Domino Discoveries
Don’t lose your whimsy, dismantling domino blindness, a comedian showing up all the posers
I’ve never known how to play dominos, only to knock them down. I blame my natural, perhaps childish, assumption: however fast paced, strategy packed and easy to learn the actual game of dominoes might be, it could never be as fun as stackin em up and knockin em down. But recently, morbid curiosity obliged me to put my biases aside to figure out what those perfectly weighted rectangular speckled blocks are truly for. Games are catchy and they catch on for a reason after all. My shallow dive taught me the basics. Dominoes originated in China but the western version of them are used primarily for “positional games.” The most basic game is the block and draw which requires two to four players who must first draw 7 random tiles before taking turns placing tiles containing identical dots a.k.a pips. Ie.) the first player places a tile with 3 pips so the next player places a tile from their pile also containing 3 pips.
In an uno-like fashion, if you don’t have a tile to play, you must pull from the scrap pile: “the boneyard.” The player who runs out of tiles first wins the round. THAT’S IT. The rules are muchhhh simpler than I imagined and also much more snappy. This quick stint of bias-bunking turned my original stance all the way around. Stacking tiles now feels juvenile, entry level, a short lived dopamine hit while a classic game of dominos has SAUCE beyond compare. Was this mini-investigation trivial? Maybe. But I believe these small, willful gaps in knowledge are stacked with abundant whimsy, a value of primary social interest.
I judge just about every interaction I have with someone new by three metrics. The first one being whimsy. I’ll tell you the other two, eventually, but without whimsy, they drastically lose their effect. Nothing excites me more than a humorous slant and there’s nothing quite as relieving as enduring an awkward encounter and soon after discovering that the person you endured it with doesn’t take themselves seriously. The natural angst dissolves with their easy self-deprecating jab, or even a gentle tease in your direction, like a needle pricking a balloon. The energy they exude is that of most honorable high vibration, rendering the whole exchange an effervescent blip so it doesn’t linger in your brain grooves for several days after, forcing you to gawk at the myriad of ways that person finds you pathetic. This is a simple example of whimsy saving the day but it’s this kind of levity that turns almost every “difficult” encounter upside down. The person who refuses to take themselves seriously is, more likely than not, the person who doesn’t jump to judge. They wait for the perfect opportunity to sprinkle their humorous flavor into the mix, even the eerie political discussion mix whose organic squabbly flavor begs for a jolt of clarity. The disarming kind of clarity that only humor can provide (especially with the progressive groundedness to match). Worth clarifying however, you don’t have to be as funny as Chris Fleming to be humorous. The waters between humor and comedy are often muddy but humor is confined to sensibility. Inseparable from whimsy, humor is a predisposition to plucking out the absurdities of the everyday whereas comedy, the funnyman’s craft, is a strategic toolkit deployed to express one’s humor, often resulting in more laughter versus the smirking recognition humor begets. The other two qualities happen to also personify comedian extraordinaire Chris Fleming— loose hinges and radical empathy. This mouthful of qualities are the cornerstones of engrossing conversation ;)
But first, some praise from Marc Maron
He’s right. And also happens to vindicate all three pillars for unboring interaction. Chris is the dude that breaths new life into your soul when you’re fed up with facade-induced internet bullshit. He lifts your spirits by shaking up your whole way of thinking. But his takes aren’t inaccessible. He poofs up images you’ve probably never heard of but you’re certain to have felt. The parallels he draws are wildly unifying yet born from an unruly specificity he wields like a wand. You don’t have to understand his references be seen by them and his attitude is everything but exclusionary. He’s inviting and disrupting all at the same time and he does it “in” a character unbound by gendered expectations or behavioral uniformity (if you’ve seen somebody move around a stage like him I’ll give you 50 bucks). The Chris Fleming playbook is having no playbook at all and putting yourself in the shoes of every community on the planet to stir up something real and provoking.
But none of this fodder does it justice. Go watch his new special on HBO max, Chris Fleming: Live at the Palace, and then watch the one before that. He’ll get you right. He’ll treat you you real nice. He’ll shake your whole shit up.
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