I love stand up comedy. I don't get to catch the live shows as often as I'd like, so thank the yuk-yuk gods for cable.

What I enjoy most about stand-up is how comics are able to accurately nail the otherwise mundane events of living and make us laugh at them. Especially the nutjob things we all do when no one's watching. For instance, a comic once sketched the way many of us will pick up a piece of lint or something when we're vacuuming ... but drop it on the floor in the suction-path of the vacuum. For goodness sake, you've already picked it up! Then there's the classic Jerry Seinfeld schtick about taking a shower at someone else's house and keeping your eye on that single, short hair on the wall and spending the 10 minutes trying to direct the flush the unknown curly down the wall, down the side of the tub and down the drain.

How did Jerry know that we've all done that? How does Leon Rodgers know that we all believe we're having undeserved moments of brilliance when we watch the science channel? Did Dane Cook do a survey of cheating spouses to discover the common denominator of the creaking floor board? Of course not, but somehow-like stereotypes and urban legends-stand-up comedy seem so distantly ... true.

Okay.

So, I discovered my husband's last remaining pair of "comfortable" underwear. Men, you already know what I found. Ladies, unless if you've never done a man's laundry, you wouldn't believe me if I described what I saw. Let's just say that my mind played a super remix of every stand-up bit I'd ever heard about men and their BVDs. " ... nothing left but the waistband ... hardly a loin cloth ...not really underwear, but a slingshot ..."

"Why ...?" I asked, through laughter and tears.

"Because it's in the Man Union Bylaws," he said, straight-faced. "These are what we wear to the gym, when we watch football and when we get to use our power tools. When you threw away my 'collection,' I knew I had to rescue this last pair and hide them ..."

So, I propose that, perhaps, stand up comics are more like historians, sociologists and philosophers than entertainers. Life is a Cabaret, my friend, just with a headliner and a two-drink minimum.