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The thing about writing about comedy is that writing about comedy is usually not funny. Let’s face it, comedy itself is usually not funny, so it stands to reason that talking about comedy is even more likely not to be funny.

So I won’t bore you with a shot-by-shot exegesis of some of my favorite comedy movies like The (original) Producers or Waiting For Guffman, or TV shows like Seinfeld or Malcolm in the Middle or King of the Hill. I’d much rather just watch and re-watch those shows and occasionally quote lines from them, so instead I’ll share a moment of hilarity from my own life.

Comedy is pain and frustration and crushing embarrassment; in other words comedy is much like real life. The whole trick is to go through the day suffering all one’s usual defeats and calamities and somehow to see yourself as a sitcom character, or, if you’re feeling really grandiose, like a big-screen funny person like Jack Black or Vince Vaughn or Ralph Fiennes.

Personally I prefer to think of myself as a small-screen hero, and preferably not one of the big popular shows but instead one of those under-the-radar shows that you’re not even aware of until it’s been on five years and it suddenly shows up in syndicated nightly re-runs in that post-11PM grey zone I like to call Sitcom Alley.

I’m talking about shows like Becker or Still Standing.

I could be Becker; of course I’m far too lazy and unmotivated ever to have gone through medical school like Ted Danson’s immortal Dr. John Becker, but I could definitely be as grumpy and misanthropic as Becker. Come to think of it I am that grumpy and misanthropic.

I could also be Mark Addy’s average clod Bill Miller in Still Standing. Bill was a lazy slob of a toilet salesman, but I’m probably a lazier slob than Bill ever was. I mean, he actually managed to live in a house, and he had a car, and Jami Gertz was his wife. I live in a small dive of an apartment, I don’t own a car, and Jami Gertz no longer even takes my calls.

Which takes us back (actually it doesn’t, but segues are for lesser minds) to the glorious mid-Eighties; cocaine and bad hair was everywhere. Reagan was president and we couldn’t believe even in our most despairing hungover and coming-down-from-coke-binge grey dawns that there could ever be a more foolish president; we were wrong.

Basically everything sucked in the Eighties.

Except for the Smiths, who sang about how everything sucked, popular music sucked; TV sucked, and movies got really really bad.

The only good thing about the mid-Eighties — which turned out to be a very bad thing — was that people hadn’t really got the message about AIDS yet, and so there was still a lot of leftover Sixties- and Seventies-style casual sex going on.

Personally I had always been as terrified and appalled by the idea of sex as I was attracted to it. I liked the concept of having sex, but the actuality turned out to have innumerable downsides, not the least of which was the fear of impotence. Twelve years of Catholic school and a shy, introspective nature conspired to turn my first attempt at embodying my half of the beast with two backs into a spectacularly limp failure.

Eventually though I got a proper girlfriend, and managed to successfully commit the act of darkness; after her there were other girlfriends, and I like to think I performed at least adequately. Being a former good Catholic boy sucks in practically every way, but on the other hand it trains you to be eager to please and to follow orders; I was usually so amazed that a girl would actually not mind having sex with me, that I did try my best to follow instructions, or, since women have an odd way of giving instructions only via ESP, I would do my best to try to guess what my instructions might be.

Back in the Eighties nearly anyone could become a player, and so, in my humble way, I finally shook off most if not all of the last of the shackles and chains of the good Catholic boy and tried to be a player. The ensuing sex was sort of fun, but mostly it was, as Andy Warhol once described it, “work”. There was this agonizing business of having to talk to the women, and then you had to try to remember their names, too. Also, you had to make some sort of effort not to be boring yourself, and we all know what a chore that can be. And all for what? For something that was rarely as much fun as a quiet wank at home.

And it was all so time-consuming. I sometimes wonder what my mind would be like today if I had not wasted thousands of hours chasing women. I might have learned Japanese, or read all of Henry James’s novels, or at least one of them, or I might have used all that energy to write a great novel myself. After all, didn’t Balzac once say, referring to one of his sexual discharges, “There goes another novel”?

