Boom!

I just don't get this youtube video all my friends are posting. It's set to Dueling Banjos and stars a Caucasian rube (I'm a Caucasian - I can say that) who is about to demonstrate the efficacy of some home made fireworks in what appears to be his dining room. Instead of the discrete shower of sparks he promises, the guy makes a huge boom and startles himself silly. Except that when the boom cloud clears, he appears to be wearing a different shirt which I don't think we're meant to catch. This is not a genuine wack job, it's a dweeb with a twisted sense of humor. He looks like David Letterman's slightly unhinged younger brother who lives in their mom's basement. The twisted sib makes fireworks and wishes he had Dave's sex life – or wishes he could have sex for once in his life. (Don't start a rumor - I made up the thing about DL.)

Anyway, real or fake, I see nothing funny in watching someone risk burning down his house, possibly singe his face (or duck on cue?) and make a complete ass of himself. If this is real, it's tragic. If it's not, it's just dumb. Now let us put aside the idiotic specifics of setting off fireworks in your home and simply look at the fact that this person comes off like a complete fool. Why is that funny? Some people are accident prone or clumsy. Yours truly, for example. I have inadvertently embarrassed myself on more than one occasion.

Once, I was participating in an ad agency creative exercise. We were divided into teams and each one had to put on a group presentation before the agency and a panel of judges from upper management. We were pretending to sell some kind of software - the details elude me - and we had determined that the overarching benefit, the one that could serve as an umbrella for all the others, was adaptability. So I decided to dimensionalize adaptability and add drama to my part of the presentation. As I was making the case for staying agile in a changing marketplace, I pulled a ball from my pocket with the intention of throwing it at my creative director friend in the judge's panel. "And you have to (BALL TOSS) think fast...". Only my aim has always sucked, and instead of lobbing the ball at my friend, I spiked it into the lap of our frail and delicate head of account services who almost fainted from the shock.

Oh, I hear you laughing. Go ahead. Chortle away. I will maintain my solidarity for that terminally immature fellow and his home made explosives. Not funny. And even less amusing if they're shooting the video at his mom's house.