Like Joan and Melissa Rivers, Only Better

On the bus ride home from school one day, I was part of a trio of uniformed and pig-tailed little girls sitting near the front, where we second class citizens graders were always booted.

I no longer remember the exact subject of our profound discourse, but at some point I made a self-deprecating comment that my peers considered a real knee-slapper.

"You're funny, Rimarama!" one of them said. "Yeah! You totally crack me up!" the other seconded.

This pleased me to no end. I had never been called "funny" before, but if it could get me positive attention from the Tatum O'Neil of our second grade class, whose beauty I admired and Muppets lunch box I coveted, then surely it wasn't a bad thing to be.

Desperately trying to ride the wave as long as I could, I continued making wisecracks in the same vein that had originally caught my peers' attention.

When I ran out of funny things to say, I pretended to choke on a jujubee.

From that day forward, I made it a point of cultivating the art of slapstick comedy, reveling in the satisfaction of eliciting a laugh, however cheaply attained.

To this end, I've masterminded and acted out many a campfire skit, each one ending with me making a fool of myself in one form or another. One skit had me running around the campfire in circles shouting nonsense words before finally collapsing in front of the embers a la John Cleese.

Needless to say, it was a runaway hit.

I used to practice rolling with fake punches, and I'll tell you another secret: I cannot approach a slow moving vehicle without contemplating a Miami Vice style hood rollover. It's one of my trademark moves.

So the other day, my friend V was over with her two kids, who are very close in age to the J-dog and V-meister. J-dog has always been the baby of the bunch though, and until just recently, he's been treated as such.

The kids were all lined up at the Little Tykes picnic table, eating their beans-n-wienies, when the little J-dog accidentally fell backwards off his bench. It was very "Now you see him, now you don't-ish" and therefore quite funny.

The other kids thought it was pretty hilarious, too. But it turns out that they weren't laughing at the little J-dog, so much as laughing with him.

Once a mere bit player, putzing around the posse's periphery and being reprimanded for knocking over the block tower or messing up the game, he was now the star of the show.

And he was instinctively aware of this turn of events, because only five seconds after popping back up and re-situating himself at the table, the little J-dog was down for the count again.

Peals of laughter and clapping ensued.

Like his mom before him, the little J-dog recognizes an audience when he sees one (and neither does he know how to quit while he's ahead). I'd venture to say that he fell off that picnic bench another ten or so times, each one accompanied by raucous laughter and enthusiasm from the peanut gallery.

Before you knew it, the V-meister had also bitten the dust, closely followed by her friend, V-boy.

Kids were falling backwards off that picnic bench like dominoes, again and again, all following the J-dog's irresistible example.

After giving him fair warning that it was time to cut it out before someone got hurt, I put him in time-out by the rose bushes.

And you know what? No sooner was he allowed back at the table, he started it up again.

And me, well, I just couldn't bring myself to re-discipline the little stinker. A regular Richard Pryor, that one. He got his mama's joker gene, and I love him for it.

I can't wait for the day when the two of us can do a BBC skit together. Soon, he'll be regaling his own buddies with fake hood rollovers out in the school parking lot, and I'll be there, coaching and cheering him on.


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Also of Note:

1. That's it, folks. Inspired by Becca and encouraged by the commenters on this post, I am going to try and arrange a meeting with Barack Obama to get myself on the ticket as Veep. How, I ask you, can "Obama-Rama" lose?
   
   
2. It's recently come to my attention, through misguided Google searches, that there is a cast member named "Rima" on the Aussie version of "Big Brother" who is one meter tall, has made some nekkid videos, and apparently also worked as a v1brator saleswoman at some point or another. I AM NOT THAT RIMA. (Am at least two meters tall, maybe even three.)