#74 A Well-Run Household

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You see them on TV all the time; houses which are nicer, cleaner, and more attractive than yours the same way a runway model is more appealing than any member of the 1972 East German Women’s Swim Team. The camera lovingly pans around showing scenes of impossible beauty like an elegant kitchen filled with matching dish ware, a living room in which the furniture does not appear to have been purchased at a trailer-park tag sale, and (most incredibly of all) a bathroom in which the towels not only coordinate but are hung neatly on gleaming towel bars instead of being heaped on the floor. When you see a house like that you’ve just to ask yourself, What do those homeowners have that I don’t have?

The answer is simple.

A small army of production personnel including three professional designers and an uptight director known in the television industry as ‘Hansel the Fussy’. Before the cameras are even permitted on the property, the house is completely remade from top to bottom.

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NOTES:

In this episode I threw in a lot of ‘off mic’ stuff where you could only hear my side of the conversation. The real masters of this form of comedy are the incomparable Bob Newhart and his brilliant contemporary Shelley Berman.

Tags: humor essay | humor column | cat | household | family | comedy