Part 82
Having extolled the virtues of some successful men and women I have known, I thought it might be fun, in contrast, to recall a couple of moments in my life that resulted in uproarious, deep belly laughs.
Verbal humor can be funny if cleverly conceived, but often enough it can be silly. I confess to being a compulsive “punster,” fully recognizing that probably 90% of my puns are terrible. But I’m extremely proud of the 10% that others consider to be clever and, of course, funny.
Perhaps the most satisfying belly laughs I’ve had came about in unexpected situations in real life. The one that stands out in my mind is an afternoon spent on the premises of Hillcrest Village Motors in the province of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. I’m not sure that telling the story will recapture the almost insane laughter that a group of us indulged in, but I’ll tell it anyway.
First of all, a background. The garage was owned by two young brothers who had a reputation for playing pranks on other residents of the little village of Hillcrest, or even on customers if the brothers felt that they could get away with it.
It was a small garage that had a reputation for excellence in tuning up high-performance motor cars. My school friend Bruce Johnstone, whom I have written about previously, was a talented racing driver who had graduated from motorcycle racing to four wheels. He was runner-up to Syd van der Vyver as South African motor racing champion, then went overseas where he contracted tuberculosis and nearly died. Whilst recovering, he told his family that he wanted to start racing motor cars again. They were horrified but his doctor said that it might be just what Bruce needed to take his attention off his slow recovery.
Amazingly, he was recruited as a reserve driver with Graham Hill’s BRM team (British Racing Motors, a Formula One motor racing team). He got only one drive but managed to place third in the German Grand Prix. He returned to South Africa after that one season and was content with some local racing before becoming a successful businessman.
Anyway, one day I went with him to the Hillcrest garage in his high-performance Volvo, a terrifying trip that I would normally have taken about half an hour to complete. Bruce did it in eight minutes!
The two brothers who owned the garage were real characters. I regret that I can no longer remember their names. I had previously asked them to have a look at the car of my girlfriend at the time, June. It was a weird-looking miniature car called a Messerschmitt KR 200. Messerschmitts were one of the most famous German fighter aircraft in World War Two. After the war, the factory virtually closed up, but one of its engineers designed a really inexpensive three-wheeler with two seats, one behind the other. It was probably the strangest-looking vehicle ever built for commercial use.
The Hillcrest garage kept June’s vehicle for a few days. I couldn’t get hold of them on the phone so I drove up from Durban to see how they were getting on. To my amazement, I saw one of the brothers on a narrow pedestrian walkway over the highway which passed next to the garage. Next to the brother, I also saw June’s car unbelievably wedged into the walkway. I leapt out of my car and confronted the brother who was standing next to June’s car and scratching his head. The car was clearly jammed tight against either side of the walkway’s protective railings.
Before I could speak, the brother held out a restraining hand and said, “OK, so we’re busted. I bet my brother that we could drive this little vehicle across the walkway. He said it wouldn’t fit. He was right. Now I’ve got to figure out how in hell to get it out of here!”
That was the kind of mad situation the two brothers were well-known for. In the event, they had to hire a crane to lift June’s poor little Messerschmitt off the walkway.
So, it was perhaps not surprising that the afternoon Bruce and I brought his Volvo for a tune-up would not follow the normal path of routine mechanical attention.
It was a particularly hot afternoon. Although the workshop doors were wide open, we were all sweating profusely within minutes. I’m not sure exactly how, but we had ended up with about six people inside the workshop. From memory, one of the brothers’ girlfriends was also there.
I’m not sure who started it but when someone (I think Bruce) complained about the intense heat, one of the brothers grinned and said that they had a special in-house remedy for that. He picked up a bucket of water and threw the contents over Bruce. He gasped as the cold water hit him, then looked around and saw a large plastic bottle of water nearby. He grabbed it and started spraying the guilty brother with water.
Then all hell broke loose. In moments, all of us joined in using any receptacle we could find to fill it with water and throw at the nearest person. One of the brothers raced to the front of the workshop, picked up a hose and started spraying all of us.
Looking back, it was incredible that six adults, presumably with a reasonable degree of maturity, could enter into the almost manic desire to soak everyone else. I think it lasted about twenty minutes as we raced outside and continued the game, finding more and more creative ways of soaking others and trying to avoid the same fate ourselves.
The overriding memory I have from that afternoon was the almost hysterical laughter that convulsed all of us. I also recall that when we were all quite exhausted from our efforts and the water fight petered out, we looked at each other and giggled wearily. All of us were busy people in various fields, but some little devil in us was sparked by the occasion. Above all, I felt an enormous sense of calmness as we looked around at the almost flooded garage and workshop. It had been a wonderful release of tension from our daily worries, quite cathartic and something totally unexpected.
In today’s somber world of masked inhibitions, where the contagion of fear is hard to contain, I would give almost anything for a good old rollicking water fight!
A couple of other incidents that released a huge wave of laughter and subsequent calmness are worth mentioning here.
As a child of about 12, I was helping my dad do the washing-up in the cottage where we lived outside Cape Town, in an area with the unlikely name of Froggy Pond. I was drying a cup with a dishcloth when it slipped from my hand. My dad had fast reflexes and caught the cup as it fell, but it jumped out of his hands as well. Somehow, I managed to catch it again, but it also slipped out of my grasp. Incredibly, my dad caught it again, but I also tried to grab it and knocked it out of his hand, finally seeing it crash on the floor and break into pieces. Thankfully, my dad could not stop laughing, neither could I. It was possibly the most camaraderie I ever felt with him.
Later, in London, I was struggling to make a living and in desperation I borrowed a bucket and chamois leather cloth, filled the bucket with soapy water and walked along the very up-market Bond Street looking for dirty cars. I managed to clean a couple and earn a few bob (slang for shillings). When I was busy washing one of the cars, a very snooty woman tottering on high heels and in a high-fashion outfit walked past and gave me a look of such disdain that I actually wondered for a moment what in hell I was doing there. It was just starting to rain. The snooty, snobby lady stopped and opened her obviously expensive umbrella. I don’t know if I’m capable of putting a hex on people, but all I know was she took two steps and the umbrella collapsed, completely enfolding her head. Once again, I was wracked by uncontrollable laughter which earned me another dirty look from “her highness”!
Lastly, picture this: A couple of smartly dressed young Greek men saw each other in the distance while walking around the Zoo Lake gardens in Johannesburg. Yelling to each other joyfully in Greek, they raced towards each other. The one guy took off with arms outstretched and landed in the other guy’s arms. Unfortunately, as he did so his pants split along the seam exposing his buttocks and a very skimpy pair of briefs. Mortified, he slid down to the ground, almost bursting into tears. Maybe one shouldn’t laugh at the misfortune of others, but Hero and I did so uncontrollably.
The moral of all of this, if there is one, is that a sudden release of laughter is incredibly therapeutic and happens all too seldom. I shall definitely enjoy the last laugh when ExoTech is launched, proving all the naysayers and sceptics so terribly wrong!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.