o’clock show.

“What is wrong with her?” I heard them ask my colleagues.

What, indeed.

It was not the first or the last time they (rightfully) lost patience with me, but I couldn’t help but plead, “ARE WE READING THE SAME STORY??”

Making someone laugh may not be easy, but getting them to stop once they’ve started is, in my experience, nearly impossible. I consider it a most delightful human trait.

Even if, or maybe especially when it is inconvenient, laughter is good for us. It lowers our blood pressure and helps us manage stress.

I reminded myself of this recently as the coffee maker spat my morning joe onto the counter as I obliviously washed my usual mug in the sink. I never gave any of it a second thought until I turned to see the steaming liquid pooling like a moat and threatening to overtake the toaster. I stared in disbelief, mug in hand, then dissolved into laughter.

And that brings me to the funny, not funny part: when it all comes down to it, comedy is, largely, an inside job. It’s the thing that brings some kind of order, or at least entertainment, to the chaos in our lives; I consider it a survival skill. We have to be able to laugh at ourselves and not take life too seriously because, as someone much funnier than me once pointed out, you’ll never get out alive.

This essay originally appeared in my column in the October

23, 2025 edition of the Perry Herald in Perry, NY.