General knowledge

A young unemployed man, terribly frightened of violence and bloodshed, is forced by his father to apply for a typist's job with the army. The recruiting officer hands him a sheet of paper and asks him to show what he can do. He sits down at the table in one corner of the tent with a typewriter on it, and deliberately types as slowly and messily as he can, so that he might be rejected out of hand. To his dismay, the officer takes one look at his handiwork and barks 'You're hired'. Flabbergasted, the lad asks 'But why ... how...?' In reply, the officer says, 'Son, I've been looking at applicants for three hours now, and you are the first one who knows what a typewriter looks like! That's good enough.'

Then there were the two country bumpkins who had been invited to dinner by the lord of the manor, known for his cultured tastes. They try to be on guard, lest they should make a gaffe. Everything goes smoothly until after dinner, when they settle down with coffee and cigars. 'Tell me, my good men, how do you like Shakespeare?' asks the squire, by way of making conversation. 'Not after dinner, sir,' blurts out Jake, and gets kicked sharply in the shin by Tom for his pains. He clams up for the time being, but asks on the way home, 'Why did you kick me so hard?' 'You fool,' roars Tom, 'you nearly spoilt everything with that stupid remark. You think Shakespeare is a kind of cheese, don't you? - Well, as a matter of fact, it's a kind of wine!'

I often tell these jokes in class. Always in context, of course, only when my pupils give me the right cues with strokes of sheer brilliance. The occasions are all too frequent these days, despite the fact that many of them routinely score very high marks in school examinations...

A funny poet

Ogden Nash cheers me up whenever I visit him. Here's a sampling of his poetry for those who do not know him already: click here. Tell me how you liked them.

Is all 'fun' funny?

Several young pupils had written letters for homework, describing a supposedly ‘funny’ incident at school. I was dismayed to read, in letter after letter, how they had hugely ‘enjoyed’ themselves and laughed uproariously at some classmate who had got accidentally hurt (such as by falling down the stairs), or at some teacher who had been inadvertently embarrassed. Is that the sort of thing that should cause us to laugh, instead of commiserating and trying to help out the person in distress? In the same vein, college seniors claim to be having fun ‘ragging’ juniors in the most humiliating and cruel manner. I have seen mobs having fun lynching helpless innocents, beating them to bloody pulp, burning them alive. And I can hear echoes of the jackboots at Auschwitz… is it only when we ourselves become victims of such fun that we remember ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’?

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple used to say that human nature is the same everywhere, in all its pettiness, crookedness and viciousness – that is why, despite never having left her little, remote, ‘uneventful’ village all her life, she could so easily see through the motives of sophisticated criminals and unravel plots that baffled the best city-smart brains. I have been a small-town teacher for the biggest part of my life, and I can see how right she was. Also, since I deal with young people, I keep worrying, being constantly troubled by the adage ‘Morning shows the day’. The Nazi killers were schoolchildren once. So also all vicious thugs everywhere else...

Sane weirdos

It is sometimes awfully difficult to deal with madmen, they can sound so rational and self-possessed and plausible - upto a point!

A man rattles the knocker at the door of the warden of the lunatic asylum at dead of night. The poor warden, rudely awakened, peers out of his window and looks down: ‘What is it, my man?’

The fellow cringes and replies, ‘Please Sir, I am so sorry to disturb you, but my folks threw me out of the house, and told me to find shelter here if I could’.

‘Why, what on earth have you done to upset them?’ asks the warden.

‘Please Sir, I haven’t done anything. I only keep telling them I like socks.’

‘You like socks?’ asks the warden, puzzled. ‘What’s wrong with liking socks? I like socks too!’

‘You do, Sir, really?’ the man beams with pleasure. ‘and do you like them with tomato sauce?’