Fiction Is Never Quite This Funny
You ought to try this some time. Next time you’re on a trip, or even just when you’re just taking the bus downtown for the day, take a notebook with you. Listen to what’s going on around you, and write it down.
Maybe you won’t end up with the entire human comedy there in your notebook, but you’ll end up with some stuff that you couldn’t possibly make up. Here’s what I overheard on my last trip:
Doctors have the darnedest names
Person No. 1: “We got a dentist in our town named Dr. Puller.”
Person No. 2: “Yeah, we’ve got one in our town named Dr. Mennis. Everybody calls him Mennis the Dentist.”
Person No. 3: “We’ve got a gynecologist named Dr. (name withheld for reasons of taste but it is also the name of a large aquatic rodent).”
Person No. 1: “He should have been a veterinarian.”
They’re sensitive about this in Kansas
Native Kansan on a bus: “When you’re from Kansas, everybody always says, ‘Say hi to Dorothy for me,’ or, ‘Can you get me in to see the wizard?’ or something like that. So I always say, ‘Yeah, I’ll be sure to ask him to give you a brain.”’
Snippet of conversation I wish I’d heard the rest of
Guy on plane: “So my claim to fame is that I once took Reggie Jackson home from a party.”
How to stop a conversation cold
Person No. 1 on plane: “I live in Chicago now, but I lived in San Jose for 10 years before that.”
Person No. 2: “Really? That’s a coincidence. The person I sat next to on the flight before this, she was going to San Jose.”
Person No. 1: (long pause) “Uh huh.”
Fun with a stopwatch
Man on plane with a stopwatch: “I always time how long the flight takes, how many seconds from the time the pilot accelerates to the time the plane lifts off, and how many seconds from when the plane gets over the runway until the wheels touch down.”
Other passenger: “Really? How long was this one?” Stopwatch man: “17 seconds. I’ve had as short as 13 to as long as 24.”
A comedian on every bus
Tour bus passenger to guide: “Is this a historic cemetery?”
Passenger in the back: “Yeah. Everybody in it is history.”
More cemetery banter
Person No. 1: “What was that great saying that some guy put on his gravestone? ‘See? I told you I wasn’t feeling well.”’
Person No. 2: “I heard of one once that said, ‘At least know I know where my husband is sleeping every night.”’
The coming rat plague
Person on bus: “I read where all these big cities are having these rat problems they never had before.”
Another passenger: “Might be the mild winters.”
Third passenger: (dead serious) “Might be the beginning of the end.”
He quit for reasons of health
Cabbie, taking passengers back to hotel from a restaurant: “I used to work at that restaurant for a while. I washed dishes. It wasn’t no fun. After a night of that, I had to go get me a beer. Or some of that whiskey. I had to quit because I was afraid that job would make me an alcoholic.”
Out of the mouths of panhandlers
Large man on shuttle bus to airport: “My wife and I were in Chicago once walking down the street, and there was this panhandler. He comes up and asks for some change, and I said no, and then he grabs my arm and I knock his hand away, and I say, ‘And don’t you ever touch me again,’ and my wife and I keep walking.
“And this guy is standing there yelling after us, ‘I had you figured out! I knew you wasn’t gonna give me nothin’. I saw you a half-block away and I said, “That guy’s a big fat no!”
“So that’s what my wife has called me ever since: The Big Fat No.”
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review