The Comedians

Everyone’s a comedian in my life, and truth to tell, it can sometimes get just the smallest bit tiring.

Photo by Les Taylor on Unsplash

The yucks for me started coming in early. I can’t have been more than four, and was skipping happily through the family home, singing a nonsense song from the 1940s of which my parents had remained fond.

“Ohhh,” I warbled adorably, and oh, how your heart would have melted to see me, “mairzy doats and doazy doats and liddle lambzy divey …”

And reaching the most scrumptious crescendo with the chorus, “A kiddly divey too, wouldn’t yoooou?”

My older brother, now a respected figure in the British political arena, looked up briefly from his building bricks.

“No,” he replied coldly, and returned to his cowboy fort.

When my younger brothers were in their teens, they had invented a running joke they called Pomposity, also known as “I say, young man,” which was an ongoing parody of the waggishly patronizing avuncular adults who in those days would sometimes turn up on television shows.

“I’m going to bed,” announced my 13-year-old brother one evening as we all sat around chatting in the family living room. He turned to his 16-year-old sibling, with whom he shared a bedroom. “Are you coming too?”

“Not yet,” said the 16-year-old. And, winking benignly as he slid into fluent Pomposity, “You just scamp off to bed, young man, and I’ll stay up and talk to your Dad.”

Maybe you had to be there, but this made us all laugh so hard that we all stayed up far longer than we should have.

The comedy followed me into my professional life….

“What I appreciate most about having you on my staff,” remarked an early editor, watching wearily as I scrambled through the teetering mountain of papers on my desk in search of the diary in which I had written the wrong date for the staff meeting, “is that I never have to worry you’ll be head-hunted away to be an office manager.”

… and continued into my domestic chores. Young, poor, and feeling protein-deprived, I once decided to treat myself to such meat feast as my budget would stretch to.

“A quarter pound of beef liver, please,” I requested the butcher.

“Throwing a party, are you?” he grunted.

He wasn’t a friendly man, and I don’t think he expected me to find this quite as amusing as I did; but I did anyway.

Even my journalist interviewees got in on the act. I was once granted an audience with the magnificent, if more than faintly terrifying, Dame Maggie Smith, whom along the way I asked, I thought non-controversially enough, a general question about the decorative style of her house.

For some reason, the pillar of stage and screen found this an unwarranted intrusion into her personal privacy, and fixed me with a basilisk eye of glacial blue.

“Well,” she drawled in full Dowager Countess of Grantham wither. “I’m surprised you don’t already know.”

Away from work, there was little relief either. When Mr. Los Angeles and I were scrubbing ourselves up to attend a Hollywood party, I decided it might be fun to open a bottle of champagne and ask a couple of friends around to admire us in our highly unaccustomed finery.

“Hello, Mike,” I greeted one of them on the telephone, feeling somewhat fizzy and glamorous at the invitation I was about to proffer. “Do you want to come over and see us off to the Golden Globes?”

“Why?” he inquired solicitously. “Do you fear you might not return?”

Over in London, the yucks keep coming…

“I’m not sure I have the correct ticket,” I fretted to my repulsively disrespectful godson as he drove me to Paddington to catch a train.

“Don’t worry about it,” he counseled. “Just explain it to the inspector, ‘Look, I’m old and I’m barmy.’ He’ll understand.”

… and have traveled to the Haute Savoie, where our chef friend Philippe prepared us a dish of shrimp and vanilla, not two tastes I would have ever thought of putting together but which, as it turned out, married like Cinderella and Prince Charming.

“But this is amazing!” I cried in wonderment. “These flavors match perfectly!”

Philippe sighed just a little.

“Oui, Gabrielle,” he explained patiently. “C’est pour ça que je l’ai fait.”

My family are a particularly witty bunch.

“What do you call a confused alcoholic lapsed Catholic?” asked my cousin Helen.

“I don’t know,” I replied, diplomatically declining to reel off the names of a selection of relatives near and far. “What do you call a confused alcoholic lapsed Catholic?”

“A mish-Mash,” she said.

I think she made that one up, which I find faintly flaunting of her.

… and some of them are even quite clever.

“And I suppose,” rumbled my learned cousin John, “you know how to spell fish.”

Mr. Los Angeles raised an appreciative coffee cup.

“Good one,” he agreed.

It appears that people like John and Mr. Los Angeles don’t spell fish the way that I, and I’m venturing to suppose you, spell it.

They spell it ghoti. Gh as in “laugh.” O as in “women.” And ti as in “facetious.” Ghoti.

Oh, how we chuckled.

Lately, even the very newest generation are getting in on the act.

“I bet I can make you say fifteen,” challenged our 11-year-old great-nephew Ethan.

“I bet you can’t,” I retorted, since there are few lows to which I will not sink.

“OK,” he said. “What’s two times two?”

While I do not claim noticeable mathematical skills, even I could do that one.

“Four,” I said.

“What’s two times four?”

So far, so easy.

“Eight,” I said.

“What’s two times eight?”

This was veering close, but – ha! – he was the essential one digit out.

“Sixteen,” I said.

“What’s eight times eight?”

So he was approaching it from the other end now, was he?

“Sixty-four,” I said.

“What’s sixty-four minus fourteen?”

Oh, lord, subtraction after multiplication. But I could apply myself.

“Fifty,” I said.

Ethan snorted triumphantly.

“Aha!” he cried.

Well, the little weasel wasn’t getting away with that.

“You didn’t say you could make me say fifty,” I reminded him sternly. “You said you could make me say fifteen.”

Ethan said nothing. Very loudly indeed.

Everyone’s a comedian.