my humourous neighbour
my humourous neighbour is always playing tricks. every sunday he takes the items on his lawn and rearranges them in a very humourous manner. i no longer get the weekend paper. if i want the sunday funnies, i just have a look at my humourous neighbour’s lawn. his characters, cheap identical gnomes from bunnings, are always up to no good. on the king’s birthday for instance, i saw them flying a big pair of white undies from the flagpole, covered in lipstick kisses. the next weekend they were doing something with the hose. one end was in the mailbox. the tap was turned on. the following weekend i saw no jokes at all. nothing on the flagpole, no gnomes, no hose. i started to worry. later i learned what happened. my humourous neighbour was in big trouble for painting his mail box yellow. he also put a mousetrap inside it. the mailman is sick of my neighbour. he has banned him from the post office.
no one on my street pays any attention to my humourous neighbour. nobody wants what he has to give. i do. when i see him at the IGA, he is always excited to see me. ‘ben ben ben, did you see the new one??’ i always give him some feedback. what i liked, disliked and some words of encouragement. sometimes, however, i do not get the joke.
two weeks ago for example, i saw four of his gnomes leaning against the back of his nissan pintara. when i later asked him why, he replied: ‘it's a lemon’ and would not elaborate any further. initially i found this explanation very humorous because of the incongruity - a lemon is a fruit, not a car. yet when i re-explained this joke to my friends, they told me i had misunderstood. apparently in this context, a lemon is slang for an unreliable car. hm. sometimes there are jokes that do not benefit from explanation. an explanation should make one feel wiser, not reveal one’s lack of insider knowledge. an explanation should make one say ah, not hm.
last weekend was my humourous neighbour’s most difficult joke yet. his yard was bare of the usual motifs. i saw no gnomes. the only thing on his lawn was a single traffic cone, spray painted green. at first i thought it was a joke about the relations between function and colour. by painting it green to make it blend with the lawn, he had negated the hi-vis functionality of the traffic cone, and while this joke may have been interesting in an art school way, this was the middle of summer: his lawn was beige with death and the hulk-green cone stood stark against it. then i started to worry.
recently my cousin got fined $600 for kicking a traffic cone into the river. she is not a bad person. she just gets a bit drunk and silly with the girls. they were having a night out at the elizabeth quays, and you know how it goes... still, the fine meant she had to delay her contiki tour to croatia. i went to warn my neighbour of the serious penalties, but when i went to ring his doorbell, i saw it was one of those humourous doorbells - the kind where the button is yellow and also is in a mouse trap. i knocked instead and as soon as i did, the door swung open. ‘do ya like it?’ he asked with a big smile. i said i wasn’t sure, and before i could inform him of the consequences for defacing roadside equipment, he asked me if i’d seen Wicked yet. i told him i hadn’t. ‘it’s about a witch’ he said. at first i didn’t follow. then i realised he was alluding to the joke of the traffic cone, which is sometimes referred to as a witches hat. but, i said, the witches hat in wicked is black, not green. ‘yeah’ he grinned, ‘but what’s under the hat?’ i still didn’t understand. my humourous neighbour was waiting for me with his eyebrows raised. i proceeded to think it out carefully:
- wicked is a movie about a witch.
- the traffic cone is related to the witch.
- the witch’s hat is black.
- the traffic cone is green.
so, - the traffic cone cannot be the witch’s hat.
- the cone is related to something under the witch’s hat.
- under the witch’s hat is her head.
- the witch’s head is green.
- the traffic cone is also green.
therefore, - the traffic cone is the witch’s head?
i still did not understand the joke. perhaps there were some unstated premises, some implicit understandings i had missed. i tried to fill in the gaps:
- people wear hats. (why?)
- people wear hats to hide their heads (why?)
- people who wear hats are often bald.
therefore, - the witch is bald.
this seemed like the wrong conclusion again. it still did not explain the traffic cone. i tried once more.
- the witch wears a hat to hide her head.
- most hats are shaped like a bald guy’s head.
however - the witch’s hat is cone shaped.
- the traffic cone is cone shaped too.
- the traffic cone is the witch’s head.
therefore, - the witch is bald and has a cone shaped head.
as i reached this conclusion, i began to smile. then I began to laugh. then i began to laugh quite a lot. imagine that: you are watching the bit in Wicked where the witch takes off her hat and and but her head is not like a normal head, its the same shape as her hat, like a cone shape, imagine that. my humourous neighbour was now laughing too and i was laughing so much i was losing my balance and when i went to steady myself on the doorframe i forgot there was a doorbell and also forgot it was a mousetrap. then my tears were not just from laughing but also from suffering.
i had not gotten the joke, but i had gotten the explanation, and therefore, the explanation was the joke, and this explanation-as-joke was making me laugh even harder than a drainpipe. i agreed. it really was my humourous neighbour’s most humourous joke yet.