THE FRIENDLY SKIES?

Is there anything like time away from the old grind? If ever you’ve been on an airplane, the experience can be as stressful as a day at the salt mine. To board your plane on time you have to arrive at the airport hours ahead of time while your jet is still refueling in Cucamonga.

If you are lucky enough to traverse the maze of a metropolitan airport you know how much energy it takes to travel, and that’s just reaching a gate! It’s no wonder they call it a terminal! You could die by the time you get there.

There are shops filled with $7 coffee, flip flops for $10 (you can get a bushel of ‘em for a buck at the dollar store), and my favorite, the airport bar. Getting a healthy airline size drink (the kind that comes in a Billy Barty baby sized bottle) can cost you twelve bucks. In my day that was a month of beer money, or a weeks worth of cover charges to Dr. Slaphappy’s massage and jerk parlor! Oh for the good old days.

The airline industry is the only one where you can buy a product (a ticket) and get to the airport to find out that “ooops we sold too many tickets”. If you want to get squeezed on the plane you’ll have to sit in the bathroom for the flight or out on the wing. Talk about your mile high club! You could of course wait in the airport for another flight. “There will be another one along shortly,” is attendant doublespeak meaning “pull up a trash-bag pillow for a few hours pal and enjoy a snooze on the floor of the skid row airport hotel”. Sometimes during holidays you’ll see rows and rows of bodies on the airport floor in a kind of Bowery holding pattern.

You’ll find yourself wheezing when you finally arrive at your gate which is usually after a mile and a half jaunt. Often large airports take travelers to long distance gates via some sort of semi-altered golf cart. That thing is always loaded with enough people to make it look like monkeys clinging to the banana tree at harvest time.

All of these honors you get to endure after you have been subjected to security! If you look like Habib the Gypsy Boy then they may take a glance at you. Inexplicably though, if you seem more like Grandma Moses, Pa Kettle, or Average Joe you might have anything inflicted upon you from the shoe search given by a frustrated out of work porn actor tuned security wiz witha foot fetish, to a full out strip search by the guy who always wanted to be a proctologist but couldn’t cut it because of his oversized knuckles!

Once on the plane you have wonderful options of entertainment. The first course is the stewardess doing the crash run through to a chorus of cackles from the indifferent and sarcastic passengers. These are the same folks who will have the fear of God in their eye as they fight you for the flotation device that’s under your butt when the big nose dive comes.

Fresh food out of a can and more tiny alcohol bottles are available on board served by stewardesses that use to look like super models and famous actresses. Today they are tougher and though they have a pleasant smile they seem more like your sister during that time of the month. They’re not much fun in an enclosed space for five or ten thousand miles. It’s almost like enduring adolescence all over again.

Seats that are as comfortable as a bus terminal bench and poor ventilation make your trip all the more precious. Add a few screaming babies and you’d be in steerage on the boat from ol’ Calcutta

Of course it’s not all bad. Modern marvels of aerospace technology have you going from coast to coast in a matter hours. You’ll be grateful enough that when you land you’ll kiss the ground under your feet after you disembark. That is of course until you find out that while you may be in New York; your luggage is in Denmark having a better vacation than you!

MONKEY BUSINESS!

No one really knows when humor began. In prehistoric times one would be hard pressed to think of something ticklish to the funny bone. Perhaps the Flintstones might qualify but they’ve been in reruns long enough for Fred to actually have evolved. Of our past primitive ancestors, it could be that Og dropped a boulder on his best friend’s foot in Stone Age times and found reason to laugh at his buddy’s unfortunate pain. Og was always a bit of a slapstick kind of a caveman.

Man dragged himself away from the apes which might have been a mistake in retrospect since all good humor is known as monkey business. Then he learned to stand erect and not only could he reach the berries on low hanging branches of trees, but he could also see things from a different perspective. Of course the berry eater is the forerunner of your neighbor Hal who is hell bent on getting all of society eating tofu and plates of green sprouts every night. Hal also wants you to drive cars that make no sound at stop lights and to make sure that you do not use any trees for toilet paper; perhaps there is a use for old dead plant leaves after all.

Regular prehistoric man developed a taste for meat and blood. He enjoyed hunting and sinking his teeth into the hide of some defenseless critter (usually a weaker specimen named Blain) and ripping the flesh away from the bone as he devoured his prey. What could be more humorous than that? Actually Mr. Meat and Potato’s predator in modern times is better known as Mr. Couch Potato. He gets screamed at a lot by his lovely mate and he no longer drags her by the hair into the cave if he knows what’s good for him.

Still somewhere along the way from there to here man not only learned how to relieve tension with laughter, but actually perfected pushing each other’s buttons to make one another lose control in a fit of convulsive laughter. Who can resist the gentle sound of gas being passed in a church mass or some other solemn ceremony? It has sent many a teary eyed saint out the holy doors gasping for air at some nonsensical thing that we use as tension relief and define as humor. Of course our evolution to a high society of civility necessitated a highbrow sense of dignity and things to laugh about which is how we got Gilligan’s Island in the 1960’s. Yeah everybody was goo goo over Ginger, but what about Mrs. Howell? She was loaded, quirky, and a lot closer to the grave. In any event ya can’t keep a Ginger without a sugar mama like Lovey to foot the bill!

So refined did we become in our design of humor that people specialized in the field. I’m not talking about the court jester who was as much juggler as funny man. He was the guy who often found the last laugh was on him as he was being dragged off to the lion’s den in the coliseum for making fun of Mrs. Emperor’s watermelon smuggling figure.

The comedian rose in esteem as a purveyor of humor, societal commentator and artisan in his own right. Henny Youngman could deliver one-liners so badly that it was funny. Charlie Callas was adept at making faces and sound effects to go with them. No one beat the rapid fire delivery of Jonathan Winters or Robin Williams in their stand up comedy prime.

Nothing feels better than laughing. Well maybe what happens after couples undress does; and in many households that still involves a lot of laughing! The golden age of television ushered in specialists whose job was to make thousands laugh. There’s quite a bit of money in humor, and that’s no laughing matter.

Not much brings instant and short term escape like a good belly laugh or a side splitting few moments of watching someone else’s unintended suffering. That can be the only reason why shows like “The World’s Funniest Home Videos” still exist. People are replacing professional comedians these days as inspiring certain humor. Invariably that means your next door neighbor rides his bike down the hill, hitting a pothole and taking a spill headfirst into a thorn bush where the wasps nest is locked in a fierce battle with fire ants colony. The victims resulting wiggle-fest sets you into a full roar. While your neighbor wails and performs contortions including rhythmic howls from the repeated countless stings per second, the buzzing hum sends milk spewing from your nose like it is being shot from a newly untied garden hose. You just stand back laughing hysterically at his welt-ridden body. Who knew the guy could move that fast? Looks like a stunt from "Survivor" or some other reality show. To make it funnier of course, the neighbor is wearing a monkey suit.