CSotD: I’ll never forget what’s-its-name
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Agnes is a quiet little strip that delivers a chuckle on its worst days and, on its best, the horrified giggle you get by watching someone about to blunder into a travesty of your own most feared social anxieties. Sort of like watching Mannix walk into a dark room and knowing that he's about to get clobbered by an unseen bad guy, only the blow will be psychological and, like Mannix, she'll be just fine in a minute.
What makes Agnes work so well is that she and her buddy, Trout, don't have two nickels to rub together, a major factor in their lives of which they appear utterly unaware. This is a tradition of clowning that stretches from Arlecchino and Candide to Emmett Kelly and Chester A. Riley; while these ambitious fools — and I use the term in its classic sense — invariably wish to improve their lot in life, their congenital lack of social poise and awareness lets them blunder on unrestrained by practical consideration or good manners, arousing in us a combination of pity and schadenfreude that creates the internal conflict upon which laughter is based.
Today's strip is a quiet poke in the ribs. You've done the same thing, and it's not the same as esprit d'escalier, the witty retort you don't think of until after the moment has passed. This, rather, is the frustration of knowing you know and that you can't summon it up.
It doesn't end with graduation, Agnes. In fact, it gets progressively more maddening, because the things or words that won't surface are never terribly complex. It's not that you won't remember "the defenestration of Prague" or the word "dioxyribonucleic."
No, it will be something like the other day when I couldn't come up with the word "shandy" in a conversation about hot weather and cold beer. And it wasn't because of the hot weather, nor had I been drinking cold beer.
It wasn't even as justifiable as the absence of mind that keeps me from remembering who it was who observed that, when you are young and forget something, people say, "Ah, well, he's an important man and has so many great thoughts that it's natural he can't keep track of such trivia," but that, when you get a bit older, they shake their heads and say, "The old boy is losing it."
No, I'm afraid it was simply a matter of the old boy losing it.
Agnes, my darling, you little know how much farther back than four months the rest of us would have to go, in order to become stars.
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