keep yourself cold

1st November 2010

Post with 2 notes

The Nature of Humour

It’s a commonly recognized fact that some things are fundamentally hilarious. Monkeys, for example, can make anything hilarious, even if they’re just the punchline to a grocery list. Watch this, for example:

Grocery List: Milk, eggs, bread, monkeys

This brings to mind a joke I heard once. It was told to me by a swarthy Assyrian* sailor on a sun-drenched wharf somewhere in the Orient. The joke went like this:

“Once there was a tribe of twelve noble heroes. One day, they all caught malaria and died, one after another. At their funeral, the undertaker showed up to supervise the lowering of the twelve coffins. The undertaker was a monkey.”

Everyone on the wharf laughed uproariously at the joke. I didn’t get it, so I asked the guy next to me to explain. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, since he was a large fish-man in a bathing suit** and not a real person, but I wrote down the syllables and repeated it phonetically to a friend of mine who’s also a fish-to-English translator. My friend said this:

“It’s a pretty obscure dialect of Fish,” he said, “mostly spoken by the disgustingly malformed beings that crawled up from the sea and that walk among us, even now, in human clothes. As near as I can tell, what he was saying was, ‘Alas, these gills of mine are far better suited to breathing sea water than air. Forsooth, I pass now into the Fishy Afterlife, where I hope my virtuous life will be justly rewarded.’ “

This explained why he’d dropped dead immediately after speaking to me, I realized. What it didn’t explain is why I woke up the next day in an airplane bound for Saint Louis, with no memories of the past eleven hours and a pickled goats head in my luggage.

* Assyria no longer exists, as such, but nobody was brave enough to explain this to the swarthy Assyrian sailor.

** It’s a long story.