By Tony Deyal
At the funeral of the company’s boss, a disgruntled employee kneeled next to the coffin and whispered, “Who’s thinking outside the box now, Gary?” A cartoonist was found dead in his home – the details are sketchy. What is well known from the Fifth Century B.C, a Greek painter, Zeuxis died laughing at the humorous way in which he painted an old woman. Two centuries later, Chrysippus died laughing after he saw a donkey eating his fermented figs. He told a slave to give the donkey undiluted wine to wash them down and he laughed till he died. Since then, it never stopped. This is why I started today’s column with a warning. If you feel you will die laughing, or laugh dying, pack it up and read the papers to see if you were the most recent. It will be very decent of you to do that.
If you think laughing could pack you up, crying is worse. One father took his 8-year-old girl to his office on the “Take Your Kid to Work Day.” As they were walking around the office, the youngster started crying and getting very upset. Her father asked her what was wrong and, with all the workers including the boss around them, the child crying loudly shouted:
“Daddy, where are all the clowns you said that you worked with here?” Another father cried like a bride at a wedding even though he didn’t have the same problem as the bride. All the brides I know cry because they never marry the best man. One joke I like is, “If you boil a funny bone, it becomes a laughingstock.” Now that’s pretty humorous, but still not as good as the reason the ancient Egyptians cried. They missed their mummies. Now, if you’re like me but you don’t have a machine to help you sleep without snoring and waking up everybody in the neighbourhood, remember the saying I got from my doctor and my wife, “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Snore and you sleep alone.”
As in my wife’s case, the only option she had when my snoring started was to read the “Did You Know That How…” books I had around or my jokes (what we in the Caribbean call “old talk”) when I was awake. Fortunately, she never got upset or told me she didn’t give a fact or tell me to go and fact myself. I used to tell her, “You heard the priest say that money is the root of all evil, but what about the branch? I think they are the police stations all over the Caribbean.” And talking about ‘root’, there is Joe Root, the cricketer, who hits everybody for six. But for me the root becomes a ‘tree-some’ for men and/or women trios, or for criminals who get jailed for ‘treeson’ and a daughter or two. This is the price for not paying child support.
What the books have are even more incredible. Chainsaws were first invented in Scotland in the late 18th Century for childbirth! It was used to help and speed up the process for widening the pubic cartilage and reduce disease-laden bone during childbirth. Roller coasters were invented to distract Americans from sin. In the 1880s, a businessman, LaMarcus Thompson, was upset that Yanks were tempted by hedonistic places like saloons and brothels. He set up Coney Island with the first roller coaster in New York. Now, if you’ve even been there, you will know that he did the right thing for the wrong reason. I think it is the way “Coney” was and continues to be pronounced.
One I found funny and sad at the same time is that before toilet tissue was invented, Americans used corn cobs. In our days of poverty, then and for a long time after, people in the Caribbean used newspapers for reading in the “John”. This was a UK slang referring to Sir John Harrington who invented the flushing toilet in the 1500s.
Actually, there’s a toilet museum in New Delhi, India, with a rare and rear collection that details the historic evolution of toilets from 2500 BC. One of these is an Australian toilet shaped like a lion. Now even though I am a born “Leo”, I am not lion-hearted enough to try that. If anything, I prefer cornflakes which were invented to suppress sexual impulses and desires.
That is because of corny jokes like, “I told my wife she should embrace her mistakes. So, she gave me a hug.” I was lucky it was not a hog. An old joke that’s still a goodie is the one about the shipment of Viagra which was stolen yesterday by a gang of old men. Police are now on the lookout for these hardened criminals. At the same time someone found a hole in the nudist colony fence and the police are looking into it. One of my favourite off-key jokes in my cornflake continent is the one about Mary who was late for school and the principal wanted to know why. She explained that she had to take their cow to the neighbours so that their bull could get their cow pregnant. The principal asked, “Couldn’t your father do that?” Mary replied, “Sir, I suppose he could, but I think the bull has more experience.”
We all had less experience in our schooldays. We used to play a game called “Police and Thief” and it took us too long to realise there was no difference between them. We then ended that game and started on called “Rescue”. While they say, “a stitch in time saves nine”, our school principal preferred a stick in time and shaved our butts more times than nine. I always got a hiding for hiding books written by P.G. Wodehouse or written about Mike and Smith or Jennings. I used to be thrown out of the class and this “punishment” allowed me to continue reading. What my parents and teachers didn’t know is that those who use humour have better relationships with their children, and even much better children who loved to read.
From the books, I found out that a crocodile cannot stick its tongue out, a shrimp’s heart is in his heard, pigs cannot look up in the sky, and bats aren’t blind. A biologist, trying to show off his knowledge, told this to a bartender who immediately replied, “That makes sense. That must be why Joe Root, Brian Lara, Chris Gayle and Garry Sobers were so good!” This is like the recent surveys and studies which have shown that Bee Keepers are the best Match Makers because beauty is in the eyes of the Bee-Holder. In learning facts like these, I found out that there are over 10,000 different types of life- and that’s just off the top of my head! It is like when a police detective asked his colleague, “Why do you keep bringing Quasimodo? He doesn’t have any real facts or information.” The response was clear, “Say what you will about him, but he’s always got a hunch.”
*Tony Deyal was last heard saying that he was just reading an article on ten facts about diarrhoea. Number 2 will surprise all of you.
