Dennis the loveable 'menace'

I have always been fond of comic strips, and Dennis the Menace has ranked consistently high on my list of favourites. The precocious child is not only always good for a laugh, but again and again a thousand times over he forces you to take a good hard look at yourself – through his own naughtiness and folly, he keeps telling you ‘You are just like me, only maybe too timid, too boneheaded or too lazy to express yourself the way I do!’ And he makes you think that the world might have been a much better place if more of us were as honest and frank and lively and loveable as he is.

One of my perennial favourites is when he asks his mom and finds out that his dad and she and he were born in places far away from one another – ‘Funny how we got together, isn’t it?’ And another where the long-suffering neighbour Mr. Wilson tells his wife ‘What frightens me, Mary, is the thought that that boy could grow up to be the President of the United States!’ And all those numerous occasions when he has given his parents and neighbours and ‘Ol’ Margaret’ and the parish priest and shop attendants red faces or left them gasping at his careless insouciance. As I saw in the strip in my newspaper this morning: A couple have come visiting, and he takes one look at the lady’s skirt and exclaims ‘Hey Dad! I thought you said she wears the pants in this family?’

If you cannot laugh with Dennis, you are a bore. If you dismiss him as merely a child, you are a very shallow person. And if you merely laugh and do not take a few moments off to ponder, well, God probably didn’t give you much of a brain…