you can't die if someone jokes

I lo-o-ove “The Sopranos” theme song…


--born under a bad sign,

With a blue moon in your eyes…

It’s a groove

It’s a riff

It’s the “Big Beat”…



Last week here, was typing these stereotyped “Mafia” phrases, more from old movies than from “The Sopranos” but still that’s what came into my head when I heard that James Gandolfini had passed –



Then after being unable to resist typing them in,

Thought: (That’s terrible! Stop it!)

(“You can’t do that!”)



All weekend, off and on, this scolding phrase lived in my mind –

Imagined it being said vigorously with a



tone and rhythm and outrage similar to telling little kids,

“You can’t play race cars on the dining room table!” –



“You can’t joke when someone dies!”



Finally on Monday while getting ready for work, wanted to try out that scolding-sentence aloud – in the shower, it came out,

“You can’t die when someone jokes…”



Oops, wait a minute …and then started thinking – “and wouldn’t it be interesting, if that were true??”



Like – as long as you had some comedians around you, making some jokes – joking, (to turn it into a verb) – you would be safe from death.



Comedy-life-insurance.



Or – Comedy Life Protection.



Thinking of how impolite it is – disrespectful, or something – to laugh when thinking of someone’s death, but then also thinking of how sometimes – you sort of have to – it isn’t the death of that person…it’s the general concept…

And there’s an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (on You Tube) where Chuckles the Clown dies in a freak accident…because Chuckles made people laugh when he was alive, Murray can’t stop coming up with funny lines about the death.

Mary gets mad at him.

--------------------

TED: That’s not nice.

MURRAY (guilty): I know. Why do I say things like that, Lou?

LOU: It’s a release, Murray. A kind of defense mechanism. It’s like whistling in a graveyard. You try to make light of something because it scares you. We laugh at death because we know death will have the last laugh on us.

TED (impressed): Hey, Lou, that’s good! It’s not only good, it’s heavy.

LOU: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls: It tolls for thee.”

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