Confessions of a Class Clown

“You’d be bored and you’d figure, ‘Well, why not deprive someone else of their education.’” – George Carlin, Class Clown

For as long as I can remember, I was always tempted to be a smartass. It seems strange, in retrospect when you consider a couple of facts. One was that, near as we can tell, I was born with markers for clinical depression. The other is that I was always the kid who was afraid to get in TROUBLE. Remember that? Do you remember when “You’re in TROUBLE” was one of the most frightening things you could hear? Well, I do. I hated being in trouble but I also never learned to keep my mouth shut. It is a matter of historical record that my first day in kindergarten, that is to say my FIRST DAY EVER in school, I was given detention for talking when I wasn’t supposed to.

After way too much education, time as an Air Force navigator, then as a librarian and finally as a lawyer (in a variety of incarnations) I continue to be vexed by the question, “What do I really want to be when I grow up?” The smartass answer is retired and, honestly, that’s not very many years away. But the honest answer is I want to be a comedian. I always have. And I’m actually very good at telling jokes, I have a great sense of timing, a quick ability to find a humorous link between certain words and I do dialects well. Unfortunately, I can’t write my own material. I think of things on the spur of the moment, but to sit down and write a full bit is beyond me. (It’s a subset of the “I write well but I can’t plot so I can’t be an author” syndrome.)

So not being able to write my own material, I took to stealing from others, one of whom was Bill Cosby. I had several of his comedy albums and I would listen to them so many times that I could repeat them word for word. How many times did I have to listen to my mother say, “Well! If you learned your school work that well you’d be getting better grades!” Woody Allen was another of my comedy inspirations. I mean, a short nebbishy, curly-haired Jewish guy from New York with an inferiority complex. What were we? Twins separated at birth?

I think the class clown stuff really started coming out in Hebrew school. Why you may ask? Well, I suspect it was a combination of factors. For five years, from ages 8 to 13, I and a bunch of the other unfortunate schmendriks were subjected to two hours of school twice a week AFTER regular school plus another two hours on Sunday morning. And don’t even get me started on Bar Mitzvah lessons on top of all THAT! So, there I was, a captive in the synagogue (where my mother was the bookkeeper, by the way), six hours a week. And what’s better to make fun of than religious stuff? In fact, doing it in Hebrew school had the double advantage of being both school and religiously oriented. And we all know that getting suppressed laughter where everyone knows you’re not supposed to laugh is the BEST. I was aided and abetted by my friends Andy and Matthew who were in the same class as me. My father took to referring to us as “the unholy three” because we seemed to find humor in the most solemn of things. Like George Carlin said, getting people to laugh at inappropriate times was the best. (More on the necessity of being badly behaved at religious observations later.)

Most of the things I said in class were of the smartass variety. The one I particularly remember was in Torah class. (Just in case you’re not sure, the Torah is the first five books of the bible.) We were up to the part of Exodus where Moses gets his marching orders from God to set the Israelites free from slavery in Egypt. When the Mose-man asks how he should identify God to the Israelites, he is told “Tell them that I am that I am.” (Exodus 3:14) Of course, without missing a beat, I chimed in with, “That’s all that I am. I’m Popeye the Sailor man. (too-toot).” (Yes, I added the toot-toot. In for an inch in for a mile.) After having to explain that one to the Hebrew school principal, I got to explain it to my mother. But, OH, it was worth it.

And lest you think that I was only a smartass in schools of various formats, let me tell you about a couple of things I did to my grandmother. I spent more time with Grandma Fanny and Grandpa Joe, my mother’s parents, than I did with anyone other than my parents. My mother was the younger of two. I was an only child and I was the first grandchild on either side of the family. Yes, I was the golden child. And the truth is that Grandma Fanny adored and doted on me. Now, Grandma came from Poland. And let’s all not forget that I am one of the pickiest eaters on the face of the earth. As a kid, I seldom finished everything on my plate. Grandma would lament, “Children in Poland are starving and you’re leaving food….” Somewhere when I was still in single digits of age, I had heard that once too often. I turned to her and said, “Whether I eat it or not, they’re still gonna starve. So what difference does it make?” And that was the last time I heard of that particular phrase.

The other thing I did to her took longer to come to fruition. My grandparents and parents were fluent in Yiddish. Whenever I’d tell Grandma that I was bored, she would say, “Geh shlug zich cup in vahnt.” Very early, I learned that meant, “Go bang your head in the wall.” After years of hearing this, one day (I believe I had made it into double digit age by that time) I said I was bored. We were in the kitchen at the time and she gave me her usual answer. I said, “Okay” and went into the living room and started banging my head in the wall. Now, these were sturdy plaster walls that did not resound well, so it took a while of some fairly hefty head-banging for her to hear me. When she finally came in to see what the noise was, she was horrified. That was the end of that phrase until…I started saying it to my daughter whenever she would tell me that she was bored. The best part is that she uses it on kids, too. (She’s very careful about it, though, because she teaches special education and some of those kids really are head-bangers.)

