The Slightest Bit

It was late on a Friday night, and I was hanging out with some stand-up comedians that I was friends with. We were all sitting around in the dark, riffing on this terrible movie that we were watching, when we heard someone knocking at the front door. The owner of the house got up to see who it was. When he opened the door, his next door neighbor burst in, frantically waving around a torn envelope and a handful of handwritten pages. The neighbor explained that this woman comedian that we all knew had sent him a letter, claiming that he was the father of her illegitimate child and informing him that she was suing for child support. A photograph had been included with the letter. He handed it to the comedian that owned the house. As the comedian held it in his hands, the neighbor kept jabbing it with his finger to emphasize the patent absurdity of it.

The photograph was a picture of the female comedian holding her baby, and it had been very obviously and very crudely doctored. She had clearly just cut out a picture of the neighbor’s face and then pasted it over the face of the baby, mustache, glasses, bald head, and all. The comedian flipped the photograph around to show everyone, and the whole room broke out laughing. But the neighbor didn’t find the situation funny at all. He snatched the photograph back out of the comedian’s hand and shuffled it back into the pages of the letter, the paper rustling and trembling in his hands. He said that didn’t know this woman. He had never met this woman. He certainly wasn’t the father of her child.

The comedian pulled the neighbor aside and tried to calm him down and explain the situation to him. He told him that this was just part of a bit that the female comedian was doing. It was all just an elaborate joke. But the neighbor insisted that it was all very real. There were court documents included with the letter. She had really gone to a judge about all of this. There was a specific dollar amount that she was demanding from him. There was a monthly payment schedule. There were back payments. The neighbor said that he couldn’t see her going to such great lengths just to have a bit to perform on stage.

“But it isn’t for the stage,” the comedian explained to him. The neighbor was dumbfounded by this. He stared down at the photograph, as though it offered some further clarification. “She doesn’t do a stand up act on stage. She hasn’t done that in years,” the comedian continued. “This is a bit that she’s doing in her day to day life. That’s the kind of thing she does now. It’s kind of experimental, I guess. It’s like the world itself is the stage that she’s performing on.” He capped this off with a nod, ruminating on the audacity of the whole thing as he seemed to really admire it for the first time.

The neighbor didn’t like this at all. He began to enumerate the problems with the situation. Who was the actual father of the child? Did she have the baby just for the bit? What about the money that she was demanding from him? Most of all he was upset about the money. “Well, she needs to get paid somehow for the bit, right?” the comedian replied. “I mean, she’s got to make a living, doesn’t she? You get paid to do your job, right?” But the neighbor glumly hung his head. He didn’t see why he should have to be the one to finance her joke, especially since he didn’t find it remotely funny. The comedian’s face lit up with a warm grin. “Well of course you don’t find it funny. That’s why they say the joke is at your expense.”