“Do you think that in Heaven we’ll ever laugh until we cry?”. My friend asked from across the table.
We had been talking about the political debates coming up. That had followed talk about baseball, the up-coming playoffs, and whether Cliff Lee would get the Cy Young (which would be EXCELLENT). I wasn’t sure how one makes the transition in the mind from how pathetically weak debates have been (with the exception of those hosted by the late great Tim Russert) to laughing so hard that you cry….and doing so in heaven? So I had to ask.
“Where in the world did that come from?”
“Well….uh….”. He apparently wasn’t sure either. “Gosh. We were talking about the debates, which made me think of past debates, which made me think of Bentzen’s JFK blather with Quayle, then Reagan’s famous line about age coming after the debate in which Reagan LOOKED old. Man, that was a great debate. Uh, then I thought about the “Read my lips” bunk…which reminded me of… Uh… golly… “. So far the closest thing to laughing in heaven would have been the Reagan line…but he clearly wasn’t connecting those dots. “Oh! Then I thought of Marilyn Monroe.”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “How did she get in here?”.
“The JFK thing.”. He said it with some offense–as though he were saying, “Duh!”
“Ah.”
“Then I thought of the Three Stooges, and”
“Wait! You go from Marilyn Monroe to the Three Stooges?!”
Sheepishly, he says, “Well, they were both in show business.”
If I was able to raise a single eyebrow (I am not), this is when I would have done it. Since I can’t, I just screwed up my face to as forceful a Question Mark as I could.
“Please,” I say, “do go on.”
“Well, obviously,” a word I would NOT be using here, if it were me, “the Three Stooges led to…”
Wait. Let me cut into the scene right here. You are very likely thinking that the Stooges led to “laughing until you cry” in heaven. In my years of experience with this otherwise very reasonable and intelligent man, I have learned to expect otherwise. However, I was expecting that, too.
“…people being dead, and…”
And so it went for two more minutes.
Somehow or other, we got back to the combination of laughter and heaven.
“…Then the Ted Bundy thing led me back to people who were dead, which reminded me of the Three Stooges, which made me think of Laurel and Hardy, which made me think of a time I was watching Spanky and Alfalfa when I laughed until I cried. And then I wondered whether we’d laugh that hard in heaven. And here we are”.
He paused smuggly, as though this exhaustive and impossible trail justified everything. “So,” another, more dramatic and smug pause, “do you think we’ll ever laugh until we cry in heaven?”
I was still reeling mentally. The abrupt end came as somewhat of a shock to me.
All I could say was, “Why wait?”
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