In California: The Life and Death of a Good Joke

Don't mess around with Mother Irony, they tell one another now at the Café Babar. When the phone rings, no one wants to answer it. Although it is more than a year since Joe Troise and Bill Glanting and the others had their big idea, the caller is more than likely to be some reporter or talk-show crocodile wanting to know about the Dull Men's Club. Dullness had everyone excited there for a while, and it kept things jumping among the regulars at the café, a neighborhood beer-and-sandwich joint in San Francisco's Mission District. Now everyone is bored, though. The T shirts finally came, but no one feels like wearing them. Dullness has lost its madcap charm.

"It just sort of petered out," says Glanting, who was publicity chairman of the club back when it needed one. There is silence. The reporter writes down Glanting's remark. More silence. Glanting is finding it hard to get up steam. He has been interviewed so often that his tape heads are gummed. He can no longer recite the club motto—"Dare to be dull." Lines like "We're out of it and proud of it" and "There's nothing wrong with being an ordinary stupid guy" no longer come trippingly to his tongue.

Ah, but in the beginning ... He and Troise and half a dozen of their friends were sitting around the café on a night like any other night, waiting for Boswell and Dr. Johnson to arrive, when the talk turned to the frantic trendiness of U.S. society. Go to a cocktail party, someone said, and everybody's talking about manipulating the money market, or parachute jumping, or that group therapy where everybody sits nude in a big tub of Wesson Oil. Yeah, said another citizen, there you are in your clean bowling shirt and they all want to go to the roller disco. "People think they have to be able to discuss everything, enjoy everything. They have an irrational impulse to be interesting." (The quotation was so good Troise later used it in his International Dull Day proclamation last Oct. 16.) That was the kind of folderol that used to fill the air of the Cafe Babar.

"Shall we, the good and dull of the earth, attempt to compete with the attention getters?" "Hurray for meat loaf!" "People who hang-glide are nuts!" "Yeah, you know what's fun, by God? Petting your dog, tuning up the old Chevy Nova." "More beer!" "Beer here!"