Honoring Your Mother

I've been reading "Laughter Is A Wonderful Thing," an autobiographical book by comedian/actor Joe E. Brown; published in 1956. I remember seeing Mr. Brown in old late night movies when I was a kid, but never knew anything about him until I picked up his book. He became a circus acrobat in 1903 at the tender age of ten, and worked in entertainment the rest of his life. I have developed a great admiration of this man as I read his life story. During World War II he traveled the world to entertain soldiers in far flung places, and he was very serious about providing good, clean entertainment to fellows far from home. Here is a wonderful anecdote from Joe E. Brown's book that shows us what a great man he was...

["Once, at Dobodura, a little tip of land in New Guinea, I was doing a show for fourteen or fifteen hundred kids gathered down at on end of the airfield where the crews could be handy to their planes if trouble started dropping from the sky.

It had been a long show, for those kids were simply starved for some fun. Every time I got ready to stop, they'd scream and applaud and make me go on. I'd just about reached the end, but they kept shouting.

"Listen, you guys," I said, "that's all I know."

"Give us more, Joe," they roared.

We argued like this awhile, and then there was a little slit of silence in the noise, as sometimes happens, and way back on the edge of the crowd a youngster shouted: "Hey, Joe, tell us some dirty stories."

You could have heard a pin drop, and not a big pin either. The kids looked at me, every one of 'em. I could feel 'em wondering what I was going to do. I stood there a minute, not quite knowing myself how to turn it off. And then I just forgot I was a comedian. I said to them, just the way I'd have said it to my own sons: "Listen, you kids. I've been on the stage since I was ten years old. I've told all kinds of jokes to all kinds of people. I've been in little flea-bitten vaudeville theatres and in big first-class houses. I've been in movies, I've made 65 pictures in my life-and there's one thing I've been proud about. In all that time I've never had to stoop to a dirty story to get a laugh."

They were quiet and they looked a little guilty, the way kids do when somebody speaks out loud about something like this.

"I know some dirty stories," I went on. "I've heard plenty of 'em in my time. I could tell them to you fellows if I wanted to. But I made a rule a long time ago that I'd never tell a story that I wouldn't want my mother to hear me telling."

Then the applause came. Not just a trickle of it but the biggest, noisest gale of hand clapping I've ever heard anywhere. It went on and on."]

Joe received hundreds of letters about this performance. He heard from parents, chaplains, officers, and soldiers who thanked him for what he did for those kids on New Guinea.