As a kid, I thought AIDS was just a joke. I know now that it’s not funny.
This piece originally appeared on Lick the Fridge on October 2, 2011.
AIDS is no joke. I didn’t always know that.
When I was about 11 my best friend and I watched Eddie Murphy’s stand up comedy routine, Delirious, for the first time. For several years we practiced all our favorite bits on each other as if we were trying to be stand up comedians ourselves.
Our favorite segment was when he talked about this new disease called AIDS, and how it was so much worse than gonorrhea and herpes, and how people thought that only faggots got AIDS and died, but, really, it could happen to anyone, like when your wife was out having drinks with her gay friend and gave him a little peck on the lips goodnight, and then came home with AIDS on her lips and transferred it to her husband when she kissed him, and five years later the husband goes to the doctor:
“Mr. Johnson, you have AIDS.”
“AIDS? But I’m not a homosexual.”
“Sure, you’re not a homosexual.”
We thought that was the funniest exchange ever recorded in human history. We would take turns being the doctor and the husband, and we would practice Eddie Murphy’s patented delivery, white kids doing a black man’s impression of a white man, all nerdy and a little bit nasally. We would pause extra long before the final line, elongating the “sure” to enhance the doctor’s disbelief.
We laughed every time, and sometimes we would truncate the entire bit and just throw in the last line, “Sure, you’re not a homosexual,” when someone did something that we thought was lame or stupid, words used interchangeably with gay, and we thought we were so clever with our practiced routine, our irony, our homage to one of the great comedians of the day.
We were too young and ignorant to know anything of the seriousness of AIDS, because even though we understood that AIDS did kill people, like Eddie Murphy said it did, the people that were killed by AIDS weren’t people that we knew or would ever meet, and so, using Eddie Murphy as our guide, we decided it was more important to make jokes about AIDS than to care about the people that were dying of AIDS, because making people laugh, even if those people were just yourself and your best friend, was so much fun, and, hey, in the end, it wasn’t really our problem.
And when I sat in the bedroom of a tiny studio apartment in San Francisco and my dad told me he was gay and that he was HIV positive and that John was his boyfriend, I didn’t make any connection to Eddie Murphy or to Mr. Johnson. I just cried and wished it wasn’t so.
And a few months later when he called to tell me that John had died of AIDS and that he had really liked me and thought that I was a good kid, and that I would turn out to be alright, I cried a little more because I genuinely liked John even if he was gay. But my cries were muted because I was only fifteen and I had not let homosexuality and AIDS become part of my world, and I could do the Eddie Murphy Mr. Johnson bit in my sleep, and I was a little annoyed that my dad had called while I was watching Family Ties.
While I eventually discontinued the Mr. Johnson bit from my stand up comedic repertoire, it wasn’t until the summer of 2000 when my dad was admitted to the hospital with what turned out to be complications from AIDS that I finally began to understand that there are hundreds of thousands of Mr. Johnsons out there and each one of them is someone’s brother or son or father or partner or friend.
And on September 29, 2000 when my dad died of AIDS in a San Francisco hospital, it had been years since I thought much about Eddie Murphy or Delirious or Mr. Johnson. But I wasn’t totally disconnected from that comedic bit, for AIDS was more firmly entrenched in my mind than any other topic.
Yeah, AIDS is no joke. I know that now.
Read Jared Karol’s open letter to his father, “I Think You’d Be Proud of Who I’ve Become, Dad.”
—
Photo credit: david_shankbone/Flickr
Having Aids is not the end of the world. you are not alone. Are you ready to find hiv dating partners. Top 10 std dating sites that actually work at http://www.topherpesdatingwebsites.com
Jared,
Deepest sympathies to you and your father. However, if you thought AIDS was a joke you must be one of the dumbest people I have ever heard of.
Why would you ever think AIDS was a joke? I am now 38, so I grew up when AIDS was becoming an epidemic. Even when I was 10 years old, I knew the disease was very grave.
If I were you, I wouldn’t post these random thoughts that pop into your head. Maybe get an editor.
What a piece of junk article.
@Great Gatsby
You are 38, and yet you are spending your time attempting to belittle the author of a well written article.
Step away from the keyboard, and grow up.
That’s a bit judgmental, don’t you think? Then again, I guess mere mortals must be a constant nuisance to you, what with your infallible politically correct morality. I don’t think the author meant to imply that he thought it was funny that people were dying of AIDS, it’s just that as kids we sometimes don’t explore the end meaning of issues and the impact that they can have on real people, especially if we are removed from the issue. And comedy, well, it takes no prisoners; and sometimes it’s simply a reflection of other people’s ignorance.
I don’t know why I was even reading this article but I ended up reading the whole thing. You are a very good writer, pulling me in until the very end.
It also helps that you were talking about a AIDS and were bordering on offensive when describing how you used to make fun of AIDS and homosexuals.
Sorry to hear about your dad.
Thanks, Steve. I’m glad you stumbled upon the piece. Yes, that was the point. . . that I didn’t know any better as a kid, and then life’s circumstances forced me to grow up. I’m glad the post resonated w/ you. Thanks again for reading.