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Non-Fiction
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| Laughter over the years . | |
| By patterjack | ||||||||||||||||
| 19 March 2007 | ||||||||||||||||
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Laughter over the years Despite what I have seen and learned over my seventy-seven ( seventy-eight next month if I make it ) years of existence I still have a bit of a sense of humour , and a random memory resulting from a quote I made to my wife this morning has brought me to thinking of what I have been laughing at for most of those years. My earliest memory of a pictorial cartoon is of one I saw in The Women's Weekly a magazine purchased by my grandmother , devoted mostly to domestic articles , recipes and so on. The cartoon was of an elegantly dressed mouse , in striped morning trousers , cutaway coat and cane , examining through a monocle a large portrait of a piece of Swiss cheese , and exclaiming: What execrable taste ! At about five years old I did not really know what execrable meant -- but the word is still with me , and so is the quote . From the same period comes the memory of two Inuit sitting in front of a beached whale and one saying : The trouble with this is it's like salted peanuts , once you start you can't stop . And the last of that time ; a non-captioned one of a woman with an elaborately patterned dress arriving at a party to find that the hostess's table cloth is the same material. What that says about my personal development of the time I hesitate to think , but my sense of humour has widened , though mostly concentrating on the verbal. Over the war years I learned to love some of the BBC radio shows , which of course were very verbally oriented . I won't list them , except for the master Spike Milligan . Since then a few quotable cartoon captions have really stayed with me -- An 18th century innkeeper pointing to a musketeer in a far room and saying to the abigail : See what duBois in the back room will have . and a Persian poet with a houri beside him together with a book and a jug of wine , saying : Pass the thou ! That situation never happened for me , alas , but I have used the quote often. I have thrown out quite ridiculous sentences and phrases , sometimes relevantly , into conversations -- one I picked up at about fifteen from a humorous piece by , I think , someone called Campbell : My name is Stuffleigh Worthington , great white hunter . I walk like this because I have contraband elephant tusks down the legs of my trousers . Some cartoons can be quite grim -- one cartoonist whose name I have forgotten drew sexless nudes involved in everyday situations : a head with attached feet walking down a crowded pavement saying : Everything looks so different today . Another by the same author with two monsters , a pole on their shoulders with a man strapped to it having a noose round his neck , while the lead monster is turning to say : Where to , bud ? Ronald Searle has always been a favourite . He produced a series on an art gallery that remain vivid in my memory . Artist covered with spots in front of a pointilliste painting : It's just in the blood . Elegant gent leaning confidentially to lady : Hang around , there'll be sherry later . A very northern English pair -- We don't know much about art , but ..... Dowdy lady teacher with a gaggle of St Trinian type schoolgirls : Look at the rhythm girls , just like in music , pom pompitty pom ..... But my all time favourite is a simple court room setting , everybody leaning forward listening to the private eye in the dock as he recounts : Outside the night was warmin' up , but it didn't want any part o' me . So I took out my little black book and decided to do some quail hunting . Just then the door opens and in steps a dame dressed in a gold lame dress and with enough ice to chill a magnum of the stuff. She pulls a little item out of her bag and says : All right Clarence ! Where's Nick Scarlatti ? I dunno , I says , and my name ain't Clarence. Your name 'll be mud if you don't tell me where to find Scarlatti she says . Stow the pepper-shaker Liebchen , I says , sidling close enough to feel two kinds of heat ...... That sort of thing may be a reason why I like Joyce's Oxen of the Sun episode in Ulysses and all Finnegans Wake . Funny after all is where you find it and we odd ones find it in odd places.
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