High school was a glorious time. It was the sixties. Flower power was in bloom. Kids were just starting to grow their hair long. And my two best friends were also class clowns. Now Andy, who wanted to go to medical school, was a bit more conservative in his clownishness than I was and Tom, who was a good bit ballsier than I, was a bit more extravagant. Together, though, we were a devastating combination. This was exacerbated by the fact that we were smart (I was the least of the three of us, but all our classes were Level 1 or higher.) Bored and smart is a dangerous combination.

Senior year, the one class that all three of us were in together (other than gym) was English class. We actually liked our English teacher, but she had an unfortunate hair style that poofed out in the front, resulting in the less than complimentary name “Tumor Head.” The fact that her last name began with a “T” made the alliteration even more appealing. Yes. I admit it. It was cruel but we never actually called her that to her face.

I forget what book we were going to read but it was not one that was part of the normal curriculum. She decided to ask if we minded paying a dollar for a copy and the entire class agreed. Well, almost the entire class agreed. I exercised my right to say that a teacher could not compel us to spend money on school materials. (Trust me. A lawyer even then, I checked the school regs and knew I was on strong ground.) I refused to pay for it. Knowing I was actually within the letter of the law, she gave me a copy anyway and dramatically said that she knew eventually I would pay for it. Flash forward to the end of the year. We had written short stories as 70% of our final grade. I had gotten an A on that so I knew no matter what happened on the other 30%, I would pass. The day of the final, I walked in with my hands behind my back and apologized for having been so obstinate about paying for the book. With a look of joy on her face, she thanked me for having seen the light…until I dumped one hundred pennies on her desk from a paper bag.

An unfortunate thing did happen to her in the middle of that school year. She had been mugged in her apartment building and was out for about six weeks. The school made the mistake of having a different substitute teacher each week she was off. Now, substitutes are notorious for receiving, shall we say, a less than appropriate amount of respect. Well, at least notorious among us. One of them was attempting to get us to read poetry…out loud. So when Tom was called on to read Joyce Kilmer’s Trees, Andy and I stood up on either side of him, raised our arms and swayed in the breeze. With another substitute, the three of us imitated a steam calliope by alternately standing up and down in our seats and making calliope-like sounds. That one decided she didn’t need to put up with us and asked us to leave. We shook her hand and thanked her as we filed out.

French teachers were among my favorite targets. I’m not entirely sure why, but my goal was to push them to the edge of a nervous breakdown without pushing them over. Now, I had scraped through French class since the fifth grade by getting just enough to make it through the year. This was not because I didn’t want to try. It’s because my inability to learn foreign languages is exceeded only by my inability to learn mathematics. So French class was truly a case of being bored and depriving everyone else of their education.

In ninth grade, my seat in French class was in the front row. As a result, it was very easy for her to see the look on my face. The look on my face was often one of confusion. For the first seven months of the school year, whenever she saw that look on my face she would stop and with all teacherly concern ask me if I understood. Inevitably I would take a moment of thought then say, “If you say so.” Finally, some time late in the winter, she had heard that one too many times and she detonated. So from then on, whenever she asked me the same thing, I just said, “Okay.”

My senior year French class was French literature. The teacher was a charming little woman whose name happened to be Bella Friedman. Whenever we would read a play, we’d all take a part and read out loud in class. She would really get into the part and emote like a ham. After several months of this, one of the girls in glass gushed, “Oh, Miss Friedman, you should have been an actress.” She just glowed and said, “Yes. Some day my name will be up in lights.” At which point I piped in with, “Yeah, flashing on and off, ‘Bella’s Bar and Grill.’”

The final high school class clownery in which I was involved was in the nature of being one of the instigators. In my school, there was a tradition called Senior Dress Down Day. On that day members of the senior class could wear anything they wanted. OUR senior year, they did away with it because they said that the student body had taken to dressing down every day so there was no need for it. Tom, Andy and I were talking about it and Andy jokingly suggested someone should walk naked to protest. I said that wasn’t practical but how about wearing nothing but a jock strap (a/k/a athletic supporter)? Tom looked at me and said, “How much?” I said, “$10.00” and Andy said he would match it. Now, in 1970, $20.00 was a tidy sum and Tom needed train fare to visit a girl so he took the bet, with the condition that he could wear a shirt that hung down in the back a bit. We agreed. The morning of it, he went to the boys’ locker room and came down wearing a shirt, his jock and sandals. He made it halfway down the hall of the second floor before he was apprehended. It was one of those things that were just too outrageous to be punished for. The principal said to him, “Son, you may be crazy, but I have to admit, you’ve got balls.” The only repercussion was that Tom was stripped of his office as president of the school’s chapter of the National Honor Society.

College awaited, but that stuff will have to wait for another day….