One of the great things about writing “Sunny Side Up” is I get to be as silly as I want to be. One of the terrible things about writing “Sunny Side Up” is this means I should also make it funny. 

I hope you’ve never tried to be funny. It’s like giving a toast at your brother’s wedding and realizing midway through not only that your toast is a tad inappropriate, but your mom is giving you the look. It’s not the look that says, “Aw, my boy is so adorable.” No, it’s the one that hisses, “You better stop whatever you think you’re doing right now, or by the curdling blood of all your ancient ancestors, I will end you.”

And if you’re, like me, a procrastinator, whom I’d rather call a creative planner, being funny last minute is like trying to tell your friends an absolutely hilarious anecdote about Shih Tzus and Bulldogs and realizing from their vacuous stares that you’ve lost them. Perhaps you lost them doing your hilarious accent of a nationality-that-shall-not-be-named. 

Nationalities shall not be named because of today’s political environs. For though politics in recent times are to humorists what Chuck E. Cheese is to 8-year-olds and though you can’t believe the topic that spits out 20 tickets every time you press a green button, which duly fizzles and giggles like a baby cherub on laughing gas – you know you can’t press it. Your mother is giving you the look.

But surely, being funny isn’t that hard, right? A humorist’s job is basically just farting with words and running away while readers look around suspecting one another. Though I do like the metaphor, my mom is giving me that look again, and since she lives in Washington State, pretty much a whole country away, I know I’m going to have to edit this out. It stinks anyway. There’s my dad joke for the article.

At times like this, I try to remind myself that it could be worse. I could be giving a presentation in middle school, or pretty much anything in middle school: going to lunch, walking in the hallway, raising my hand in class and voice-cracking, “So-oh, basically, you’re saying that the male anatomy of the chimpanzee is much like a human’s – what did you say we should call, you know, their unmentionables?” Or I could be my teacher at this moment who, knowing he should answer the question with something witty to put the little snark in his place and show that Mr. Teacher is not the dork he’s proved himself to be for the last six months, chooses instead to go with his instinct. He gives a very accurate scientific explanation, along with a slide presentation and a hastily-chalked illustration. After all this, he finally pauses to turn to the class to see his observations twinkling like rubies before warthogs, hogs that very much look like 14-year-olds the day after Halloween.

Alas, trying to be funny on cue is never easy, but I will say it’s a lot easier than – getting back to life in Central Florida, which this column is supposed to be about – trying to out-run mosquitoes, trying not to run over turtles, trying not to be terrified by every gator-infested puddle you see, and, for crying out loud, trying to walk across any stretch of “earth” that’s not a minefield of bedevilled ant colonists rubbing their mandibles together in anticipation of burying their hindquarters into your ankles.