The Best Thing You'll Read All Day

I love Dick Van Dyke, who is always a brilliant and compelling raconteur, and a generous and hearty laugher, and this story has to be one of the cutest things I've ever heard [story starts at 8:20]:

Craig Ferguson: Where do you live now? Do you live in California?

Dick Van Dyke: Yeah, right here in Los Angeles.

Ferguson: Do you surf?

Van Dyke: [grins] No. [audience laughter] Not any more.

Ferguson: Did you ever surf? 'Cuz you're down in Malibu, aren't you?

Van Dyke: I surfed when there were— Remember the ten inch boards? [grins at realizing his mistake] The ten inch boards!

Ferguson: [laughs] I never forget ten-inchers! [audience laughter]

Van Dyke: You have to be pretty good. [laughs] Ten FOOT boards.

Ferguson: Ten foot boards.

Van Dyke: The old-fashioned—

Ferguson: Yeah, the big, uh, the long boards.

Van Dyke: Yeah.

Ferguson: They used to have a canteen at one end, a little bar at one end, maybe some chairs. [Van Dyke laughs] You did, you used to long board then?

Van Dyke: Oh, yeah.

Ferguson: Ohhhhhh.

Van Dyke: On the East Coast, really. In Virgina Beach, places like that.

Ferguson: It's freezing, the water there!

Van Dyke: That's correct. [nods emphatically] I went out once and fell asleep on that board [audience laughter], I did, and I woke up out of sight of land.

Ferguson: Oh lord.

Van Dyke: And I looked around, and I started paddling with the swells, and I started seeing fins swimming around me, and I thought, you know, I'm dead. They turned out to be porpoises! They pushed me all the way to shore. I'm not kidding. [mimics the porpoises pushing him] Pushed me all the way to shore.

[H/T to Ann Friedman.]