What’s Funnier — Slipping on a Banana Peel or Getting Smacked with a Cream Pie?

It Depends on What the Cook Put in the Mashed Potatoes

This is what happens when you write the first thing that pops into your head. I was thinking about what a lot of work being funny is. If I try to write something funny it just never works, yet sometimes I can write funny stuff. I guess I can’t force it.

Getting a glimpse into what it is like to get something comedic going, I recently watched a whole bunch of episodes of Jerry Seinfeld’s show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. It’s on Netflix — all 11 seasons of it. Evidently, you can also catch episodes on YouTube.

Anyway, Jerry gets to drive a new car each week. These are never new off the factory line. These are old, vintage cars that have been lovingly cared for. Some are rust buckets, but most have been restored. For every new show, there is a new comedian guest and a different car they drive around in.

They always get coffee and sit with other customers in diners, coffee shops, and sometimes fine restaurants. What is neat is the customers will sometimes get in on the act. Sometimes, they make random stops in stores. One store in LA said they couldn’t come in. They went somewhere else, and somebody on the staff must have fixed it because they ended up checking the store out anyway. I think they sold high-class hats. I watched one this afternoon with Jerry and the guy with the face…oh, yes, Jim Carrey.

As I get older, the names start to slip. I loved them all, but especially the ones Ricky Gervais was in. Evidently, even though the two of them are good friends, Ricky almost lost it with how fast Jerry drove. You could tell it was real when you looked at him white-knuckling it as Jerry swerved in and out of traffic.

Who else was on the show? David Letterman, Eddie Murphy, Martin Short, and Jimmy Fallon were all on. Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks were both on one of the shows. They got to tool around in a Rolls Royce. In one episode, the car was an old ordinary brown station wagon that Paul Newman owned. I can’t list all the comedians who were on the show.

Hey, there were 84 episodes, but if you’ve got Netflix or you search them up on YouTube, it will be worth your while to watch a few of them. Maybe it’s like being psychic. The more you hang around with psychics, the more chance you’ve got of it rubbing off on you. It’s sort of contagious. Maybe being funny is like that, too.

It didn’t look like anything was scripted on the shows. It was always two comedians, Jerry and somebody else, making magic as only can happen when two comedians get together. The gang from the Jerry Seinfeld show all visited in different episodes, Jerry Lewis showed up for an episode.

Even President Obama was on one episode. That one was funny. The Secret Service guys told them they had to turn around in the Sting Ray they were driving. They got to have coffee in the White House instead of a coffee shop.

Watching Jerry with other comedians, who were many times close friends, was a joy. This is where two people, at a time, just truly meshed, melded through the humanness of being all kinds of funny. There were 84 episodes made. You haven’t really wet your pants until you watched some of these episodes.

Here’s a few minutes of a random sampling of some of the episodes on YouTube.

If you are interested, you can see who was in each episode and what cars they were driving on Wikipedia here.

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