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AL
HARVEY IS FUNNY AND DEEP
4-6-10
Al Harvey sits out on Bakewell Mountain thinking up philosophical
jewels and comedy routines. I have long said he is the funniest man I
have ever known but strangely, he is also one of the deepest.
Every funny person totes around many characters in his being and finds
it necessary now and then to let them out to play. One of Al’s is
Grandfather Fluke.
Once when I was interviewing Grandfather
Fluke for my show Face This
Big Awful Stinking Mess
(my version of Face
The Press) I
asked him, “Why do you feel the need for out-of-body travel?” He
answered, “Ever so often a man has just got to get away from himself.”
That is really a deep and profound statement. It made me
stop and realize how much of our behavior is really an effort to get
away from our limited world and play a while on a different playground.
I am thinking a lot of our obsession with sports is just such escapism.
For a while, we want to live through others we have idealized.
One of his sayings made page one of my book
Kickstarts: “There’s
a time for glee and a time for woe, a time to peacock and a time to lay
low, and it’s up to you to know what time it is.”
One day when I
had spent some time laughing with an old pal and then stopped by a
funeral home to be with friends in grief, I realized that there are days
when we experience all these things -- glee, woe, peacocking, and
laying low.
The thing I questioned at first was the value of
laying low. Then I discovered the Biblical character Eutychus. He fell
asleep while sitting in an open window on the third floor of a building
while listening to Paul preach. Paul went down and raised him from the
dead, I thought to myself, “I bet Eutychus became a firebrand for Paul
after being raised from the dead.”
To check that out, I went to
my concordance and was shocked to see that Eutychus is never mentioned
again in the Bible. So I developed the theory that Eutychus just
believed in keeping a low profile. I came up with a chapter for a book
titled “Low Profile Eutychus.” Al’s now famous words helped me rescue
Eutychus from oblivion -- a fate worse than death.
Once I was
asked to emcee a show at The Comedy Catch where three area stand-up
comics were taping their acts to create a demo to send to clubs where
they were seeking bookings. I saw it as a chance to expose Al’s comedic
talents to the world and asked him to come and do some crazy stuff with
me. I was also hoping he’d “get the bug” and decide to become a
professional comedian. He brought the house down but when he
showed no interest in following up, I asked him why. He said, “I do my
thing for my friends only. It’s really spur-of-the moment stuff. I can’t
imagine anything more boring than repeating the same material from town
to town, night after night.”
Al may need to get away from himself
now and then but he always comes right back home to who he is.
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