The Pun Also Rises

"Man of the Cloth"

    I'm not a very religious person, although I play one on TV. Well, I don't actually play one on TV, but I've seen religious people on TV. And one thing I remember from seeing them is that someone would always refer to a priest as a man of the cloth. It had me thinking, what if you were introducing a priest to a tailor? Which one would you say is the real man of the cloth? I guess you could say that they're both real men of the cloth, as opposed to a doll, which is not a real man. Unless it was a rag doll, in which case that would be the real man of the cloth.

    But in spite of common sense (a term we use to refer to our ideas we think other people should hold), our society pretty much refers to priests as men of the cloth, tailors as tailors, rag dolls as rag dolls, and plastic dolls as supermodels. And society accords a place of respect to men of the cloth, and less so to tailors. Perhaps it's because we're impressed that someone would devote their life to study and religion. Or just talking to god.

    Talking to god is a dangerous thing, because people who claim to talk to god tend to do whatever god tells them, even if it doesn't fit in with common sense. This can be irritating if god tells them to beg for your money on TV, dangerous if god tells them to hate those who are different, pleasant if god tells them to be kind and generous to everyone, and amusing if god tells them to stick bananas in their ears and make sounds like a train.

    Unfortunately, the banana preachers today are outnumbered by the beg preachers and even the hate preachers. But the good news is that the banana preachers are also outnumbered by the kind and generous preachers. In fact, I believe that it's precisely because so many god-talkers have been kind and generous in the past that we respect and honor men of the cloth today. Sure, there are some bad ones, but some of them are so nice that they'd give you the shirt off their back. Why this is always used as a measure of niceness I don't know. Me, I'd rather have a shirt out of your clean laundry drawer. (Unless you're a very attractive woman, but that's another issue entirely.)

    Shirts are useful though. When I first moved into my house, I didn't have any curtains. And I had a lot of T-shirts. So I decided to make Shirtains, and hung T-shirts in all of the windows. This may have kept in a little heat during the winter, but had the unfortunate side effect of making my house look like a mass crucifixion was going on. Although I guess that's still within today's religious theme.

    And my T-shirts are very religious. In addition to being crucified, they've started having random stigmata. Even a man of the cloth would have to admit: My T-shirts are holey. But in spite of the fact that they seem to randomly self-destruct, I never run out of T-shirts. This is because we live in a world of spontaneous T-shirt generation. Even if you never buy T-shirts, you will acquire some through a magic far beyond our understanding.

    Most of my shirts clearly came to me this way, as evidenced by the fact that I have no idea what's on the T-shirts I own. Then every once in a while, I'll look down and see that my shirt says "Stop the Code!" and a bit picture of an IRS form with a slash through it. Then I recall that my anti-tax-code T-shirt was received from a summer internship I did at a political group, where instead of being paid money, we received a few T-shirts for our time. I have a shirt with an unauthorized poorly drawn Calvin and Hobbes, and a shirt that advertises a food product that I think tastes bad, and a shirt that espouses a cause I don't even believe in.

    I know that I should upgrade my shirt collection by taking an active role, purchasing shirts I like instead of just letting them spontaneously generate. But I'm just too lazy. I guess you could say I'm a man of the sloth.

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    Seth Brown is a local humorist who writes his column religiously. He appears frequently in the Washington Post's Style Invitational, infrequently in various other publications, and once in book form -- in his first book "Think You're The Only One?", published by Barnes & Noble. His Web site is www.RisingPun.com

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