The following was due to a contest I was sent to judge, and I had my kids with me. The people at the event asked my kids if they'd like to participate. As I was also a judge, I agreed, but would only give my kids average points in fairness for the other kids. All agreed.
The article was due mostly to Nathan's very outgoing personality, a child most noted wherever he was as being very honest. An interesting note: Tickling in our home was forbidden as Kim was very sensitive to being tickled, and Nathan loved to tickle. That rule was respected by all the kids, and his comment in the article was more based on the laughter and joking around we all enjoyed wherever we were.
TO MAKE IT BIG ON COMEDY`S CAROUSEL, YOU GOTTA START SMALL.
Published on 01/08/89 (1182 words)
Nathan Jensen, the newly crowned hottest young comic in Rockford, insisted as he accepted his prizes, ``I never told a good joke in my life.`` But the joke was on him, because there Jensen was, standing between a blank movie screen and an adulatory public, the result of having outwittied five other nascent jokesters.
The TV cameras were trained on him, the radio microphones were switched on, a newspaper reporter was scrawling notes. His two sisters and father smiled from an audience of 25 scattered about a theater that, later that day, would feature Dustin Hoffman.
Jensen could afford to be modest, even if it did mean twisting the truth. He was Nathan Jensen, funnyman, and he was king of the grueling 5- to 10-year-old comedy circuit in Illinois' second city.
He had beaten the kid in the funny hat with the knock-knock jokes. He had beaten the blond punster and the taller kid who tried to impress the judges with intricate sotry jokes. He had beaten his own two siters, who tried mostly snake jokes. At 6 years old, the youngest in the competition, Jensen had prevailed. Top of the Humor Heap. Boss Comic.
For now.
It is a cat-scratch-cat world for young comics, especially in a room like Cinema 3 at the Colonial Village Theatre in Rockford. There, no drummer chases your punch lines with rimshots, and no stripper comes on next to make 'em forget all about you. In a room like that, you're on your own, kid.
You gotta have confidence and you gotta have material. Nathan had both. A child more willing to talk than a low-level mobster looking at a life sentence, he said beforehand that he was ready to unleash "two neat jokes...a smokestack one and an orange one."
He confided, perhaps disingenuously: "This is the first time I ever got a funny joke. I never got a funny joke."
His dad, Jerry, is the afternoon jock on Rockford's WZOK-FM, Nathan said, and he keeps the kids laughing at home. "He tickles us 3 billion, 2 thousand times a day," Nathan alleged.
"We study joke books," said sister Kimberly, 8.
....(article then goes on to talk about other kids for a few paragraphs)...
Then came Cicely, at 9, the oldest of the Jensens. She opened with a knock-knock joke: "Knock, knock" Who's there? "Hiss" Hiss who? "Make up your mind. Are you an owl or are you a snake!?"
Sticking with an animal theme, she told the one about the guy who walked into the clothing store, only to find a lion working there. "Surprised to see a lion selling clothes?" asked the big cat.
"You bet I am," replied the man. "I didn't think the giraffe would ever sell the store."
Sister Kimberly returned to snakes. "What do you get," she asked, "when you cross a kangaroo with a snake?"
"A jump rope."
And again. "What do you call a snake with a hard hat?"
"A boa constructor."
You don't see stuff like this on Letterman.
Then came Nathan, who, apparently disdainful of improvisation, stuck to his origional plan:
"Why did the orange stop in the middle of the road?" he said.
"'Cause he ran out of juice!"
"What did the big smokestack say to the little smokestack?"
"You're too young to smoke."
...(article goes on with stories on the other kids, then after last kids joke)....
With that, it was time for the judges---an official from the hot dog company (oh, okay, Oscar Mayer), a theater official, and dad Jensen---to compose themselves. As the winners were announced, it became clear that this was a comedy competition in the same way that the produce section is a vegetable competition. Everybody won a prize.
But Nathan was named the overall champ, and, in addition to the T-shirts and other goodies everyone else got, he won a ride in the Wienermobile.
His dad, who said that he gave all his kids medium scores, suspected that the other judges had made Nathan the winner on the basis of age rather than jokes. In actuality, he said, Kimberly is the "hysterical" one. "She's always joking around."
But she did not seem bitter. "He's gonna be on David Letterman or the Johnny Carson show," she said of her brother.
As Nathan posed for an eager photographer at the door of the Wienermobile, he showed a disrespect for celebrity that would make Sean Penn proud. "Enough pictures," he said, several times.
He issued a command to the Wienermobile driver: "You're gonna take us to Minneapolis to see our grandmother."
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