How to Instruct a Trainee

I’m particularly proud of panel three. There’s something about incompetent cursing that always amuses me. I think it has to do with the idea that if you’re shouting insults and profanities at someone it’s already a sign that you’ve lost control of the situation. The idea that you then curse badly makes it even more pathetic.

Once, when I was in high school, my brothers and I went to visit my father and his second wife. We were in dad’s backyard when the kid next door, probably around eight years old, decided to shout insults at my father. Normally my brothers and I might not have found that funny (I say might. There’s a pretty good chance we would have, actually.), but in this case it was 100% hilarious, because the child chose to call our father a “boob butt brain.”

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How to Accept an Apology

In case I haven’t been clear on this, I don’t consider Basic Instructions to be any sort of source of actual, usable, real-world advice.

One time, a young person I think very highly of told me that she had gotten useful advice from one of my comics. My stomach immediately clenched. I asked which comic. She said, “How to Apologize without Accepting Any Blame.”

I hoped she learned to deal with someone delivering a weaselly non-apology, but she told me that I had taught her the technique of seeming to apologize for something you don’t regret by telling the wronged party that you’re sorry they feel mistreated. She used this technique on someone she knew, and it worked.

I feel bad that I made this young person a worse human being. On the other hand, I suppose it’s nice to know that I’ve made a difference.

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How to Appreciate a Mixed Blessing

One of our cats has a new game. She drapes herself across Missy’s lap, gazing up at her and purring for twenty or so minutes. When she’s done adoring my wife, the cat gets up, walks over to where I’m sitting, and bites me on the leg.

It’s like she knows that her affection for Missy will make the bite hurt more.

Note from Missy: to be fair, Cheddar (the lap cat who bites Scott, not the barfing cat [Trouble] who passed away a few years ago) only started draping herself on me for the last year or so; before that she was vehemently anti-lap.  The (hilarious) biting Scott’s legs thing came first.

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How to Stand Up for Yourself

For whatever reason, I’m not coming up with anything to say about this comic. Instead of just spewing out something I think is just good enough, I’ll instead share what is probably the most-watched video in the history of the Meyer household. Both Missy and I have watched it countless times and are still amused by it.

It will either make you laugh, or haunt your nightmares . . . or both!

Note: The video is not in any way obscene, but I still wouldn’t watch it at work if I were you.

[Link, in case the embedded video isn’t showing for you]

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How to Understand a Great Man's Actions

The legend is that Edison promised Tesla a huge bonus if he could get their electric generators to work above a certain high level of efficiency. Tesla managed to do it. When he demanded his bonus, Edison laughed and said, “Nicola, you have to learn to understand the American sense of humor,” and didn’t pay up.

So yeah, Edison wasn’t a great guy.

On the other hand, Tesla later claimed to have invented a death ray, so they both have their issues.

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How to Adjust to a New Reality

Back when I was a comedian, there was a club in Green Bay, Wisconsin that I played several times. I always enjoyed it. The audiences there seemed to like me, for whatever reason.

Of course, you can’t perform in Green Bay without talking about football, and I’ve never been a fan of the sport, which they couldn’t understand and didn’t respect; but I was able to defuse that situation by explaining that I was from Seattle, and football had been nothing but a source of pain for my family.

The Green Bay audience liked that.

Note: I’m aware that eventually Seattle whipped itself into a formidable team. All I’m saying is that in the 1970s and 1980s, that very much had not happened yet.

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How to Avoid Blame

Reading this comic about an unhealthy working dynamic puts me in mind of Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary, Get Back; but pretty much everything reminds me of it at the moment. That’s the natural side effect of spending nearly a week working through a documentary that is almost eight hours long.

I wonder if my enjoyment of Get Back might be a form of Stockholm Syndrome. I’ve spent so much time with the Beatles that I’ve started to sympathize with them.

I won’t spoil anything about the documentary here, but those who have seen it will know what I’m talking about when I say, “Dude, shut up about your amphitheater in Libya. Nobody’s interested.”

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How to Confront Someone

I’ve had people in my life who have pushed me to do things that I didn’t think I could. They always couch it as an attempt to help me, but think about this: the thing they encouraged me to achieve was always something they themselves wanted me to do.

They expressed faith in me that if I worked hard enough and faced my fears, I could do what they wanted.

Kinda makes it seem less benevolent, doesn’t it?

I’m just saying, my mother expressed confidence that I could keep my room clean and get good grades, but her faith in my ability to become a notorious cat burglar seemed to be lacking.

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How to Evaluate Your Formative Influences

When we were kids, my older brother had a sure-fire method for solving the Rubik’s Cube. The method was to break it apart and then put it back together. Solved!

A few years ago, I decided to teach myself how to actually solve the Rubik’s Cube. There is a method that involves starting with the cube held in a certain position then following a defined set of steps that results in a fully solved cube every time, if you can remember all of the steps. I worked at it, practiced every day, and in time I proved that I could learn all of the steps and solve the Rubik’s Cube on my own.

Then I stopped practicing every day, and proved that I could also forget all of the steps.

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How to Learn from Others

When I was a road comic, I used to carry a Ziploc bag to put the hotel TV remote in so I could use the remote without actually having to touch it.  The initial idea was that perfect strangers had used the remote and I couldn’t trust them to not be disgusting. Over time I learned that many of the hotels had specific rooms, rooms undesirable to guests, that they would put the comedian in every week. This meant that I knew many of the people who had used the remote before me.

That made me want to double-bag the remote.

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