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Drunk driving is not funny but sometimes the actions of drunk drivers are, especially those who are pulled over by the police before they can cause any damage. Take, for example, the guy who placed a large traffic cone over his head and began twirling around in front of the police officer. Or the guy who fell backwards into the grass while the officer was talking to him. My personal favorite was the guy who, when asked if he spoke English, picked up a traffic cone, held it to his mouth like a megaphone, and shouted, "No!"
These fine gentlemen were all featured in a videotape shown in Comedy Traffic School, which I recently attended because I received my first traffic ticket in over fifteen years. The ticket, if you must know, was for speeding, which is apparently illegal in Norco. I told the officer that I had gone over the speed limit in other cities and they never gave me a ticket. The officer then wrote me up for having a broken taillight, and I decided that maybe I should let him do his job. The videotape excerpts that I mentioned above, and you may not be surprised by this, were the only genuinely funny parts of the full eight hours of Comedy Traffic School. The rest of the jokes were allegedly funny, meaning that they might possibly be funny, but it would be real hard to prove. At the start of the class, our instructor pretended to be of Middle Eastern descent long enough for us to believe he was for real. The comedy value of this is unclear. When the instructor stopped and began acting like a guy from California who teaches traffic school, we all fidgeted in our seats and became even more uncomfortable than your average traffic school attendees already are. My palms started to sweat. Perhaps our instructor had not heard comedy rule #518 which states that irritating people who are already grumpy is not likely to make them laugh. For example, if you have a headache and I jab you with a sharp stick, you are not likely too say, "Boy Bruce, you are a comedy laugh riot. Please provide me with more hilarity." This was the first of many laws of comedy to be violated and, during the day, several citable offences occurred. For example, one can have their comedy license revoked in certain states (and coincidentally, Norco) for overusing the phrases "You're scaring me" and "Just kidding" in one's attempts at humor. Another of the "gags" pulled by our instructor is that he told us that we could make our tires last longer by occasionally deflating them and then filling them back up with air. He said, very officially, that stale air molecules attach themselves to the inside of the tire and wear on it from the inside at the same time it is being worn down from the outside. He then revealed that this was a joke. Comedy rule #8 states that if you have to explain that what you just said was a joke, the odds are it was not funny. This is why the phrase "just kidding" is a giveaway that a joke has failed. For the sake of clarity, I must mention that there are exceptions to this rule. One exception is when you are being deliberately obtuse, as I have been guilty of on occasion, like that time I told my goldfish that its real name was Bernie. "Was that a joke?" you ask. I'm not telling. By the end of Comedy Traffic School I had laughed a few times, but in a kind of giddy insane way. This is because stale air molecules had attached themselves to the inside of my head and I was starting to wear down. Immediately after receiving my certificate of completion from Comedy Traffic School, I slapped down my "Comedy Police" badge and issued the instructor a citation. No doubt, he will try to keep it off his record by going to Comedy Comedy School. Regardless, justice was served. And so was dessert because I had some pie when I got home. Just kidding. That was a joke. |
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