A Story About the Time I Agreed to Try to Entertain Mensans

Answering the question: Can there be funny stuff at a 'Colloquium'?

In 2005, I was asked to appear in a movie called “The Aristocrats,” perhaps the raunchiest non-pornographic independent film ever made. The idea was that many comedians would tell the same famously dirty joke in their own particular style, out-doing each other with gross and vivid graphic detail.

  As someone who has never been comfortable telling off-color jokes, I knew I couldn’t compete with the other comedians in the film, eg the late George Carlin, and the even later Gilbert Gottfried. So for my version, I rewrote the joke 180 degrees in the wrong direction. I made it erudite. I set it in the world of performance art and dressed it up with references to Joan Miro, The Venice Biennale and Postmodern Neoclassical figurative painting. And I was able to make my personal version of this traditionally filthy joke so effete, cerebral and esoteric that my segment was excised from the final cut of the film completely. By the time it hit the theaters, the sum total of my final appearance in the film amounted to one (1!) line.

However, when the DVD finally came out, my seven minute contribution appeared in the ‘extras” section in its entirety. And that is how, a few years later, it eventually met up with its proper audience: MENSA called to ask if I would speak at their annual Colloquium.

 The spokesperson for the Mensans informed me that he liked my contribution to The Aristocrats best out of all of them because it was the only version of the joke sporting the word ‘entrails.’ They had called me because this year their topic was going to be humor. And as every comedy insider will tell you, the ability to pass the ‘entrails’ test is the most reliable gauge for determining whether a comedian has their finger on the pulse of comedy.

 “Tough gig,“ said my husband, when I asked him to help me ponder whether I should say yes to the invitation, “If you bomb, you won’t be able to use your usual excuse: ‘Well, those people were a bunch of fucking idiots.”

But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that if I opened with a few funny personal anecdotes, and then topped them off by throwing in a couple more of my legendary“entrails” jokes, the evening would probably work out okay. So I said yes. Though in the interest of full disclosure, my real motive for agreeing to appear was that I wanted to see what Mensans looked like.

I have plenty of very smart friends. In fact, I would call all of my friends brilliant (a technique I recommend to anyone who wants to engender long term loyalty in their current group of friends.) But I had never met anyone who claimed to be a member of Mensa. To me, they floated on some distant horizon with other spooky secret societies like The Bilderberg Group or The Tri-lateral Commission. Who were these people in real life? I wanted to have a look.

As the date approached, I decided to check their website to see how my appearance was being promoted. I gasped out loud when I saw my name posted near a quote from Aristotle. To make matters even more mind-boggling, my upcoming appearance was listed along side a changing slide show of photographs of both Freud and Einstein. Talk about a terrifyingly rapid, and frighteningly steep sudden upgrade in peer group! Oddly enough, both Einstein and Freud had been artistically graffitied so they appeared to be wearing a Groucho-nose-and-glasses. For those who are unfamiliar with this ancient joke reference from the 1950’s, I will add that it was an odd and almost invisible choice of humorous embellishment for both of these famous Jewish men of a certain age.

Not just hilarious, it’s the perfect disguise.

 Hoping to find a comfort zone somewhere on the website that might make me feel less alone, I perused the resumes of other scheduled Colloquium speakers in search of a few participants to whom I could better relate. (BTW: I would have probably phrased that thought “looking for a few participants I could relate to” but since saying yes to this gig, I’d begun to automatically worry about my grammar whenever I spoke. For the first time in my life, I was really not sure if I knew how to correctly assemble a sentence.)

Unfortunately, the other speakers booked for the Colloquium did not sound at all like the kind of folks with whom I usually hung out. Take, for example, the author of “Humorous Interaction and The Social Construction of Meaning: Making Sense in a Jocular Vein.” Or the speaker offering a saucy evening of “Exploring the  Theoretical, and Empirical Evidence for Several Psychological Functions of Humor.”

In a flash, the goofy personal anecdotes I was planning to share seemed ridiculously simple minded. I had been thinking of opening with the story about how, at a handsomely appointed outdoor dinner party , my friend Cynthia had approached me to announce that she had decided that life was best viewed as either a sit com or a soap opera. And after she said that, she leaned back into an open candle and her hair caught on fire. In the past, that story was almost always guaranteed to get a laugh. But was that because it had only been tested on normal audiences? Would defining life too simplistically make the assembled group of Mensans glare at me?

This lead me to some panicky science-of-humor googling in order to raise the level of my content. The first thing I found was a scholarly essay titled “The Evolutionary Origins of Humor.” I exhaled in relief when I read “Humor is arguably too complicated to learn without an assemblage of specific neural pathways or an associated cognitive module,” “What a perfect replacement for my opening joke!” I thought, clicking SAVE.

 And so it came to pass, a few weeks later, that I found myself checking in to The DoubleTree Inn, in a suburb of Chicago where The Colloquium was to be held. As soon as I finished, I raced to keep an appointment for coffee at the hotel restaurant with the head Mensan who had hired me.

He turned out to be an attractive, nicely dressed man of perhaps forty, who told me that he raised orchids, liked to kayak and used to work in bio-medical engineering developing a piece of apparatus that, when attached to a damaged spine, could move a paralyzed arm. Ah yes. Just like so many of my other friends back home.

