Blogs

There was, above all the others, Nora. Because of our shared history of kidding around, I could make her break up across a conference room just simply by lifting an eyebrow at the right moment in a boring business meeting.

Robin was a pitch-perfect parody of a Southern belle, slyer than me by a photo-finish. We'd batter each other with witticisms like two club fighters, then collapse after the final round, exhausted.

Next was Nina - the improbably big-boobed ballerina with the Hungarian intellectual DNA. She'd talk my mouth dry as we bantered back and forth.

But these are all, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, a feminine wit who was second to none, The Women I'm Not Married To. My wife is a Presbyterian - you will search in vain at your local library for The Big Book of Presbyterian Humor, and not because it's checked out. There isn't one, and probably there never will be.

There is something about a man who can't keep himself from kidding around that is attracted, then repelled - like those black-and-white Scottie dog magnets - by his wise-cracking female soulmate.

You may recall the "Seinfeld" episode in which Jerry meets Janeane Garofalo and becomes infatuated because she seems his distaff carbon copy. The two break up when they realize they could never live together - it would be like sharing an apartment with your doppelganger.

Evidence of this strange plus/minus polarity dates at least from the 19th century. In the 1860s Mark Twain met two cousins, Harriet Lewis Paff and Olivia Lewis Langdon. Paff got the point of Clemens' every joke, high or low, but Olivia could not "see anything to laugh at in the wittiest sayings" unless Harriet explained them in detail. Harriet finally gave up after realizing that her "quickness at seeing the point of a joke and the witty sayings that I had considered almost irresistible were simply nothing in comparison to my cousin's gifts. Mr. C evidently preferred her sense to my nonsense."

Dave Barry, one of the few American males who actually makes a living writing humor, sometimes injects his wife into one of his pieces. It is clear when he does so that she's not amused by him.

Dorothy Parker, a bespectacled bookworm, is evidence of a corollary of the rule I'm postulating. A woman with a wisecrack for every occasion, she was unlucky in love, and was the author of numerous aphorisms that expressed the mordant view of romance she developed as a result, including her most famous, "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses."

Perhaps it's the search for the toughest audience in the world, the way Sir Edmund Hillary wouldn't be satisfied until he climbed Mt. Everest, just because it was the highest mountain in the world, that makes men seek out women who give them a blank stare after they've delivered the punch line of their favorite knee-slapper, the one about the priest, the rabbi and the lady snake-charmer who walk into a bar.

All I can say is, to the fraternity of males I'm talking about, of which I consider myself a member in good standing, there are four words that act like Spanish Fly, a verbal aphrodisiac on us. Try them next time you find yourself seated next to the life of the dinner party, the guy who's cracking one joke after another, keeping everybody in stitches:

"I don't get it."

- Con Chapman

Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer whose works include The Year of the Gerbil, a history of the 1978 Yankees-Red Sox pennant race, 10 published plays and two novels, Making Partner and CannaCorn (Joshua Tree Publishing). His articles and humor have appeared in magazines and newspapers including The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe and The Christian Science Monitor.