Stalling no longer, I present the afore-mentioned classic comedy highlight moment from the inexplicably long-running sitcom of my life:

I went home with a woman. I secretly called her the Cockatoo, because she had one of those stiff brightly-colored quiffs that women wore in those shameless days; she probably had an equally unflattering private nickname for me, like “He’ll Do In a Pinch”. I can’t remember what my haircut was like, but I’m sure it was a bad one. The cockatoo and I had nothing in common really, but that meant nothing to us. We were young, or almost young, and wild, or almost wild.

We went through some pro forma preliminaries; then, as Samuel Beckett put it somewhere (quoting from memory; scholars, feel free to write in with corrections), “I toiled and I moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop.”

We lay there in the dark in her bed, the Cockatoo and I. It was a ground-floor rear apartment in a major East Coast City. I think the time of the year was autumn, or perhaps spring. We lay there, probably the both of us sort of wishing the other one wasn’t there, when suddenly we heard a voice from outside the window above our heads.

“I know you’re in there!”

She whispered to me something about how this was her former boyfriend. I had sort of met him once or twice. Not an enormous guy, but still, he was an angry guy, and angry guys are scary no matter what their size.

He apparently didn’t agree with the “former” designation, because he kept screaming that he knew we were in there, using lots of variations of the F- and M-F-words

I don’t think I ever really cowered before in my life, but there and then, lying naked under the covers with the Cockatoo, with an angry (possibly) former boyfriend screaming at a window just a couple of feet over my head, I cowered.

Fortunately, this apartment being in a large East Coast city, the Cockatoo had bars on the window, so the angry possibly not-quite former boyfriend couldn’t actually get in. But the window sash was up, and he was able to reach his arms in.

I looked up and saw two groping hands in the moonlight inches above my face, accompanied by the repetitive but effective screaming of him to whom these Eighties-slasher-flick claws belonged.

F-words and M-F words abounded, the C-S-word and its variants joined in, I could almost feel on my face the hot spittle-spray of jealous rage, and come to think of it, perhaps I did.

“Go away!” shouted the Cockatoo. “I’m gonna call the cops!”

“Go ahead and call them,” yelled the maybe-not-former-at-all boyfriend. “It’ll take ‘em ten minutes to get here, and by then I’ll break in and kill that motherfucker!”

With that he knocked over some potted plants and nicknacks from the window shelf, spilling soil and tea roses onto my face and onto the Cockatoo’s quiff.

I had never actually seen a French farce, but I had heard about them, and here I was in the middle of one.

Even while it was happening I thought it was funny. Not funny ha ha, because after all, what if this maniac managed to pull the bars out and then thrash me senseless with them? But funny in that looking-from-outside-yourself way, when you see yourself as a character in a play or movie.

Why didn’t angry ex-or-maybe-current boyfriend realize this? Well, I guess every actor just takes the roles he’s given, and this was his, the enraged jealous lover. Me, I played the cowardly Lothario, staring up at those grasping hands in the moonlit air above my face, and wishing I had another role, like Guy Who Stays Home With a Good Book.

Well, he didn’t break in, and he obviously didn’t kill me.

He went away after a while. Or at least he seemed to go away.

I got dressed, in the dark.

“Be careful going home,” said the Cockatoo. “Watch your back,” she added, not very reassuringly.

“Sure,” I said.

I managed to walk home without being attacked, maimed, or otherwise thrashed to an apologetic gibbering pulp.

For some reason I never went out with the Cockatoo again.

A month or two later I was in a crowded bar; Camper Van Beethoven were performing. I saw the Cockatoo at a table and said hi. She said hi too, but then I noticed that the former, now apparently current, boyfriend was sitting with her. I left the bar. I wasn’t all that into seeing Camper Van Beethoven…

Now I lead a life of quiet contemplation. I refrain from sex, and sex with a great sigh of relief refrains from me.

But do I miss those nights of hooking up at smoky clubs where sweating people in shiny tight orange sleeveless t-shirts danced to “Come on Eileen” and “Tainted Love”, and “Don’t You Want Me”, of flowerpots and tchotchkes landing on the pillow next to me, of skulking home expecting former or current boyfriends to come leaping out like Freddy Krueger from every dark alleyway?

Hell yeah.

(This exclusive is my humble entry in our Newcritics Comedy Blogathon. Check out my joint for more hilarity.)