My Dad, who died 15 years ago, was not the guy who told jokes that featured an Irishman, an Englishman, and a Russian going into a bar. He never responded to the Reader’s Digest monthly offer to pay $300 for an amusing anecdote. Nor did he have a repertoire of homespun stories featuring his family and friends behaving in outrageously funny ways. I do not recall him once cracking wise, engaging in jocose repartee, proffering a pun, uttering a mot, or pulling a gag. He was not one to put others at risk for having their sides split, ribs tickled, or knees slapped.
Dad wasn’t grim or glum; he enjoyed clever stories his friends told, reacted appropriately to TV comedies of the Red Skelton Show sort, and laughed dutifully at whatever witticisms, selected from those au courant in our elementary school classes, my brother and I auditioned at the dinner table. He just didn’t do comedy himself.
He was, in fact, somewhat taciturn in general, especially compared to the stereotyped used car dealer.1
Nonetheless, Dad had one comic bit he performed reliably throughout my childhood and into my teens.
When he said goodnight to us on December 31st, he would end thusly …
I hope I see you all next year.
_____________________- Of course, other than the fact that he undeniably bought and sold used cars, he had so little in common with the caricatured image of a fast-talking, sharkskin suit-wearing, fast-and-loose-dealing predator hustling suckers into buying wrecks at inflated prices that the comparison itself is misleading. My father preferred overalls, never slapped a back literally or figuratively, and had a reputation for honesty such that auctioneers at auctions limited to dealers would routinely note when he was the owner of the automobile on the block as a certification of the accuracy of the information they offered about the car, a tactic I never heard associated with another dealer in the eight years of car auctions I reluctantly attended.↩
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