The next day at a Sunset Strip restaurant called the Source, I have lunch with Greg Dean, who runs a school for stand-up comedians. A veteran of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey clown college as well as the comedy-club circuit, he describes himself as a comedy clinician. In the next two hours I begin to realize the wisdom of E. B. White when he suggested dissecting humor was like dissecting a frog: complete goosh.

“My basic piece of theory,” he begins, “is that all comedy happens in the human mind.” “Ah,” I nod.

“Information comes in, we do something with it, we kick it back out as a joke.” “Ah,” I nod.

“I’m saying all jokes shatter some assumption. There’s people’s expected assumption and people’s unexpected assumption. The unexpected assumption leads you to the punch line. They get the second story, which is more of a reinterpretation, and they realize their initial interpretation was shattered.” “Ah,” I nod.

“You know what happens then?”

“Ah,” I nod, but catch myself. I shake my head. “Uh . . .”

“Then people laugh.”

“Ah,” I nod, sensing the peanut at last. “And they laugh because . . .”

He looks puzzled.

“I have no idea.”

I stop nodding.

“Now we’re dealing with a why question and I don’t care why,” he says.

“You don’t care why?”

“ ‘Why’ leads you into psychology,” he says. “If there’s a ‘why,’ it’s a playful way of dealing with negativity or pain. That’s the probable ‘why.’ It doesn’t interest me.”

“Ah,” I nod, signaling urgently for the check.

And so I drive, at last, to 922 N. Vine, the address printed on my dozen books from the Hollywood School of Comedy Writing. I have fantasized for years about what the campus must look like. Would there be a huge portico that emits laughs when you drive through? Is the school football team called the Comedians?

My first misgivings occur as I drive past the two-story building at 922 N. Vine. It bears a large sign that says Sales Boosters Inc. Is this some subtle in-joke? I don’t get it.

Then, on one corner, I notice a tiny taco shack. And on the other, a small kiosk where one can have car seats reupholstered with the kind of exotic patterns favored by people who have let their Thorazine run out.

Overall, the neighborhood bears the look of one of those pictures that hang in urban-renewal agencies, showing an area just before the dynamite is touched off: A gray, aging school building shored up like a fortress, tire stores, gas stations, mini-marts. A boulevard of bad burritos.

With a desperate feeling, I park and go inside. A directory by an elevator lists several small businesses, none of them even remotely suggestive of comedy.

I knock on a locked glass door on the first floor where two women who work for a Los Angeles housing agency regard me suspiciously. I shout through the glass that I am looking for the Hollywood School of Comedy Writing. I try to look like an advanced comedy student and not a serial killer. I realize too late that from a distance it might not be easy to distinguish one from the other. When one of the women reaches for a telephone I decide, on a whim, to explore other parts of the city.

**********************************************************************

Morey is telling me how comedy nearly got him killed. He’s in New York City, it’s late, after a show, when a guy with a gun comes along and says, “Stick ‘em up.”

“I says, ‘What do you mean stick ‘em up?’ He says, ‘Gimme your money or I’ll blow your brains out. And I say, ‘Start shooting.’ I said, ‘In New York you can live without brains, but you’ve got to have money.’ ”

The guy starts laughing. He says, “You’re Morey Amsterdam. I can’t rob you. You’re my wife’s favorite comic. She’d kill me.”

Ta da!

“I think you’ll find that the character Morey played on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” still exists,” says J. J. Wall, an ex-stand-up now writing and producing for “The John Larroquette Show.” “There is still somebody you need to just put jokes in. Forget the story, forget everything else. You need a joke guy.”

At the same time he looks skeptical when I mention the Hollywood school. “I think you can teach somebody how to draw but you can’t teach somebody how to be an artist. There has to be some kind of inner spark for it.”

Finally, I hand Morey the dog-eared, cherished Volume 1 from the Hollywood School of Comedy Writing. I tell him I’ve considered him the Dean ever since I saw his picture in that ad. I tell him how I’ve studied his theories and used him as a role model.

He looks at the book, flips through a few pages, shakes his head.

“I haven’t the faintest remembrance of this,” he says.

I swallow hard. My eyes get very large.

“No, I never saw this before.”

I feel lightheaded.

“Did you ever see my cookbook?” he says cheerfully. “It’s called ‘Betty Cooker’s Crock Book.’ Do you have one? I’ll give you one.”

I mumble something.

“It’s got 300 recipes and 300 drunk jokes. I don’t drink. Never drank or smoked in my life. I’m a soda pop guy.” He hands back my spiral bound booklet. “I never saw this before.”

***********************************************************************

My father picks up the phone.

“Dad, remember that Hollywood Comedy School thing you signed me up for years ago?”

“Yeah.”

“And you remember Morey Amsterdam?”

“Dick Van Dyke Show.”

“And you remember how Morey’s picture was in that ad?”

“What ad?”

“For the Hollywood School of Comedy Writing.”

“His picture was in the ad?”

“You don’t remember that?”

“I remember Morey Amsterdam.”

“But not the ad?”

“There was an ad?”

**************************************************************************

The Dean was saying goodbye. “You want advice? First of all, find out if you have a sense of humor,” he says. “Ask your friends. I think they’ll tell you you’ve got a good sense of humor. You laugh at hello.”

And, of course, I laugh.

“But,” he cautions, “it doesn’t necessarily make you a comedian. It’s an unexplainable thing. You can’t just put your finger on it and say this is it, this is the correct way.”

His father-in-law once built him a small box that looked like a little organ grinder. On “The Morey Amsterdam Show” from 1947 to 1950, he had people in the audience call out names, items, dates. He’d write each on a piece of paper and slide it into the top of the box. He’d turn the handle and out would come a joke, which he would read and the audience would laugh hysterically.

For years after, he got letters from people asking, “Where can I buy one of those joke boxes? It would be great at a party.”

I am recalling this little story as I fly home, much less certain now than when I arrived. That ad. Ward’s sadness thing. Rooney’s plumber friend. Dennis Miller’s butter knife. Morey’s memory. Morey’s hair. My memory. My hair. My old man’s memory. My old man.

I look down at the stack of books from the Hollywood School of Comedy Writing. And all at once they don’t seem quite as weighty. And I hear the Dean’s parting words:

“I keep telling people,” he says, “there is no joke box.”