It's Funny When People Cry." My dad was a stand-up comic. He did jokes about people who were too fat, or too poor, or too shy. He also did jokes about people who tried to break into our house. My mom would say, "Not another one! I thought we got rid of all of them!" The last time my dad made a joke, my mom said she heard a funny noise. That was the last time she ever heard him make a joke. You've got to know how much my mom loved Dad to know what happened next. My dad's wife, Laura, was out of town. My mom heard the funny noise. She opened the door to the laundry room. My dad had hanged himself. He was six feet tall and weighed about two hundred pounds. He hung himself in the laundry room. The funny noise was him dropping his pants. She didn't want to call an ambulance. She didn't want him to be found. She loved him very much, and she couldn't imagine living without him. She had to get him down. She got the laundry basket from the dryer and used it to lower him down to the basement. She waited for the police. She waited for his friends to come over. She watched the news on TV. She heard my dad's jokes about those people, all those people who were too poor to pay their bills, or too fat to get out of their house, or too shy to talk to people. She knew he wasn't just joking anymore. All those jokes were from the back of the laundry room closet. On his last night alive, my dad had hanged himself in his joke closet. He asked her for a joke. He told her one that used to make her laugh. Then he told another one. Then he pulled his pants down and asked her for another one. He started laughing. That was the last time she ever heard my dad tell a joke. I grew up hearing about my dad. My grandparents always told me that he had the best sense of humor of anyone they knew. I heard about his jokes all the time. The first time I heard one, I laughed. I know that's not exactly how you say it. The truth is, I heard my dad tell one a lot of times. I always thought that I wouldn't be the kind of person who would make jokes. It was a joke of a job, to be funny in a movie. I thought that I'd make fun of people on a sitcom or in a movie. Or maybe I'd make jokes in the news, if I ever ended up working at a news station. My dad was an English professor. He was very tall. He had a big white beard. That's not the joke. He also had a big pot belly. The joke is that he was very funny in class. People would say, "Professor Toth is so funny, I just want to die!" One time, a student came into class with a bottle of wine. She was not supposed to be drinking. He said, "I'll have a glass, and then I'll return the bottle to the store." He had two drinks and returned the bottle. He said, "Who would like to buy a bottle of wine?" He told his students, "Let's have a contest. The guy who comes up with the best joke in the world gets the bottle. Then we'll drink it together." His students kept telling jokes. Then he said, "Okay, the guy who comes up with the second best joke gets the bottle." His students told more jokes. My dad told the first joke. He said, "And I bought this bottle." He didn't win the bottle of wine. But when he told that joke, everybody laughed and applauded. I always thought that my dad was the funniest person I knew. I don't think of him as funny anymore, but I think that we still laugh together. I miss him. I have so many memories with him. He knew how to play blackjack. We played it once at the Tropicana in Atlantic City. He showed me how to play blackjack. He also knew how to play cards. He had the most hilarious thing to say about them. He said, "My father was a magician, my grandfather was a magician, and I'm a magician. I'm very good at playing cards." I know that he knew that I was never going to have a career in show business. He never told me to be funny. He told me to be a writer. He always wanted to write books. He used to write articles about sports. When he read one of my books, he wrote a note that said, "If you can, please send me a copy of your book. Or better yet, just get it published." I did, but I just couldn't get it published. My dad was very proud of me. He loved the book _The Pest_ that I wrote about my dog. That book never sold many copies, but he always liked it when people would tell him about it. When I wrote the script for _A Fish Called Wanda_ , he thought it was hilarious. He had already told me about a British detective who had a mustache and was married to a woman. He even told me to read the book. "That's the movie I want to do," he told me. He had already told the studio how he wanted to make the movie, even though he didn't have a movie deal. When he died, I was sad, because I knew I wasn't going to see him again. The only book that I had for him to sign was _The Catcher in the Rye_. We talked about that book a lot. He said that he was not a rebel, that he was a conformist who liked to live in the world he was born into. He thought that Holden Caulfield was a jerk. My dad wanted me to grow up to be an artist. He never told me what I should do for a living, but I thought that it would be very nice to make lots of money. I am lucky that he never told me how to earn a living. Some of my dad's jokes were good. He wasn't bad, but he wasn't very good either. He was average. But the joke he told about the people who had come to him in his final days was absolutely brilliant. He had them all come into his classroom and sit down on the floor. There were about ten of them in his classroom, and he had the best jokes about each one. My dad had them laughing, and they all laughed with him. I didn't like jokes very much when I was a kid. I liked _Star Trek_ , because they had jokes in it. My friends who liked _Star Trek_ all liked it because of the jokes. I didn't want to say that I liked _Star Trek_ because of the jokes. I wouldn't want to say that anymore. Maybe we did things right for our family. Maybe we all had the right laughs in our family, so we could laugh together. My mom, my sister, my brother, my daughter, and my son all laugh together. My dad always said, "Every family has problems. They're not funny." He couldn't have been more wrong. You're having fun because of the memories, not in spite of them. Sometimes it's just a good thing that your parents are there, but they were both funny. I wouldn't change anything. Everybody has memories of having a good laugh with their parents. When I was a kid, my dad never told me jokes. But now I can think of funny things to say. Everybody has a good laugh about how embarrassing it would be if your father or mother fell into a river or hung himself. We're all still laughing about that. _We all get it out and we tell our whole story_. When I was four years old, I had a pet named Frankie. He died. He was hit by a car. We were really upset about it, even though he was a dog. He was a very good dog. I started acting in films when I was twelve years old. When I saw _The Godfather_ for the first time, I was shocked. I saw everything on the screen in color. I had never seen things in color before. I had never seen anything that felt like that in my life before. I didn't know that I had been colorblind. I was happy to see things that I thought were in color, even though they weren't. I was happy that I could see that they were in color. I thought they were green for a long time, until I started being a little more educated about color. Every actor knows that when they get the part, they're on their own. You don't have anybody there to teach them anything about the character. You're just left alone, out there, on the stage, or in front of the camera. Even though you're alone, you're not alone. You have a friend. You have yourself. There are always things to tell yourself: "I can do this. I can do that. I can do this again." You can always find an answer to what you're doing. You've got to look around and see if there's something to look at. That's what acting is. You have to start by looking around at the