The Great Zucchini!

plus later discussion.

he looks like the janitor on scrubs, btw.
:D

Do the math, if you can handle the results. This unmarried, 35-year-old
community college dropout makes more than $100,000 a year, with a two-day
workweek. Not bad for a complete idiot.

If you want to understand why the Great Zucchini has this kind of success, you need look no further than the stresses of suburban Washington parenting. The attendant brew of love, guilt and toddler-set social pressures puts an arguably unrealistic value on someone with the skills, and the willingness, to control and delight a roistering roomful of preschoolers for a blessed half-hour.

Even before they respond to a tickle, most babies will laugh at peekaboo. It's their first "joke." They are reacting to a sequence of events that begins with the presence of a familiar, comforting face. Then, suddenly, the face disappears, and you can read in the baby's expression momentary puzzlement and alarm. When the face suddenly reappears, everything is orderly in the baby's world again. Anxiety is banished, and the baby reacts with her very first laugh.

At its heart, laughter is a tool to triumph over fear. As we grow older, our senses of humor become more demanding and refined, but that basic, hard-wired reflex remains. We need it, because life is scary. Nature is heartless, people can be cruel, and death and suffering are inevitable and arbitrary. We learn to tame our terror by laughing at the absurdity of it all.

By laughing at that recognition, you are rising above it, and blunting its power to disturb.

later comments:

Arlington, Va.: Dear Gene --

It is Saturday morning, and I have just finished reading your article for the third time. My son just asked me why I am crying.

Thank you

Gene Weingarten: Thank you.

Now, continuing the theme we have been developing -- ask yourself why you were crying. Ernest Becker would say it was because you came face to face, heart to heart, with the central fact of the pain of human existence and our continuing fight to transcend it.

You either have to laugh, or cry.

now my problem is not being able to stop!!