For those of us who love to laugh, the year 2020 was an absolute frolic, although a few people may have felt otherwise. Which is understandable. The best jokes for 2020 were actually not very funny.
For this column, I had originally planned on the headline: “The Funniest Jokes for 2020”. But I realized that no one actually made a successful joke this past year. Oh, sure, we did a lot of laughing. We were practically rolling on the floor. But these weren’t jokes. They were the real thing.
There was no doubt 2020 was going to be one hilarious year when the Colorado Department of Public Health officially canceled April Fool’s Day. Ha! Who needed it, anyway. We were headed into an April Fool’s Year!
For some of us, the chuckles kicked in when we walked into the paper products aisle and discovered that even the purse-sized Kleenex packages were completely sold out. We had the choice of laughing or crying, so of course we laughed. The guffaws echoed up and down the empty aisle. “Hee hee hee! The world has finally gone crazy! Ho ho ho!”
And then we heard about the masks. What a crack-up! We were all going to wear face masks, everywhere, all the time. No, wait, hold on a minute… there aren’t any masks available, so we shouldn’t wear them after all… unless we wanted to survive, that is… in which case we should immediately cover our face with anything that even slightly resembled a mask. Somebody’s idea of a prank? Everybody was in stitches!
But you know, it wasn’t a “joke”. A joke is an exaggeration of reality… but reality had already exaggerated itself, all on its own. Reality had inflated itself, to where it was bursting at its own humorous seams.
Who knew it could feel so hilariously goofy to wash your hands every ten minutes? Not me.
It looked, for a while, like real life couldn’t get any funnier. But somehow, it did get funnier… as we watched the Presidential election unfold. What a gut-buster that was! Two septuagenarian idiots — one, a pathological liar, and the other, barely awake — were supported to the tune of $7 billion in campaign contributions. That’s more than twice the amount spent during any previous Presidential election. And for what? Talk about a practical joke!
But it wasn’t a joke at all. It really happened. Ohhh myyyy… it only hurts when I laugh.
Then we heard the gales of laughter coming from the unemployment offices. Who could ever imagine that our service industry workers could make more money collecting unemployment than they could actually working? Ha ha ha!
And it seems like the humor just keeps on rolling. Imagine the laughs when the federal eviction protections expire this week, and ten percent of the population gets kicked out of their apartments… onto the street, or forced to live with friends or relatives. I can hardly wait!
And what a giggle, as we watched Amazon increase its sales by 30% this year, while 25,000 brick-and-mortar retailers have either closed their doors or are preparing to go under. We got another big chuckle when we found out that a quarter of America’s 1,000 shopping malls are expected to close in the next three to five years. J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus, and Brooks Brothers have already filed for bankruptcy. What a gas!
One of the most rib-tickling non-jokes was the US Congress, as they argued for nine months, after passing the CARES Act, about helping people — and couldn’t figure out how to do it! Har har har! I nearly peed my pants.
Oh, oh… I nearly forgot to mention another real thing that happened. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo painted a poster (or had one painted, I’m not sure which?) illustrating in no uncertain terms how New York conquered COVID Mountain during the “111 Days of Hell”, between March and June 2020. You can click on the image to see a larger view. I especially liked the way the dollar signs were getting washed down the mountainside. And check out the little guy, sitting in the crescent moon, muttering “It’s Just the Flu”…
I am so going to miss 2020.
Unless, of course, we can manage to make 2021 even more entertaining? Nah, couldn’t happen.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.