I'm not great at telling long jokes. I can successfully complete "Angus the fence builder" with a Scottish burr included, but that's about it. Otherwise, I usually get only partway through some time-released thighslapper before the struggle begins to keep the plot. "Talk among yourselves," I'll tell a small, unfortunate group of listeners, as I mumble and curse my memory.
Always leave your audience begging for more, they say; in the past I have left people praying for less. Out of a sense of social responsibility and personal pride, I now keep the yuks brief.
The average urban dweller encounters thousands of attention-getting messages every day through media and marketing. Humour helps cut through the clutter, and in this department a North Vancouver print shop always delivers. For years Contact Printing's illuminated sign on Forbes Street has entertained passerby with regularly updated puns. My favourites include, "No matter how hard you push the envelope it will still be stationary" and "Six out of seven of Snow White's dwarves are not Happy." Also, "These days there is just no arrest for the wicked."
I have often passed by the print shop with a grin. After years of unsolicited entertainment, I feel like I owe Contact Printing an order for business cards ("Olson's Joke Demolition Service: Weddings, Parties, Children's Birthdays").
If only more marketers, educators, and bureaucrats recognized the effectiveness of bite-size humour. The parks department at the District of North Vancouver gets it. For years, their dog-walking signage has abandoned officious commandments in favour of droll nudges. Among the steel-plate witticisms are "Attention Dog Guardians: Pick up after your dogs - Thank you. Attention Dogs: Grrrr, bark, woof. Good dog." Another reads, "Dog doo good God. Beware of Palindromes and Pick up after your Dog."
This kind of civic levity is thin on the ground in Vancouver. Last year some nameless wit erected a professional-looking sign reading, "Dude Chilling Park" at Guelph Park in Mount Pleasant. Reactions of locals were mixed; some loved it and others disapproved, interpreting it as an encouragement to drug-users who frequent the area. In any case the City has since removed the sign, but in a similar fit of grassroots creativity the "Dude Chilling Art Exchange" now sits by the park's community garden, welcoming Vancouverites and visitors to drop off or pick up artwork on an honour basis.
Cheryl Cheeks, a Mount Pleasant resident who conceived the six foot tall structure made out of salvaged cabinet drawers and cedar planks, hopes it will house all kinds of free art, including poetry chapbooks, sculptures and paintings. "I think whatever comes bubbling out of a creative person's brain, if they want to put it in there, that's fantastic," she told The Globe and Mail.
Of course, not every artistic creation is amusing or uplifting. I recently passed an extra ticket to a friend for VanCity Theatre's screening of The Act of Killing, a surreal documentary about a group of aging, unrepentant gangsters who joined in on the paramilitary murder of hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia during a U.S.-backed coup in 1965. The film is much about the clownery of evil as the banality of evil, but there's nothing "funny" about it. I felt it had great redeeming value as a historical document, but my friend walked out feeling like he'd been shot in the gut.
In a world with so many high-level assaults on reason and compassion, our appetite for positive information - or least some scraps inspiring us to laugh, dance or sing -is greater than ever. Poet Jack Gilbert's "Brief for the Defense" addresses the need to find some shafts of light in the darkening clouds. Here is a brief extract (italics mine): "We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil." To paraphrase Buddha, life is inseparable from shit; the trick is to clean up the latter with enlightened intent. Or in the words of the District of North Vancouver's parks department, "Dog Guardians: In a world where everyone is looking out for number one, who is looking out for number two? Please pick up after your dogs. Thank you."
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