Anatomy of a Failed Comic Moment

Is it possible to have too many comic moments? If one is referring to earlier versions of God, Geezers, and Golf, the answer would be a resounding “yes.”  In the earliest drafts of the story, the Comic Moments chapter was roughly twice as long as any other chapter. As the editing process unfolded, a lot of that segment’s material exited stage left.

One such casualty of the pruning effort was something we referred to as the Colonoscopy Skit.  The description that was deleted from earlier versions of the book went something like this:      

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Many seniors are on fixed incomes. Needing to watch expenses, they are naturally interested in discounts and bargains. One Sunday I displayed a slide that was entitled Discount Club Cards, and featured images of two “punch cards.” Each card was labeled C-R-U Frequent Plumber Card. The blue one had my name on it with two of the ten spots punched, and the pink one had Denise’s name on it with seven of the ten spots punched. On the next slide a third spot was punched on my card, and I revealed that these were images of our Colonoscopy Club Discount Cards from Colonoscopies-R-Us (C-R-U). I’d just had my third colonoscopy and wanted folks to see where things stood on our family’s invasive procedure scoreboard. Of course, this also afforded us the opportunity to talk about the importance of such a procedure for people in the Heritage Class age group, and to encourage those in attendance who had never had one to pursue it. A couple of years later Denise scored her eighth such procedure, which we reported to the class using the same method. She will clearly win the family’s lifetime achievement award in this category, a competition I was willing to concede from the beginning. And for the record, everyone understood that Colonoscopies-R-Us probably doesn’t offer discounts after ten procedures. In some respects, one might say it’s the opposite of a discount—they clean you out!

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Senior adults are indeed interested in discounts, and unlike younger generations, most of us have had one or more of those little business-card-sized, plastic laminated, cardboard or card stock “discount club punch cards” from various merchants at one or more times during our lives. Sometimes those things lived in our purses or wallets for years. So the set up to the punch line (no pun intended) resonated with a lot of people in the audience. On the first occasion that this comic moment was shared, I enjoyed a lot of relational equity with people in the room, there were no newcomers, and judging by the favorable response, the skit was well received.

On a subsequent occasion however, we had perhaps half a dozen first-timers in the room. At the end of the segment, one of them remarked “I’ve never seen that in a Sunday school class before,” and none of them ever returned.

Further, while Denise and I extoled the virtues of the procedure as being in the best interests of one’s health, we learned that not everyone in the senior adult Sunday school class had enjoyed similarly successful, painless, “no-big-deal” colonoscopy procedures in the past.

Worse, one of our classmates had endured a terrible experience with the same guy who had conducted all of the colonoscopy procedures Denise and I had ever had. Our credibility on the subject plummeted to zero, and I chose to abandon further skits on this topic, no matter how many additional colonoscopies Denise had.  

On the upside, the post-mortem assessment of this comic moment led me to stay away from certain topics in the future. While humorous stories about religion and politics remained fair game, jokes about really serious topics were not. So when covid came along, I knew enough to steer clear of jokes about masks and vaccines.

Another cloud—another silver lining. Such is life.