In California: The Life and Death of a Good Joke

By John Skew

Don't mess around with Mother Irony, they tell one another now at the Cafe 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 cafe, 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 cafe 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!"

Lightning had struck the primal soup. A collection turned up $3 for a classified ad in a newspaper called the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the Dull Men's Club was on its way to becoming as fashionable as the All-Booze Diet or neoconservatism. "Write for information," said the ad. Amazingly, seven or eight people instantly did. One sufferer admitted that hot tubs made his bathing trunks pucker. Someone else cried out in the night: "Help! I'm tired of being the star of the show, the life of the party. Stop me before it's too late!" The Babar plotters bought another ad, this one offering a club membership and a lavish brochure for $5. Troise, an auto mechanic in his mid-30s, composed a mimeographed, both-sides-of-one-page exhortation titled "Lavish Brochure." At one time Glanting, 30, had a little success as a stand-up comic in clubs around San Francisco. Now he works for a coffee company. But he did the spoken interviews that were beginning to be requested by a few radio stations.

"Publicity would build for a while, then die out," Glanting recalls. But each wave was bigger than the last. At first the clamor came from small FM stations, then the Knight newspapers wire service, then a huge AM station in North Carolina, "then some station in Detroit, they called me at about 11:30 one night and I was plotzed, then local television." For a while, Troise says, the club became a monster that wouldn't die. Glanting was doing as many as six interviews a day.

He had a spiel worked up: "It's the decade of the dull. Mountains are dull, birds are dull, flowers are dull, they don't hang around in fern bars trying to impress people." The producers of To Tell the Truth flew Glanting to Manhattan, where, he says, it felt a little odd to meet "some guy from a beer-tasting club who was going through the same kind of media ride."

Dullness had struck a chord, as home truths occasionally do, but at the Cafe Babar they needed new material. One of the TV networks got hold of Troise, who, improvising with some desperation, said that the club was going to create a Pantheon of Dull Heroes in--here he reached into his skull at random for the name of a small town--Carroll, Iowa.

Some people in Carroll, a corn-country town of about 9,000 inhabitants, were miffed, but some weren't. Glanting took time off from work, flew to Carroll, and with the enthusiastic help of the town's Chamber of Commerce, invested the "pantheon"--a small concrete structure in a cornfield--with a rusty barbecue grill, some worn-out tires, and pictures of such dull heroes as William Bendix, Hugh Beaumont (the father in Leave It to Beaver), Alan Hale Jr. (the skipper in Gilligan 's Island) and Walter Mondale.

By now, national renown was beginning to seem like work. Club membership had crept past 450, including a proud contingent from Carroll. Most were men, despite club advocacy of a Dull Rights Amendment for feminists (women don't seem to be comfortable with dullness, says Troise). Printing and mailing costs ate up the income. The organizers figure they made about $100 apiece. "Wefutzed around with T shirts for a while," says Glanting, but the only size that sold was extra large, and "who wants to have ten gross of T shirts in his living room?" Glanting was losing money skipping work, and he says that he turned down requests for appearances from Tom Snyder's Tomorrow show and Dr. Joyce Brothers.

At the Cafe Babar the other night, Troise came cautiously to the phone and said yes, they were trying to give the club a decent burial. "Don't use my address, O.K.?" There was a good deal of commotion in the background, and the caller asked Troise whether the noise was creative ferment. Well, as a matter of fact, Troise admitted, he and a friend were trying to mobilize the nation's pets to solve the energy crisis. "Put the little beggars on treadmills." Did the movement have a slogan? "Sure: 'It's not enough to be cute any more.' " --By John Skew

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