I just realized tonight that I haven't been nearly as funny as before Matt Lemieux left. Mary Lisa, based on her first meeting of me at Matt Lemieux's thinks that I am so funny, that the few times I've seen her since, she laughs upon seeing me. And then laughs more when my face turns red, thinking, perhaps, that I am such a jester that I can control even my facial blood vessels. And others too end up laughing much too strongly and much too loudly over the most banal of banter, but only around Matt. And part of the charm of the experience, I'm sure, was how Matt was entertained, not that I was that entertaining, but his amused reactions were themselves so funny, that it was probably almost like coming in at the tail end of a joke, having heard enough of the punch line to understand and chuckle a little, but ending up in an outright guffaw so funny was the reaction of the first participants, that even if you didn't think it was that funny, it was funny enough that the one or two were still laughing that you thought that funny itself. It might be the case that you might laugh hardier than normal because your imagination actually gave you a funnier thought, a comic subtext, double entendre, innuendo, that you made all your own, given the tabula raza of a largely unheard joke. But these people who are people who are not given to polite laughter, and they are quite intelligent all, so I suspect the latter, that their own imaginations made they themselves delight so.
But with Ed McMahon, he was part of what made Johnny Carson so funny an experience. The laughter he shared with Johnny, while the rest of us, including Johnny, groaned, that part of the joke was that it wasn't really that funny.
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