Unintentional comedy

If you’re wondering why someone as bitter, jaded and just plain angry as I am has stayed in teaching for almost 20 years, I can sum it up in one sentence - I laugh my ass off at least once every day. Sometimes several times a day. And sometimes all goddamn day long. (But those are usually the days when the alcohol hasn’t worked its way out my system.)

I can leave a staff meeting on a Wednesday afternoon and drive home so pissed and discouraged about the people I work with that I have to pry my nails out of the steering wheel when I pull into Ray’s liquors for a half gallon of Dewar’s. But by 8:00 Thursday morning, I’ll already have had two belly laughs from something someone did or said. Sometimes they mean to be funny, but more often than not, the humor comes at you in the form of some statement made with complete seriousness.

The guy across the hall has a class full of hellions during his last period of the day. Hey, we all do. I don’t care if your 8th period consists of exactly three kids named Jesus, John the Baptist and Mahatma Ghandi. Ten minutes into class you’re going to be telling Jesus to stop making fun of the skinny kid and for the skinny kid to stop calling Jesus a bastard, and the Baptist dude will be running around the room like a chicken with its head ... okay, that’s even too low for me. It’s just the nature of the last period of the day in a public high school. The teachers are fed up with kids, and the kids are spent and angry after seven periods of being beaten down by those same bitter adults.

But this guy, good ol’ Paulie, came over between classes and said, “Hey Bitters, how about I take your 8th period today and you come over to my room and handle my nuts.” Um, Paulie ... I like you, I like you a lot, but uh ... not quite that much. (Although I have to admit, since Paulie is the guy who found me a dependable weed provider, I might have considered that request out of green gratitude.)

We had a band teacher last year who announced to his guitar class one day, “Today I am going to show you how to finger the G-string.” At least that’s what two of the kids in that class came running to tell me as soon as that class was over. If that’s an old joke, and it sure smells like one, it still left me damn near pissing myself, probably because the band teacher was enough of a hump to have said that without realizing the way it would make adolescents - and an incurably immature 40-something teacher - laugh. So I’m going to believe it really happened.

I used to be across the hall from a female teacher whose specialty was the tirade. She could blow up at the slightest transgression, such as a kid taking too long to sharpen a pencil or a kid forgetting to put his name on an assignment. One day she had had enough of a student who perpetually fell asleep in her class. I could hear her gaining steam as she got in this kid’s bleary face and started her nineteenth lecture of the day. When she finally stopped for a breath, the kid managed to get out his reason for falling asleep. He said, “But I’m tired and I just need to sleep.” To which the teacher replied, at full volume, “Then maybe you should come in after school and sleep with me!” For the next two weeks all the males in the class kept pretending to sleep in class, hoping for the same invitation.

This same teacher had a kid in her class who had asthma problems. At the beginning of the school year, we are made aware of any kids with health problems that we need to know about, such as asthma, allergies and diabetes. (The list used to include those male students who just can’t seem to keep their hands off of their balls, but it ended up being the entire male population of the school, so they discontinued that.) However, this teacher always acted as if actually reading this list of maladies was beneath her, so she had no idea that the kid might go into a near-death choking fit at any time. One day, the kid was having a mild attack, and he started to cough, choke and gasp. She put up with it for her usual extremely tolerant five or six seconds before coming over and to the kid and demanding to know just what his problem was, because you see, his choking was disturbing her class. The kid managed to choke out the beginning of a response, saying, “If I could ... (gasp gasp) ... just ... (cough, choke) ... blow out a little ...” But Miss Short Fuse Two-Thousand-Every-Year got right up in his face, looked him dead in the eye, and cut him off by yelling, “I’m going to blow something in a minute!” I can’t confirm the rumor that every male in the class had a daily coughing fit after that.

Then there was the tall, handsome, young science teacher who made all the girls get soppy pants. He could get the kids to go along with just about anything, big tall midwestern hunk of studliness that he was. One day he did an activity in which the kids learned about DNA strands or something, and as a hands-on activity (which means “Kill some class time by letting the kids play with stuff”) he had them stringing beads. One young lady finished her strand, tied it up and put it around her neck. Just then a vice-principal walked in, and the girl excitedly told him, “Look Mr. Stevens, Mr. Kramer just gave me a pearl necklace!” Somehow, Mr. Kramer kept his job despite this porno-money-shot way of rewarding his best female students.

Sometimes the (unintentionally) funniest teachers don’t last too long. We had a long-term sub who couldn’t handle her third period. One day, the entire hall heard her blow that final gasket, and she laid out a string of Bobby Knight-like expletives that was as eloquent as any of the overrated, written-by-dead-white-guys English textbook crap that we have to teach. She finished off with a Shakespearean flourish, screaming, “If I have to put up with this kind of shit on Monday, I swear to God it’s going to be another Columbine in here.” But she wasn’t done yet. She saved the last few words for one particularly troublesome student. She grabbed the little runt by the shoulders, started shaking him (according to multiple eyewitness accounts), and said, “And you’re going to be first on my list!” Needless to say, that Monday there was another long-term sub in that room.

But I think my favorite unintentional beautiful line happened over 10 years ago in one of my honors classes. We were reading the novel A Separate Peace, and one of the main characters is named Phineas, which is shortened to Finny in most of the book. About four chapters into the book, one half-awake airheaded girl in the back asked, “Wait a minute. Which one is Finny, and which one is Phineas?” After the class accorded her the appropriate amount of derisive laughter that would ensure she never asked another question the rest of the year, the kids started to try to explain it to her. They were giving her examples such as, “It’s like when you get Beth from Elizabeth ... It’s like when you get Timmy from Timothy ... Jerry from Gerald ...” Finally, one innocent kid in the front row offered his example, saying proudly, “It’s like when you get Dick from Richard.” Before the class could turn their derision toward him, I got my lick in, saying (quite wittily, if I believe), “Leave your personal life out of this, Chad.”

I laughed my ass off that day.

Ned Bitters teaches high school and dreams of one day seeing one of his former students on stage at a strip club. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.