Did you hear the one about the comic writer and the lovesick owls?
‘MEDDERS!’ Hermione knocked hard on the study door. ‘Come out now, please. It’s dinner time.’ ‘Yerummh.’ Then silence. ‘You’ve been in there since seven o’clock this morning.’ ‘Umphadumpha.’ Silence resumed. ‘Are you alright? Do you want me to send for an ambulance?’ ‘Norrabirra.’ Once more silence.
‘I’ve cooked you your favourite,’ she cooed. ‘Kidneys in mustard sauce. I still have the clothes peg on my nose.’
‘Urrnnh.’ Hermione heard nothing further from within. ‘And there’s a bottle of rioja on the table, opened and ready to pour – at perfect room temperature.’
‘Eh?’ At last the concerned woman’s efforts were rewarded. The key turned in the lock and her husband emerged from the darkness within. His hair (what little is left of it) was ruffled. His face was gaunt. His brow was furrowed. Here was a man haunted. The struggle to express his torment rippled across his careworn face, like a depression on a Met Eireann weather chart heading across the Atlantic for the western seaboard. And eventually coherent thought was vented: ‘Oh, sweetest, have you learned nothing? Rioja! Kidneys obviously demand a double-strength brown ale.’ There’s gratitude for you…
Bit by bit, over the meal, an explanation of sorts for why he had shut himself away in an unlit room for twelve hours was revealed. Apparently, he had been wrestling with the notion of taking up a new career as a writer of jokes.
If Woody Allen or Brendan O’Carroll can make a living from humour, then why not Medders? Find the funny bone and a fortune is there waiting to be claimed, rattling off scripts for TV sit-coms or working as resident humourist with ‘Ireland’s Own’. Of course, it pays to draw inspiration from The Classics. Classics such as the one about the man who jumped out of the aeroplane…
This man jumped out of an aeroplane at ten thousand feet. He enjoyed the thrill of descent for a few seconds and then pulled the ripcord on his parachute. Nothing happened. Nothing, that is, except that he continued hurtling towards terra all too firma with unchecked velocity. He told himself not to panic and tried the ripcord again. And again, once more to no avail.
Then he noticed a most extraordinary thing. As he plunged down, another man was coming the other way, shooting upwards at similarly breakneck speed. As they passed one another, the man who had jumped out of the aeroplane hailed the man who was ascending like a rocket.
‘Excuse me. You may be able to assist me,’ said aeroplane man. ‘Do you by any chance know anything about parachutes?’
‘Sorry, pal. I can’t help you there,’ was the reply from rocket man, ‘but perhaps you can assist me. Do you know anything about gas ovens?’
Boom, boom, as they say in the trade…
Or here’s another vintage gag, best told in an Ulster accent, a piece of dialogue between two female work colleagues on the pay roll of a railway company.
Lady One: ‘Och, hello, Arlene, you are not looking too cheerful this evening.’
Lady Two: ‘Aye, Michelle, I am not in the best of form, now you say it.’
Lady One: ‘What’s the problem?’
Lady Two: ‘Well, I don’t really like talking about it but it’s the love life. You see, I haven’t been kissed since 1957.’
Lady One: ‘19 (pause for calculation) 57! Sure, God love you, Arlene, that’s not so bad. It’s only a quarter past eight now.’ Groan.
The session in the study did at least produce a piece of natural history which might be useful to David Attenborough if he ever decides to do a stand-up routine…
It is a little known fact that owls do not mate in the rain. And so the call of the owl goes: ‘Too-wet-to-woo! Too-wet-to-woo!’
It took twelve hours to compose this ornithological insight. At that rate, it would take about a year and a half to write one episode of ‘Missus Brown’s Boys’.