For H.E.’s A Jolly Good Fellow

For H.E.’s A Jolly Good Fellow

Today belongs to Human Encyclopedia. Long live Human Encyclopedia!

H.E. is probably the funniest man I have ever known. Never a day goes by without him making a joke or some triple wordplay, and almost none of it is planned or set up in advance. If you’re discussing nuclear physics with him, he will find some way to make it slapstick funny. You can have an entire conversation with him, with topics ranging from politics to history, and there you’ll find—mixed in with all the legitimate and resourceful information that he’s giving you—amusing puns and dry ironies.

The dark side of it is this: H.E. forgets his jokes soon after he makes them; he jokes totally on the fly.

Earlier, I was trying to remember some of the witty lines he made during dinner, so that I might share them with you, and I failed to even capture the essence of a discussion with H.E.

We were discussing extra limbs, for instance. Well… I brought up the topic of extra limbs. Don’t ask me why; I’m sure the train of conversation led there with some proper justification, but there I was bringing up the topic of an Asian former classmate who had an extra thumb on one of his hands.

This, of course, led to H.E.’s brief history of the use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, resulting in strange birth defects, which included spina bifida and Hermaphrodite, the goddess of self-love… and it all began, by the way, when Zeus told his daughter to go fuck herself.

All of that was said in a single breath, and I have missed half the jokes he had in there, between spina bifida and hermaphrodite. I tried to get him to remember what other birth defects he mentioned, which of course weren’t actual birth defects but completely hilarious and well-intended malapropisms, but they were gone from his memory. His jokes, H.E. said, were like gossamer, borne out of the moment; once people laughed at them, he promptly flushed them out of his RAM.

On good days, I know I’m like that in some ways, but H.E. is like that everyday. I wish I could strap a recorder around his arm so I could save some of his wit for sharing later.

But anyway, today belongs to Human Encyclopedia. Yes, he was born on this day.

Not yesterday, mind you. Today.

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16 thoughts on “For H.E.’s A Jolly Good Fellow”

  6. Happy B.D. to H.E.! I am afflicted in the same way, though I haven’t been so prosaic about it, rather getting annoyed with my brain for refusing to record!

    I quite like the expression on Aprilgem’s face. 🙂 heh! Whee! and GAK! at the same time.

  9. Happy Birthday!
    And I concur with Davezilla’s previously-stated opinion that H.E. ought to get his own site, or at least comment in here, a’la DJBlurb on Dooce.

    I both love and hate those careless witty people, being one of the lame folks who, on the rare occassions that I says something funny on purpose, repeat it three or four times, until everyone nearby is not only over, but sick to death of me. Ah, well.

  10. Happy Birthday!
    And I concur with Davezilla’s previously-stated opinion that H.E. ought to get his own site, or at least comment in here, a’la DJBlurb on Dooce.

    I both love and hate those careless witty people, being one of the lame folks who, on the rare occassions that I says something funny on purpose, repeat it three or four times, until everyone nearby is not only over, but sick to death of me. Ah, well.

  11. And damn on the double-post. I’m only just now getting over the shame of my previous blunder.

  15. Ah… now we found out why April moved to the new house. Her pet Peeve grew to large to play in any three rooms of the old place!

    Since the mid eighties, citizens of the World have grown to expect the reporting of astounding inventions each Monday, as common as the weekend scores. I wonder if April will have the same affect here.

    This streak of new drawings eclipsing the last is astonishing.

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