schtick it to em

Mia was prompted yesterday to check out whether Robert Downey Jr was dead by a former VCA classmate’s art project that claims to memorialize him posthumously. I noticed from her investigations (there is a website called something like ‘Dead or not dead?’ which she looked him up on) that he was born 16 days before me. If I hadn’t been overdue, we might well have shared a birthday, unless he was also overdue – I’ll check up on 'Overdue or not overdue?' later. Anyway, I thought next time someone accused me of being, or in some way implied that I was, old, I could say ‘Well I’m younger than Robert Downey Jr, and he’s a junior.’ Then I thought, god that sounds exactly like the kind of line an old man would have up his sleeve (it was sort of calculated in my mind to be hokey that way, but I guess that could go pearshaped too i.e. just end up really hokey). Not only would the old man have that up his sleeve, he would repeatedly use it, until one day he would possibly half-realise that he had used it more than once on the same person and kind of proved their point.

If it had been spontaneous, it would work but I’m not an actor and I can’t make things work calculatedly.

Here’s another schtick bit which I might as well put in here because I’ll never get a chance to use it. It’s a joke about history and reimaginings of history with hindsight. I imagined, in the walk to work, penning a parody Victorian epic (I often think about doing this, actually, and who knows – sometimes I do get things done). Anyway in this parody I imagine two people lost in the desert in the 19^th century, and one says, ‘If only they’d hurry up and invent the telephone… and then, the mobile phone!’ and the other one says, ‘Yeah, but even when they do, it’ll be years later before they get coverage out here.’

Wow, I’m glad I wrote that down, because it is truly so unfunny it’s more of a joke to call it a joke, than it is to regard it in itself as a joke.

Usually schticks should come in threes but I can’t think of a third.