Daddy, The Comic

This morning I am thinking about my dad’s delightful sense of humor.  He had quite a knack for cracking people up, delivering jokes and quips with perfect timing and often with a paradoxical straight face.  I remember one day while the two of us were riding somewhere in his car.  We passed a woman standing on a corner, and she was wearing lots of makeup.  I mean LOTS of makeup!  Without missing a beat, he said, “She has to wear it like that, baby.  Or else someone might mistake her for something that escaped from the zoo.”  With an incredibly quick and clever wit, Daddy could render all those around him rolling with laughter or trying desperately to suppress it...sometimes at the most inappropriate times and places...while he sat or stood by with unflappable composure and a façade of innocence.  One day some of my mischievous older siblings stumbled upon a previously unbeknownst source of my dad's comedy.  It was a not-so-well-hidden stash of albums featuring Moms Mabley and Nipsey Russell!  We would sneak and play the records while our parents were out, laughing hysterically at the same jokes over and over, as though hearing them for the first time.  With some of the jokes, I didn’t really know what I was laughing about, but it was still funny.  To our surprise, Daddy came home one day while we were playing the “secret” albums.  No one noticed that he had come in the back door.  We were so busted.  He looked around the living room at each one of us, sitting there frozen with guilt and feeling the sting of complicity.  Then he chuckled and headed for his room.  He didn’t have to say it directly, but we knew we had better stick with The Three Stooges and Mel Brooks movies after that.  Looking back, I can see how Daddy’s humor was like a powerful glue in our home.  So many times, it helped to hold us together as a family when we were children.  And even now as adults, I see how it has bonded us to one another as friends.  Certainly my dad's legacy of laughter has remained with us, even to this day.  What a wonderful inheritance.