“I think you’ll be fine,” he said , after I nervously outlined the key points I was planning to cover in my speech. I was looking for some kind of reassurance from him that I was heading in the right direction. Sensing that I was jittery, he attempted to console me with examples of how relaxed and fun the Colloquium was going to be. He backed this up with a little Theoretical and Empirical Evidence of his own regarding the likelihood that there would be some after-hours-Mensa-hot-tub hijinx taking place closing out the evening, just like there was last year.

As grateful as I was that he’d made an effort to allay my fears, I confess I did not really feel reassured. It had never occurred to me until this very minute that Mensa might be a kind of Match.com or Tinder for people who tested well.

I had spent most of the previous month fretting about the proper wardrobe for this event. Never having attended a “Colloquium” before, I wasn’t too sure about the dress code. The word Colloquium seemed to imply a certain conservative formality. But was it formal like in a board room? Or formal like in ‘cruise-wear’? The multiple shopping forays I made throughout the city of Los Angeles in search of “Colloquium-wear” elicited only puzzled expressions from dead eyed salespeople. So after gamely trying on many outfits that didn’t look Colloquiumly in the least, I selected one that I hoped sat at the intersection of conservative and irreverant. In case you’re interested, it was a shiny dark suit.

This brings me to the night of my big speech. I was pretty nervous as I entered the banquet room for my first viewing of Mensans En Masse. But I instantly realized I’d worried in vain. The assembled group were largely white, mid-thirties and older and mostly male. And they seemed to favor, as a general approach to fashion, the Bill-Gates- aggressively-rumpled- and-utterly-blind-to-any-and-all-zeitgeisty-approaches look. One white haired seventiesh gentleman arrived dressed in a sweat stained white running suit and matching headband. As a whole, they looked like who they probably were; middle-aged versions of kids from your high school Chess or Latin club who also entered and won The Science Fair. The oft-mentioned famous porn star Mensan and the award winning famous actress Mensan, though frequently topics of conversation, had decided not to attend. It was probably for the best. Both would have stuck out like Sumo Wrestlers at an AV club meeting.

A few hours later, I delivered, to an attentive and friendly audience, my speech about viewing your life not as a sitcom or a soap opera but as a modestly budgeted indie comedy. Much to my relief, no one heckled my grammar. The only dark note was one agitated Mensan man in his mid fifties who, during a Q and A period, appeared to have made little progress recovering from the pain he’d suffered as the butt of callous jokes during childhood. “Why do people think its funny to be mean?” he asked me tearfully. “I don’t know.” I replied, not wanting to launch into a discussion of humor and personality with a weepy middle aged man. But as I think back on this living reminder of the fine line between humor and cruelty. now I think the right answer might have been “Why not write to the programming guys on the streaming platforms who make 250 million a year and vote Republican.”

A different fine line, the one between humor and funny, was on display the following morning when I was asked to sit on a panel next to a man whose life work involved speaking at literary events while wearing a red rubber clown nose. “Most people can’t help but smile when they see it,” he assured the unsmiling audience. I was on their side. I personally have never found a red rubber clown nose even the littlest bit funny. But on the bright side, watching this guy explain to a crowd full of frozen faces how an over-used approach to humor was a surefire ticket to big laughs was an excellent reminder of why no one should ever explain to anyone why they ought to find something funny.

After my appearance on this panel, my Mensan Colloqium duties came to an abrupt end. Unfortunately my plane flight home was not until the following morning. This left me with an alarming amount of unoccupied time to kill at a DoubleTree Inn . For a while, I stood around in the back of well-attended performance given by a very pun-intensive Mensan Shakespearean Improv group. I tried my best to find a way to like them. But no one, and I mean NO ONE, hates puns more viscerally than I do. So despite the fact that I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, I was still afraid to actually sit down for fear I’d be unable to restrain myself from making anguished and probably audible groans.

Next thing I knew, there I was, back in my room, gazing out my hotel window. There was nothing I wanted to watch on TV and I had forgotten to bring a book. That was when I realized there was still one last route to high quality entertainment: I had an unobstructed aerial view of the roof top hot tub directly below my room. Unbelievably I had been given a front row seat to the Mensan hot tub shenaningans that I had been told were still to come. It was early in the evening. They would probably start a bit later. Imagine the splendor as Mensans, in fluffy towels, sidled up to each other. What kind of lines did Mensan hook-up seekers favor? Would they ask each other about their favorite prehistoric source materials using fancy alternative word choices from the thesaurus? Would they expose hidden tattoos that revealed their IQ’s and recent test scores? But after logging a couple of disappointing hours, checking and re-checking the hot tub for action, there was nary a Mensan to be seen anywhere.

Was it be possible that having nothing but numerical IQ scores in common might not be the optimum way to generate human chemistry? This left me no choice but to resort to the only remaining recreational option still available to me: consuming all the seven dollar beers in the Mini-bar fridge in my room. I also ate all the gummie bears and a Snickers bar.

I couldn’t wait to go home.

But looking back on the experience, I now realize that I had definitely accomplished what I had set out to do: I had seen and spoken to actual Mensans. I had watched them eat. I had observed their dress. I had listened attentively to their version of humor. But in the last analysis, I was forced to admit that the theoretical and empirical evidence of associated cognitive modules in a jocular vein, (which I used to call ‘a joke’) had definitely been on me.