Comedy Team

I ran into Roger, whom I hadn't seen for a decade and a half.  We worked together for something like two years, maybe less, drank beer and played pool on Friday evenings, until it all ended rather badly.   We started out about the same time, Roger in December, right before the company Christmas party when the management brought Chris Isaak to entertain the employees, and I in early February, forever regretting having arrived too late to attend that show which included Chris' original guitar player Jimmy Wilsey.  The manager, a lawyer by trade, assigned me to the same team as Roger, and soon we became a dynamic duo, twice as  productive as the rest of our colleagues, a feat noticed by the management, and, as things went there at the time, unappreciated.

"We should have formed a comedy team," Roger said, when I saw him last week, an idea that had occurred to me more than once since those days.

I could only nod in agreement.

He was the funniest man I have ever known.   Our job was hard, stressful, and as I mentioned, unappreciated, most of our teammates didn't last at it very long, quit and moved on to other things.  Roger dealt with the pressure using his natural talent for humour.  There was nothing that anyone could say to him that he couldn't turn into a joke.   I quickly caught on to his brand of humour and contributed with my own talent for puns, limericks and absurd asides.  Together, we were the life of the office.  There were times that we were on a roll with a non-stop comedy routine and Roger, who smoked, would decide to go outside for a cigarette break, so I plus one or two other guys, all non-smokers, would follow him, just to continue the act that was going so well.

"You could have been the straight man," he said.

I'm not sure how we could have developed an act, perhaps I'd be the straight man, or I'd be the banana man.  When I think of various famous comedy duos, the roles  in each of them are slightly different from all the other duos.   We of course didn't have a comedy club act, but thinking back on it, we could have developed one if the idea had occurred to us.

But it didn't.  The management above us changed, more than once, the company fell into a turmoil,  Roger became upset about some trifle having to do with a management decision, stopped speaking to all his mates, and soon quit in the middle of an economic recession with no other job prospects.

"Yeah, we should have thought of forming a comedy team!" I said to Roger.