By Steve Fey

It is my observation that a great many people take life much too seriously. This includes, unfortunately, comics. Have you heard George Carlin lately? Boy, there’s a downer for you. Or have you heard Dennis Miller, who makes the argument, without meaning to, that becoming conservative means you lose your sense of humor? I think that this problem happens because people really don’t know how to discriminate between good days and bad days. So, as another public service, we present this Guide to Good Days and Bad.

You’d think bad days would be easy. Take a few weeks ago, when the Levee broke in New Orleans. That was a terrible day, right? The worst, wasn’t it? Well, if you were there, yes. But for the rest of us, that was one heck of a great day. One of the best. Why? Because we weren’t there! Now we get to be sympathetic, indignant, charitable, thoughtful and selfless all while not suffering anything worse than TV viewing fatigue. Grab your eyewash and hang on: a tragedy like that is good for weeks on end, and that makes for a whole string of good days. There’s no real shock that a large storm struck the Gulf Coast, after all: they’ve been doing that for at least the last four centuries, so the rest of us may as well enjoy the aftermath.

Not too long ago, for those of us at least twenty-something, we had the better part of an entire decade of good days. I mean the nineties. Sure, the rich got richer, but for once, so did the poor. That’s almost unheard of but you may remember one salient characteristic of that decade: it was dull as holy heck. Yes, good times are very very dull and uninteresting. We met our threats by firing missiles into Iraq rather than sending troops, we all had trouble counting all of our new found money, and we were reduced to digging into the details about Bill Clinton’s private life to find something to complain about. Now that was some double plus good good times, m’man!

Bad times are just the opposite of good times. Here are some historic bad times for you: The last night on the Titanic for those who were there; The battle of Gettysburg; The Battle of the Bulge; The Siege of Troy; Hurricane Hugo; The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906; The Great Depression; The Fate of Pompeii and Herculaneum; Any tragedy you’d care to name. You’ll notice that every single one of those events is interesting enough to be remembered years, decades, even millennia later. And, if you were there for any of them, how in heck are you reading this? Please, let those of us among the living know so that we might set up the proper altars and sacrifice appropriately. I mean, okay, there are some people who remember the Great Depression, and Hugo didn’t really kill that many people, it just ran them out of their homes. But you see what I mean.

Good times are dull as they can be. Here’s a quick personal example of a good day: A good day is when you have something caught between two teeth and you stick a fingernail in there trying to dislodge it and amazingly just this once it actually works and the bit of food that’s been bothering you comes out. Now that’s a four-star day and that’s no joke. A bad day is one that anyone else might want to hear about. Those two examples mean a couple of things.

First, don’t bother telling anybody about your good days because they’re dull. I don’t care if you won the Powerball Lottery for $200 million, okay? Tell me how you almost won but the ticket blew into the incinerator while you were on the way to collect, because that would be a story worth hearing. Okay? Good day, shut up. Bad day, call your agent. If I could make it simpler, I would.