It’s So Hot They Can’t Laugh It Off

Summer will not last forever. --Erasmus

Russ T. Nailz knows it’s beastly outside, but he’d like you to humor him for a moment.

“This,” the comedian says of an egg, “is your brain.”

“And this,” he continues, referring to an egg sizzling in a skillet, “is your brain in El Cajon.”

It’s been so sweltering in San Diego County this week that even hot jokes have been hard to stomach. It’s grating to guffaw when your head’s in the freezer. Particularly when your necktie tugs like a noose or when pulling on panty hose feels like sentencing your legs to Panamanian prison.

Temperatures around the county ascended into the triple digits Thursday. Downtown San Diego got off easy, hovering in the 80s for most of the afternoon. But, to the east, things got ugly: the mercury hit 102 in Santee, 114 in Borrego. And the weekend looks equally feverish.

A high-pressure front in the upper atmosphere will keep the county hot and muggy today and Saturday, with only slightly cooler temperatures on Sunday, said National Weather Service forecaster Wilbur Shigehara. Nighttime temperatures will continue to be high, hovering in the 70s, he said.

So what’s an upstanding citizen to do, when it’s hotter than hell’s hinges?

“Humor is a good way to deal with it,” Jay Shaffer, a San Diego psychiatrist, suggested. “It lets off steam, as it were.”

Shaffer says it’s no accident that we often use fiery language to describe unpleasantness--heated arguments, hot tempers. When the thermometer goes up, so generally does the homicide rate. So, if San Diegans know what’s good for them, he advised, they should take a calm, philosophical approach to the weather and try to forget it’s as hot as a kiln.

“Heat in general is a stresser to the body,” he said of a myriad of heat-related maladies, from fatigue to exhaustion to dehydration. “You can only handle so many stressers. If you’re pretty much maxed-out for starters, and another stresser is added, like 110 degrees in the shade, your ability to cope goes down.”

But is sweat a laughing matter? Sure, it certainly feels funny when your thighs adhere to the car seat. But is that sticky sensation the stuff of satire? Fred Burns, a comedian at the Comedy Store in La Jolla, isn’t so sure.

“When there’s a natural disaster and suffering involved, we comics are on top of it with topical jokes,” he said. “But, when you think heat, you think irritable. Heat is synonymous with in-laws. You’re real lethargic, and your mind’s not real quick. I keep forgetting the punch lines.”

Two weeks ago, when the last shroud of steamy air descended upon San Diego County, KFMB-TV (Channel 8) weatherman Larry Mendte noticed the change as well. The world seemed grim and mirthless. Formerly cheery San Diegans, usually smug in their climatic superiority, acted as if they’d been betrayed.

“People back in New York get irritable” in the heat, Mendte said. “Out here, they get disgusted, like they got cheated on their lease.”

Hilarity was hard to find. Even professional late-night funny-man David Letterman fell flat, in Mendte’s view, when he said it was so hot in the Southwest that, when you ordered a McDonald’s McDLT, the hot side and the cold side were the same temperature.

So Mendte made an on-air appeal: just how hot is it?

It’s so hot, San Diegans responded, that two trees were fighting over the same dog.

It’s so hot that people were jumping off buildings just to catch a breeze.

It’s so hot that they renamed El Cajon, where it hit 95 degrees Thursday, El Cajun.

It was so incredibly hot, one caller told Mendte, that a woman in her office was 10 months pregnant. “ Nobody wants to come outside,” the caller said.

Others tried their luck at hot humor, with varying results.

“When I put on deodorant this morning, it sizzled,” said Bob Ross, a professional humorist who lives in Bonita, where it hit the mid-80s Thursday.

“It was so hot, joggers were sticking to the streets,” said David Dillon, a public-relations account executive who lives in Escondido (Thursday’s high: 97).

“It was so hot, I thought old age was finally creeping up on me, but it was only my jockey shorts,” said Gary Beals, founder of the San Diego Hell on Earth Club, an organization dedicated to using humor to discourage out-of-towners from moving here.

For Beals, who runs an advertising agency out of his un-air-conditioned house in Kensington, recent temperatures only support his tongue-in-cheek contention that America’s Finest City is unliveable--a hellish smog pit “fit only for beer-swilling, overweight chief petty officers.”

Still, Beals endeavored to do his part to relieve the suffering. As the city’s voluntary water conservation efforts consistently fell short of the 10% goal this week, Beals has asked club members to conserve moisture by not licking their postage stamps.

“We’re asking them to attach them with a paper clip,” he said.

Nailz, who appears weekday mornings on the Berger and Prescott radio show on XTRA-FM (91X), said it’s been so hot where he lives in La Mesa that his patio furniture was standing on one leg.

“The warm setting on an oven is 110. I’m crawling in there all week trying to cool off,” he said. Nailz has even come up with the top five activities that San Diegans should never do during a heat wave.

No. 5: Use Visine that’s been sitting on the dashboard all day.

No. 4: Wear wool.

No. 3: Loan out your fan.

No. 2: Jog.

And the No. 1 thing San Diegans should never attempt in the heat: Live east of Interstate 5.

If that doesn’t get a laugh, maybe Russ T. Nailz’s real name will: Russell Wilbur Stolnack Jr.

Times staff writer G. Jeannette Avent contributed to this article.