Humour

The Family Skunk

A mother skunk and her little family lived underground in a clean and well ventilated, as you would suppose, hole.

Her family was made up of two boys who, like all young boys, were mischievous and scampered around constantly.  However, the difference with these two boys was that they rarely scampered around together.  One of them would, at every available opportunity, run outside to play and the other would not.  In fact the other was so hesitant to go outside that his Mum feared that he had agoraphobia.

Both boys had names that their Mum had given to them in their infancy but, because of their individual peculiarities, they had developed nicknames.  One of them was called ‘In’ because he liked to stay inside the home all the time and the other was called ‘Out’ for the entirely opposite reason.

All was well in the family Skunk household until, one fateful day in late August.  Mum was busy, as ever, making a delicious dinner for them all when she heard one of her boys calling out.

“In!  In!  Are you in In?”

“Why are you calling In, Out?  In will be in—why aren’t you out, Out?”

“In’s not in, Mum.  I came in from out to find In to take him out for a change.”

“But if In’s out and you’re in, Out, then In will get lost out because In stays in all the time—he never goes out.”

“Don’t worry, Mum.  I will go out to find In and bring In in from out.”

“Please go out, Out, at once and bring In in—In can’t stay out without you, Out, he’ll be lost out.”

“I’m going out now, Mum.

So Out went out to bring In in from out.  Mum stayed in and worried about Out finding In out.

In just a moment, Out came in with In from out.

“Out came out to bring me in, Mum.”

“But how did you find In so quickly out, Out?”

“Instinct!”

This is a short story—a very short story, that I wrote to put on my web page.  I should say that it is a story that had been wandering around the Royal Air Force for many years, I just ‘dressed it up’ and wrote it down.  If anybody can claim copyright, and has the provenance, I shall be happy to apologise and remove it.

Why have I reproduced it on my ‘Blog’?  Well, because somebody read it, they wrote to me about it and they said that, while they enjoyed the story, they did not understand the humour.  “Was it,” they asked, “A joke?”

Well, yes.  But.

There are also some ‘Shaggy Dog’ stories on the web site.  Isaac Asimov, of whom mention has previously been made on this ‘Blog’, wrote such stories beautifully.  One of them was called ‘Shah Guido G’.  How cool was the Master, eh?

The humour in such a story depends on having a long story with a weak punch line.  It can be clever and it can be witty but, essentially, it must be weak.

Asimov’s humour in his story was contrived but excellently written so that, at the end, the ‘groan factor’ was exploited to the full.

It also relied very heavily on the reader understanding the colloquialism involved.  I explain as follows:

Fifty years before ‘Avatar’ Asimov came up with the idea, as have others I agree, of floating landmasses—islands in the air, if you will.  The rich and élite lived on these islands in the sky, the biggest was called ‘Atlantis’, while the great unwashed lived on the dirty ground grubbing, as best they can, for a living.  The story gets to a point where unhappiness is turned into action, the military become involved; they send in female marines to ‘take’ the islands.  Unfortunately the engines that keep the islands airborne cannot cope with the extra mass of these heavily armed women and slowly descend to the ground.

Punchline?  “And so, for the second time in history, Atlantis sank beneath the WAVES.”

Monumental.  Perfect.  The great ‘shaggy dog’ as related by the Grand Master.

But.

You need to understand the reference to ‘Atlantis’ and also that ‘WAVES’ were a World War II-era division of the U.S. Navy that consisted entirely of women. The name of this group is an acronym for "Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service".  Without that, you are lost.

The other part of humour, especially when used in the ‘Shaggy Dog’ type of story, is the ‘play on words’.  British people love this.  It is, very often, the root of British humour such as was characterised by the great Spike Milligan (Also know as ‘Milligna the well known typing error’).

Exemplars?  Certainly.

“Today convict Eccles fell into a vat of concrete and looks like becoming a hardened criminal.”

“How’s your German?”

“He’s fine—how’s yours?”

“Here’s your breakfast, Lads.  Boiled eggs, I’ll be bound.”

“I have cunningly disguised myself in a leopard skin coat.”

“Hello, Ned.”

“Damn!  I’ve been spotted.”

“You in the Crow’s Nest!  Can you see ahead?”

“Yeah!  A dirty great, big, bald one.....”

And so on.  The pun, the ‘play on words’.  Wonderful.

It is, as I said before, frightfully British.  That is not to say that other English-speaking peoples will not understand it but something may be lost in the vernacular.

For instance, the story about ‘Hermann Limpitt’ requires a person to understand old British currency; even younger British people may not understand that since the currency was changed in 1970.  Forty years ago.  Staggering. 

Forty years ago I was a young man in the correct ‘blue’ uniform writing stories and drawing cartoons every month for the local magazine.  How time flies.

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”  Grouch Marx.

Puns.  Got to love them.