I have to admit it: I'm one of those dreadful people who is apt to laugh like a drain at the misfortunes of others. I really find them hilarious, in the nicest possible way, if there ever is a nicest possible way. I often wonder at this strange sense of humour with which I must have been born; it may be a sense of the ridiculous, the absurd, or just the ability to laugh when others might cry. Here are some terrible examples:
- Many years ago, when I was in my early teens, my aunt and uncle, their two children and I were walking along a steep track down the South Downs of Sussex on our way back to the car at the end of an afternoon in the country. It was high summer and the lanes were thick with flowers, the grasses tall and waving in a soft breeze. My aunt and uncle were walking ahead, deep in conversation together, and my cousin and I were bringing up the rear, swinging sticks at imaginary foes in mid air. My aunt must have trodden on a loose stone or hit a very smooth patch of ground because, suddenly, without any kind of warning, she was skidding downhill on her arse, and my uncle was left having a conversation with an empty patch of fresh air. I was overcome with that terrible hilarity which leaves you, heaving, the tears running down your cheeks, and hanging onto the blackberry bushes like a suspended jelly. When I laugh it's like a hyena suddenly being let loose in your back-garden and, before we knew it, all four of us were howling at her misfortune. Dreadful.
- Easter Sunday in Germany is a very serious day. I was staying with a friend of mine and his very upright German family and we were having a very correct afternoon tea. He, his wife, their three very polite children, and I were in our Sunday best as we sat round the coffee table on which was the best tea service and a huge plum tart which absolutely dripped with whipped cream. He was a very highly qualified and dignified man who generally had little or no sense of humour. His wife had poured us all tea laced liberally with rhum and was serving, somewhat timorously, large slices of this plum tart on a cake knife, which she was managing to balance as each slice wove across the table to land on a waiting plate. On one of these journeys the tart began to wobble dangerously, and, despite her anxious efforts to stabilize its passage, the confection fell with a resounding splash which soaked two of us, right in the middle of one of the very wide and full teacups. There was one of those awful silences when the husband's glare could have ignited a gas-stove. The more I tried to keep a straight face and not to laugh, the more I began to shake. Since I was sitting on a divan facing the table and there were two kids next to me, the divan began to shake and so did the two children, until, helpless with mirth, I ended up trying no to cry. Fortunately, we all fell about with laughter and the situation was saved. My jacket and shirt weren't, however.
- Early in the "90s I was sitting in my office and using a quiet moment to scan the paper when suddenly peals of laughter rent the air. In the distance I could hear one of my staff announcing that I must have found something horrible in the newspaper. She was quite right. It was a story about two black petrol attendants in Swaziland who were having a fight over the affections of one of the local girls. In a moment of fury the one grabbed hold of an air-hose used for the inflation of tyres and shoved it up the other"s rectum, pressing the release button as he did so. Naturally, the unfortunate recipient died a very painful death, but I had visions of this body growing ever larger and disappearing into a bright blue sky like a balloon which has suddenly escaped your grasp before you can tie it off. I was beside myself for twenty minutes.
- A lady member of my staff who was not known for her nun-like purity had picked up a stranger on a long-haul flight and had taken him home to her flat for a few days. One morning, tears glistening in her eyes, she told me how this unfortunate man had had a heart-attack while "in flagrante delicto" and died on top of her. Somehow, she had managed to drag him to the bathroom before she called for the ambulance. Another staff member who shared my horrible sense of humour was in my office at the time and we simply dared not look at each other until the sad lady had left the office and closed the door. As soon as she was out of earshot we hung onto each other, tears streaming down our cheeks, wobbling like jellies with suppressed howls of laughter.
- In the early days of jet travel the contents of the on-board toilet were somehow jettisoned into the atmosphere, where, because of the extreme height, they froze into solid ice packs. This was known as "blue ice". I remember curling up for minutes over a report of an elderly man who was tending his vegetables when one of these missiles knocked him unconscious in the middle of his allotment. Imagine being knocked senseless by a block of flying s..t!
Of course, there are other instances which are funny in a different way; not funny ha!ha! but funny-sad, like Jacob Zuma's belief that a shower would spare him a possible AIDS infection; but more of that sort of thing in another edition.
