Comedians Aren't Funny When You're Pregnant

Sometimes even professional comedians aren't all that funny - like when you're living with one, or married to one, or find yourself impregnated by one. No, not funny at all.

My ex-husband, Michael at a run 

to end breast cancer - finally 

doing something helpful for women.

Photo courtesy of Michael Aronin. 

For instance, most husbands of women turning forty and overdue with their first child, know enough to keep their mouths shut - about pretty much everything. But when the husband is a stand-up comedian, he doesn't know enough to do this and says things men planning to live long enough to see their babies would never say.

Picture this: I'm standing there, so pregnant my nose has gained weight. The baby is inside me, hanging window treatments, rearranging the furniture, and ordering from Wayfair, showing no signs of coming out. My then-husband, Michael looks at me suspiciously and asks, "How do I know you're the real mother?"

Then imagine this: I'm somewhere into my 104th week of pregnancy. I have given up shaving my legs. Our shower stall is tiny and when I bend over and lather my legs, the soap immediately washes off and I'm cutting myself. Even if I shut the water off first, bending over to shave is miserable.

And forget shaving in the tub; just sitting down in the tub is like centering a house onto one square of a sidewalk. 

So I give up shaving for a while.

After a few weeks, as I roll into bed, Michael reaches over, pats my leg and mutters, "Dad?"

Anyway, I blubber and sulk my way through my fortieth birthday and two weeks later the baby is still a no-show. By the time I am finishing the nursery, I am enormous, and if I am sitting on the floor painting a baseboard and need a rag from the other side of the room, I roll there to fetch it.

One night, I am putting up a wallpaper boarder at chair rail height. When it starts peeling off faster than I can slap it back up, I scream for Michael to help. He does his best, but we end up watching helplessly as all my hard work comes crashing down like a home improvement project in a Laurel and Hardy short. 

I throw myself on the floor in a hormone-enhanced tantrum and begin to bawl. At first Michael takes the sympathetic approach and tries unsuccessfully to comfort me. Then he decides I will settle down if he leaves me alone for a few minutes. My hysterics, however, continue.

After a full thirty minutes of this, Michael grabs the bull by the horns and, using the same judgment he too often employs, takes the tough love route.

"Teece!" he bellows from the bottom of the stairs. "Pull yourself together and get down here - NOW!"

I yell back what he can do with his order.

And his stand-up buddies weren't all that different. When one of them got in trouble with his pregnant wife, he solemnly absorbed her words, looked at her with mopey eyes and a divorceably straight face, and said, "That's okay, honey; it's just the baby talking."

As another of them was coaching his wife through labor, the baby's head emerged, but his wife was exhausted and stopped pushing. The doctor told him to say something motivating, so he told his wife, "Sweetie, if you don't keep pushing, you're gonna have a helluva time buying pants."

Yes, comedians are a very glib bunch - which is just one of the reasons so many are divorced.   

                         

         

Short Comedians

My ex-husband is a stand-up comic who for years milked our kids for all the free material he could get. Actually, being a writer, I did, too so I’m not pointing any fingers. Now the kids are teeenagers and suddenly they aren’t that funny anymore. Any parent of adolescents knows what I mean. But the ages of three to ten were the golden age of kiddie comedy in my household, and it was great while it lasted.

            When my son, Jon was three, he was sick and I left him in the car with my mother while I ran into the store for his prescription.

            “Grandma,” he announced from his little car seat in the back, “I’m gonna throw up.”

            “Just a minute, Jon; I’m coming,” my mother said, fumbling to unfasten her seat belt and find something for him to vomit into. Due to my fortuitous failure to clean the car, she was able to get her hands on a fast-food paper bag. “I’ll be right there,” she said.

            Scrambling out of the car, despite her bad knee and reliance on a cane, she threw open Jon's door and thrust herself in just in time to hear him say, "But not today."

            Jon was the kind of kid who would chatter happily to anyone who would listen - and often to those who hadn't planned to. One day, when he was about four-years-old, a friend of my husband's stopped by. And even though Jon had never seen him before, he linked his arm through Larry’s, guided him to the love seat and cuddled up against him. Within seconds, Larry couldn’t get a word in edgewise as Jon explained the intricate plotline of a Teletubbies video he was watching.

            “. . . and the yellow one is La-La. La-La almost always has an orange ball with her. The purple one is Tinky-Winky and Tinky-Winky has a big purse. The red one is Po, and Po . . .”

            After at least five minutes of this, Larry glanced at me and made a brief comment, prompting this gentle reprimand from Jon, “Excuse me, Larry, but if you’re going to keep talking like that, you’re not going to be able to hear this.”

            By the time our daughter, Sydney was three, she had perfected a dry, low-key delivery that takes some comics years to develop. And when she was three-and-a-half, her father and I were sitting at the desk of a carpet salesman who was writing up our purchase. Sydney started fiddling with the man’s calculator. When I told her to put it back, she put me in my place by quietly but arrogantly dismissing me: “Talk to the man, Mommy.”

            Flash forward to Jon age five and Sydney age seven. I was driving somewhere with the two of them in the backseat. Not surprisingly, Jon started complaining about his sister.

            “Mom, I’m never going to believe Sydney again. She always tells me these really great things she’s going to do for me and then she never does them. She just lies to me, so I’m never going to believe her ever again.”

            Sydney executed a masterfully elongated silence before saying in a very sly tone, “Hey Jon, I’ve been workin’ on that rocket ship for ya.”

            “Oh really?” Jon called out in a delighted little yelp, all excited and ready to jump on board.

            When I recounted this anecdote to the kids the other day, Jon said, “I hate you for lying to me about that rocket, Sydney.”

And Sydney said, “It’s still in the attic.” She was even lying to him about the attic since we don’t have one.

Anyway, even though they rarely cough up charming and quotable nuggets these days, the kids are still the cheapest source of material my ex and I have – at least until they get wise to us, unionize and demand compensation. If that happens, I’ll hire a couple of four-year-olds. Like elephants, they work for peanuts - except for the ones who are allergic, and they work for cookies.