Featured Essay: Laughing Ourselves to Sleep

by Michael Edward Kitchen

It’s been four decades since I roomed in college with my best friends, Robin and Glen, but I can still hear them giggling in their beds. 

Growing up, we developed our humor and musical tastes by happily teasing and warping each other. When we roomed together at Michigan State University, we stumbled upon a quirky application of our record collections that improved our disposition every single day, and gave us the juice to handle school and each other with good humor. The best humor.

We met in kindergarten, where we began tutoring each other in seeking humor everywhere. We continued challenging each other with laughter, music, ideas, and practical jokes all the way through high school, where countless comical episodes naturally centered around cars.

The convertible top on my white-and-rust POS Impala was so ragged it looked better down — its position 95% of the time — even though that invited snowballs in winter. We belted out tunes drowning out the POS radio for all the world to hear, and hurled “hysterical” jokes at innocents.

When the Impala’s horn and radio quit working, Glen played spoons for music, cupping two tablespoons in his hands and slapping them against his thigh. When I needed to alert another driver, I’d hit the dead horn button and Glen would jump up and yell, “Get the hell out of our road.”

I never named the Impala, but ascribed to it apropos theme songs like Foghat’s “Slow Ride,” and Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty.”

We each supplied cassettes to play while driving around, and went to quite a few concerts in that car: Bob Seger, Heart, Kiss, Cheap Trick, Frank Zappa, The Knack, Ramones. 

My musical awareness first stirred with namby-pamby pop music on an AM transistor radio. I became musically aware in teen-dom, and at 12 bought an FM radio-cassette the size of a cereal box. With a morning newspaper route at oh-dark-thirty, I carried it on my bicycle for company, stocking it with cassettes from a Columbia House deal — 13 for 1¢, then eight over two years at regular Club prices, something like $137.98 each. I didn’t know how to pick music then, so my haul was a mixed bag from embarrassing to accidentally great.

I developed quickly. Two years later I bought my first vinyl record at a discount department store, Elton John’s just-released 1975 album, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirty Cowboy. I was already wild about the only released single, “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” which had sent me to buy the album. When I pulled it out of the bin, the wild, glorious cover art felt like defibrillation, electro-shocking my musical and creative consciousness to life. With a cheek-cramping grin, I hugged it, then adopted it and brought it to its forever-home.

I was instantly hooked on albums, and needed more. Using paper route money, I added vinyl whenever I could. A handful turned into a dozen, then many dozens. 

The collection started with music, but after watching British imports on late-night PBS and Fernwood 2 Night, I realized comedy albums were required, and added Monty Python and Martin Mull. Other comedians’ albums became necessary. After reading National Lampoon, a recording was a must.

It was a revelation enjoying Mull, as with Steve Martin, melding absurdist stand-up comedy and satirical songs, perfectly combining comedy and music into one perfect act. We missed their joint tour, billed as “Steve Martin Mull,” and always wished there was an LP of that collaboration.

About to graduate high school, Glen and I built wooden crates to protect and transport our albums. We joined Robin at Michigan State a year later. 

We set up the stereo, speakers, and hundreds of records in the middle of the apartment between the bedroom and living room, next to the dining table where we shared many pancake and Kool-Aid meals. Music was literally and figuratively central. When someone wanted to listen while the others studied, watched TV, or slept, we used giant headphones with long, thick, curly extension cords.

The next task was the art installation — we picked 35 of our favorite LP covers and pinned them to the angled wall above Command Central, seven wide, five tall. Beautiful. Stimulating. Motivating. Inspiring. 

We sought out every way to have fun with music. A treasured independent label — London-based Stiff Records — produced our favorite new wave musicians. Stiff injected wit into its marketing slogans, appealing to our ridiculous sensibilities. To wit: “In ’78 everyone born in ’45 will be 33-1/3.” Another made us especially giddy: “If It Ain’t Stiff, It Ain’t Worth a Fuck,” or the more sanitized, “If It Ain’t Stiff, It Ain’t Working.”

The three of us came up with a brilliant use for our never-enough collection: we put on a record as we went to bed each night. It played for 23± minutes, then shut off, allowing us to drift off listening to our favorite LPs, a beddy-bye lullaby.

Except we didn’t select music.

We selected comedy.

I doubt we invented falling asleep to records, but I never heard of anyone going to bed with stand-up. What are the odds all three of us loved to laugh ourselves to sleep?

We took turns picking the night’s performer. The other two roommates eagerly awaited the surprise of who would laugh-lull us to sleep.

Between us, we had dozens of comedic choices: Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, Monty Python, National Lampoon, Steven Wright, Lily Tomlin, Billy Crystal, Sam Kinison, Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, Martin Mull, Woody Allen, Firesign Theatre, Bill Cosby, others.

If we were feeling especially rambunctious, we’d stack two platters and give ourselves a 46-minute spell of silliness under which to drift off.

The popping and crackling of the needle engaging the first track cranked up our anticipation, which beget a silly amount of smiling and giggling as the behind-the-eyelids show began.

Laughing to sleep twisted our little psyches in delightfully positive ways and sharpened our goofy senses of humor. Like education, bad eating habits, and skewed views, that laughter became part of us, and gave us the juice to handle life and others with good humor. The best humor.

Michael Edward Kitchen has worked as a photographer, journalist and editor, and publication graphic designer. He has written stories since he was in the third grade, when the teacher published his 4-page story on the bulletin board in the main hallway. He now devotes full time to writing fiction, mostly supernatural and ghost stories for middle grade and adult readers, and creative non-fiction humor essays. When he’s not writing, he dabbles in baking delicious nutriments using recipes handed down from his mother, who always claimed that even the most decadent dessert was “health food” if it contained even one “healthy” ingredient, and he “scientifically” tests her theories.