Deadpan Alley

The writing workshop that I’ve been going to the past two or three years is sponsoring a writers’ showcase at a famous local club called ComedySportz. I figured I should do it, you know, just to keep that dread/stress/anticipation thing in good working order.

My husband asked what I was going to read. I told him I was going to read The Fall, a weird tale involving my falling down at a little resort in Florida, a veterinarian from South America helping me, the EMT’s coming, my recovery, and then meeting up again with the veterinarian who was then hand-feeding a squirrel in a bougainvillea bush. It sounds funny but it’s not. It’s all about age and disability and being vulnerable and falling down all over the place. It’s very depressing, it’s ‘where is the rum, never mind the limes’ depressing.

“This thing is being done at ComedySportz, right?” I saw his point right away. I should read something funny.

So I’m going to read Crop Tending, a piece I wrote about my ever-futile attempts to be a gardener. The story involves insidious, plotting ferns, many types of pests, flying and crawling, plotting against my neighbor’s tree, wishing an evil dead guy across the street was still alive, and comparing going to my garden to visiting a dying bird, better to stay back until it’s over. The essay won a humor prize but the judge told me it wasn’t laugh out loud funny, it was subtle humor. Wry.

So I’m going to work on my delivery to be as deadpan as possible so as to really play up the wryness. But I don’t think people will laugh, ComedySportz or not, because who laughs at wry? People raise their eyebrows, roll their eyes, maybe slightly smile, they don’t laugh. Maybe they won’t know that it’s supposed to be funny. “It’s supposed to be funny!” I’ll tell them after I finish. And they’ll say, “oh, yeah, we get it” but they probably won’t. It’ll be too wry for them. Overly wry.

I don’t care. My husband will clap for me. That’ll be nice.

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Red Oak Writers’ Showcase
ComedySportz Milwaukee
420 S. 1st St., Milwaukee, WI
November 13, 2019
7 pm to 8:30 pm
Free