I greet you all like this to apologize for
any apparent sexism in the title of this posting. Blame Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
The quote I appropriated was originally his. If the Confessions are
anything to go by, he had a weird way with women. Or is that a way with weird
women? My French is too rusty for me to be completely sure.
Be that all as it may, this week’s episode of Vasco da Gama is about money, so we thought we’d hop on the bandwagon
and share a recent quip by our genteel host, The Cousins of Cousins Manor. This
one can also be filed under the general heading “Cousins slightly amuses those
more noteworthy than himself”. (Click the link and see this posting for another
example of this.)
A week ago (give or take), Cousins family
friend Nile Seguin posed a query to the huddled masses on Facebook. For those
who really ought to know anyway, Nile is a stand-up comedian in the ascendant,
and in the words of Cousins:
He’s
funny as hell. No—hold on—is Hell funny? Yeah, I guess if you were just
visiting, and you saw all the people who didn’t expect to be there, like
Hitler…or Shakespeare…or your ex-girlfriends or something. Or the guy who
invented Ziploc bags. You know, the ones with the plastic pull tabs on them
that don’t work properly, or come off when you pull on them…if he were in Hell,
his punishment would be that he’d have a really bad case of the hiccups—you know,
hiccups so bad they almost make you throw up—and there’d be this amazing
miracle cure for the hiccups—I mean, like no hiccups ever again—but it’d all be
in Ziploc bags…and every time he’d try to open one of the Ziploc bags, the
little pull tab would come off, and it wouldn’t open, or it’d open too quickly,
and spill everything all over the floor, and the little tab would come off too,
so he couldn’t close it again…
…it’d
be kind of a blast, actually. So yeah, he’s definitely as funny as hell.
But back to Nile Seguin. This is the
question he asked on Facebook last week:
Mr. Cousins’ response was succinct:
I’d like to point out that this
represents a considerable mellowing of Comrade Cousins’ views on this
particular subject. Up until now, he hasn’t been able to mention Friedman or
Friedmanites without working a few strategic uses for boiling oil into the
conversation.
Anyway, here was Nile Seguin’s reaction to
Citizen Cousins’ comment:
Once again, a Cousins bon mot (or, in this
case, is it a “mauvais mot”?) has grazed the funny bone of a professional maker
of mirth. It’s enough to make a fellow give up his day job—but the ink is
already dry on the contract for Jack-of-all-trades-and-Master-of-Arts Cousins’ long-awaited scholarly monograph on how Spike
Milligan is more like Doctor Who than Doctor Who (or whatever it’s actually
about).
Don’t despair that the seductive life of
the ivory tower has deprived the world of a late-blooming comedic voice. Taken
all in all, the great compendium of Cousins wit and wisdom is rather more like
hit and miss-dom. The run of the mill tends to be of a piece with his
impersonation of a Dalek imitating Paul Lynde.
It didn’t sound as bad as all that when he
did it, I must admit. You really had to be there, I guess.
Uncle Fun
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