Here are two local jokes told in the late 1980s to some non-U.S. businesspeople on their way to New England for a sourcing trip:
First: Parts of Maine are so remote that when visitors ask Mainers for driving directions, Mainers may answer: “You can’t get there from here!”
Second: In Cambridge’s Central Square Purity Supreme supermarket, a bookish-looking college student brought 15 items to a cashier at a “12 items or fewer” check-out line. Staring down the student, the cashier warned, “I don’t know if you go to Harvard but can’t read or you go to MIT but can’t add, but you won’t get away with this again, kid!”
‘Good jokes, huh?
At that same time, when Norm Crosby’s malapropisms were an established national act, and with the opening of Boston’s Comedy Connection club, the world began to realize just how wicked funny we are around here!
Take all this from me because when I was born, without my parents realizing it, my older sister and brother managed to name me after an even older cousin whom they admired. . . because he had Lenny Bruce albums.
Abbreviating a list of great New England comedians takes time, leaves out some greats, but certainly includes Orny Adams, Mike Birbiglia, Bill Burr, Norm Crosby, Jane Curtin, Rachel Dratch, Ayo Edebiri, Ziwe Fumudoh, Mindy Kaling, Jay Leno, Seth MacFarlane, Juston McKinney, Seth Myers, Patrice O’Neal, Amy Poehler, and Steven Wright, whose own success had much to do with the Comedy Connection’s own success.
‘See, aren’t we funny around here?!
An early 2020s Boston Globe article about Seth McFarlane’s take on local people’s wit and sense of humor, quotes him as saying, “It’s this odd combination of just an absolute absence of self-editing in so many cases, and. . . the [expletive] that these guys say is just jaw-dropping.”
Years before that article, I began to take pride in my wife calling my efforts at humor as “thinking man’s Tourette’s Syndrome.” Just to be clear though: I am funnier than her.
It’s not all fun and games being a wicked funny local though. I suspect that I didn’t get to interview for one tour-guide position because at the end of the application where the form invited “Anything else you think we should know?” I wrote, “Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana.” ‘Pretty good, right?!
When you visit New England, take time and make yourself available for local wit and conversation. Whether you need to or not, ask a local passerby for directions or suggestions on where to eat.
Take your pick of comedy venues large and small—there are more and more clean comedy shows, BTW—or eat supper at a restaurant’s bar alongside friends you haven’t met yet at Gritty McDuff’s, Union Oyster House, Pizzeria Regina, or Jazzy’s down in New Haven, to name a very few.
To turn that Maine joke upside down: You can get here from there!