A three-second joke that lasts thirty years

When you watch a documentary on Netflix, you expect to learn a lot of things about people you don’t know.

What you don’t expect to learn is that an old friend of yours has died.

That’s what happened when I watched the Netflix documentary “Sr.” created by actor Robert Downey Jr as he interviews his father, filmmaker Robert Downey Sr, over a period of about three years.

Late in the film, Senior chats with Junior and his wife, Susan Downey, and he says to Susan, “Every day I think about your dad.”

Susan sighs and says, “Yeah, it was a tricky first Father’s Day without a dad.”

I gasped, because Susan’s father was Elliot Levin, an old friend of mine. This was the first I was hearing that he had died sometime in the past couple of years.

Susan and her brother Steve grew up in Schaumburg and went to high school with my son and daughter, Dave and Jen. Steve and Dave were close friends who played on the same soccer team together — I took both of them to Europe to play soccer — and over the course of a few years our family spent a lot of time with their family. My wife and I got to know Steve and Susan’s parents, Elliot and Rosie Levin, and we took our friendship off the soccer field to include them in our social life.

Of course, our kids grew up and moved on with their lives. My wife and I moved out of Schaumburg, and over the years we fell out of touch with the Levins.

I knew that Susan had married Robert Downey Jr and was instrumental in turning his life around and cleaning him up from drug addictions, so I was hoping to catch a glimpse of her in the documentary, but I knew it was more of a father-and-son study, so there was a good chance she wouldn’t appear in it at all.

But I smiled when she showed up near the end of the film, and I saw that this pretty little girl — valedictorian of her high school class — had grown up to be a beautiful, confident woman whose accomplishments in the field of film production are every bit as impressive as her husband’s creds as an actor.

My smile faded quickly when I learned that Elliot had died.

But then Downey Sr says to her about her dad: “And, boy, was he funny.”

And just like that my smile was back, because one of my favorite memories of Elliot is an offhand one-liner joke he said to me that I have never forgotten.

We were all going to Yu’s Mandarin restaurant together, and as Elliott and I held the doors open for our wives and kids to enter, someone cracked that old worn-out joke about eating Chinese food and being hungry again a half hour later.

As we held the doors, I pointed to the end of the block, where a German restaurant stood. “That’s a good place down there, too,” I said to Elliot. “We should go there sometime. Do you like German food?”

Without missing a beat, Elliot said, “Yeah, but when I eat German food, a half hour later I’m hungry for power.”

I don’t know if he was the first to tell that joke—I think Dick Cavett may have told a joke along those lines at some time or other—but at the time I thought it might have been one of the best jokes ever told to me. I mean, it would have been funny if told anywhere, but he didn’t tell it as a random joke. He pulled it out of his hat in front of a Chinese restaurant in response to my question about German food.

If the key to a good joke is timing, no joke could ever have been timed better.

Add to that the fact that Elliot was Jewish, born right near the end of German atrocities committed against Jews during WWII, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better joke in all my life.

In retrospect, I suppose it was very “woke” of me to acknowledge uncomfortable facts about my ancestral homeland and to laugh at that joke, because my grandparents were immigrants from Germany. Of course, it takes less courage to be woke about uncomfortable facts of the land you left, rather than the land where you live. In any case, truth is truth, and the truth will set you free—and sometimes lead you to a really good joke.

I can’t say, as Robert Downey Sr says in the documentary, that I think of Elliot every day, but every time I do think of him, I think of him telling that joke.

Because if I could keep just one memory of my old friend Elliot Levin — only one — it would be the memory of that moment: A bad joke turned into a good, nuanced, three-second joke — a joke that has lasted thirty years and more in my memory.

I can’t think of a better way to be remembered by an old friend.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.

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