December 3, 2003

• Funny Alaskans

  Book review:  On the Road to Tok

  I cannot cite any hard statistics on this, and have no idea how one would go about trying to document it, but I’m firmly convinced that Alaska has more funny people per capita than any other geographical area of similar magnitude, except possibly Antarctica.

  

  (Rhonda Flamingo:  “Peas, sweet potatoes, gravy and stuffing under the cushion?!!”
  Ursa:  “Everybody knows bears will cache their uneaten food for later.   
  Now back away slowly…”)

  In my opinion, we have some of the best cartoonists on the planet, but admittedly they have a rich fund of weird information and humorous situations from which to draw.  Peter Dunlap Scholl, who does Muskeg Heights, above, has a more… shall we say “conventional” sense of humor than does Chad Carpenter, whose Tundra cartoons have been published in several collections.  Chad, whom I met (Socially, Alaska is like a very spread-out small town where everyone knows everybody else if they’ve been here long.) when we both had booths at the State Fair, is often more over-the-top than Gary Larson of Far Side fame.

  Not all Alaskans are intentionally funny.  Politics up here in Seward’s Icebox seems to pull the zaniest bushrats out of the woods and down to Juneau, or to Washington D.C., if they’re really lucky.  As horrendous as Washington traffic and social life might be (I’ve heard rumors to that effect.), Juneau’s weather has them beat.  Our state capital, as few Outsiders know, has no land access.  No roads lead to Juneau.  It sits like an obscene growth on the Inside Passage, accessible only by choppy and uncertain water (notably the state ferry system, the Alaska Marine Highway, a joke in itself) and by even less navigable air (White Knuckle Airlines only–no strip long enough for the big carriers).  It takes a firm commitment to “public service” or the pork barrel, or just being ripe for commitment to an asylum, to run for one of those offices.

  One of the most unintentionally funny people in Alaska is Theresa Obermeyer.  Here is what someone in Utah had to say about her and in general about one recent particularly laughable year of state poltics:

  Alaska’s Ted Stevens has served in the U.S. Senate nearly 30 years. As the state’s senior representative in Washington, D.C., and its most powerful politician, his race was almost a non-event. Credible Democrat candidates spurned the contest, and the primary winner was Theresa Obermeyer, a recalled member of the Anchorage School Board who claimed that a Jewish conspiracy, in which Stevens and other politicians participated, had denied her husband success in the Alaska bar exam—at last count, he had failed the exam 22 times. She pursued Stevens throughout the campaign season, and ultimately spent 29 days at a federal penitentiary outside Alaska on a stalking charge. Stevens won his seat with 74 percent of the vote, and Obermeyer took third place, behind the Green Party candidate. Don Young won a comfortable victory in the U.S. House race over Democrat challenger, state Senator Georgiana Lincoln.

  That paragraph is so rife with Alaskan in-jokes that I feel I should apologize to all Outsiders.  You really have to be here to really get all of it.

  

  And speaking of Juneau’s weather (I did mention that.  Did you miss it?) brings me to the subject of this book review, a collection of edgy postcards from the edge of the back of beyond, whose authors include another Alaskan I’ve schmoozed with.  Mr. Whitekeys and I met at the local PBS station when my Mensa chapter was answering phones for a pledge drive and he was there to give his own hilarious endorsement of the station.  The man makes what appears to be a comfortable living poking fun at Alaska in his musical comedy Duct Tape Revue at an Anchorage night club.  But, back to the weather… that’s a Juneau street scene, above, and too true, ‘way too true.

  

  Also too close to the truth for comfort is this postcard Doug picked as his favorite when I sought his help in narrowing down the field.  I wanted to scan and post the entire book, but out of deference to the intellectual property rights of  Tom, Jeff, Jimmie and Whitekeys, I decided to keep it down to just three.  It was ‘way hard, dood, to pick any favorites at all because they’re all my favorites.  This last one, below, though, still warms my heart and makes me giggle each time I look at it, after several months and many perusings of the book—

  This one appears, to my educated eye, to bear the distinctive stamp of Whitekeys’s warped mind, but if one of those other lunatics is responsible for it, I apologize.

  To conform to the spirit of the copyright laws, let’s add a sentence or two to make this a true review, eh?

  Although there is not much to read here, I did enjoy reading the captions.  Some of the pictures wouldn’t have made any sense at all without them, and others still made no sense with captions, but made me laugh all the same.

  

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  • 4:24 pm
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