Jose Jalapeno on a stick
I sat by the fireplace listening tonight… quietly… but laughing laughing laughing inside, at times just marvelling at the magic… as I wished, as always, that I could record the after-dinner conversations going on in the room. Some of the conversations were an exchange between two friends, some were a give and take with characters not visible to me, and some were just musings, no audience necessary.
These guys are FUNNY. Deliberately funny. They play off of each other like a seasoned comedy team. They take each other’s quirks and they run with them. They accept the jokes about their own quirks that others are making, and they make them even funnier. They interject pop culture humor, so SouthPark and Family Guy and Jeff Dunham are often partners in their act. (…Jose aka Jose Jalapeno on a Stick thinks his nickname is pretty cool.) And when the comedy routine takes a turn for the intellectual as Ray expounds on a joke in excruciating detail, everyone yells NO MORE, RAY!! and the comedic exchange returns to the ridiculous.
There’s magic here. We love and accept some of the guy’s imaginary friends. The imaginary friends are funny too. They have names and voices and places they like to sit or sleep and rules they think we should all follow and lots and lots of things that they do that are WRONG and it’s a good thing the imaginary friends can’t really get in trouble because EVERYONE would get them back for it.
and I just can’t imagine anyone else’s dinnertime being this much fun.
Of course… things are not always this way. Sometimes a glance at the wrong instant becomes a serious insult, or the timing of a joke sends anxiety through the roof.
But there is something about Friday nights.
Maybe it is the anticipation of a lazy Saturday morning with bacon… and NO STAFF in the house.
Or the complete and utter shutdown after a week of intense thinking about how to load a dishwasher … or worrying how not to drink more than your share of 
orange juice … or the guilt about how you should save money towards something practical when all you want to do is coerce your support staff to drive to WalMArt IMMEDIATELY because that $5 in change in your pocket needs to be spent on a LEGO or there is no future and you can’t relax until that money is GONE.
OHHHHH the pressure!
DEEP BREATH. It’s Friday night. All those things you tried to learn this week, already a distant memory. Let the dishes pile up. Bring on the OJ.
Let’s laugh.
