PUNCH LINE

 

The oldest known written joke is Sumerian, because they were about the oldest writers that we know of. “Name something that has never happened in all of history? A young wife who did not fart on her husband's lap”. 

Now, somebody took the time, 4,000 years ago, to notch that one up in cuneiform on a clay tablet and bake it into a book. Today you would have to write a script, pitch it to first an agent and then a producer. They would then find the money. gather a crew, light and decorate the set, hire the actors, rehearse, tape and edit the result, and then title it something like “Bridesmaids”, all to capture that magical moment of discovery when the young couple realize there is nothing they can hide from your mate. 

And, of course, its also a fart joke – and those are always good for a laugh.

Then there was the ancient Egyptian riddle. “A virgin and a slut attend a beer bash. The slut just has a good time, but the virgin gets pregnant. How is this possible? The answer (drum roll): Auxiliary Forces.” (Ba-dum-bump.) 

Okay, you have to know that auxiliary forces are sort of local yokels, farmers usually, badly disciplined and...oh, just trust me. Tell this joke to any ancient Egyptian and they will laugh themselves to death.

Goes another old joke, “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh?” And the answer is, “You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile, and then you urge the pharaoh to go fishing.” 

According to the gossip Herodotus, Khufu, who ruled Egypt about 5,000 years ago, got really drunk one night and ordered his spendthrift daughter to go into a temple and have sex with any man who would pay. She did, but she only asked each man for a small stone. And when she rose from her task the next morning she had built her father's Great Pyramid. That was maybe the first political joke, 150 feet long on a side.

I know where people got the idea they were the first generation in history who were funny. Nothing can bury a punch line faster than an archaeologist. It's the degree – the suffix “ology” means to kill the joke. 

Did you hear the one about the unlucky eunuch who developed a hernia? That perfectly good joke survived being buried for two thousand years before a graduate student dug it up, dusted it off and handed it over to her professor who sucked the life out of it and then published it in his own name. I'll bet you if every school of archeology had a resident comic, our view of history would be a lot funnier.

Did you hear about the rich guy who got caught in a storm at sea? The waves were crashing over his Trimene and the slaves shackled in the rowing deck were starting to drown. Taking pity on them the rich guy runs to the gangway, leans over and tells the terrified men, “Don't worry. I freed you all in my will.”

By the way, there is an ancient contemporary religious version in the Torah, but in this one the rich guy is a schlemiel named Jonah, whom Yahweh had chosen to be a prophet. Why would the Hebrew god pick a schmuck to be a prophet? Because it turns out that Yahweh has a sense of humor. Unfortunately the scribes who later copied and edited this one, did not. 

Okay, having survived the storm in the belly of a whale, this mumbling wishy-washy nobody Jonah manages to convert the entire population of the Assyrian town of Nineveh. That is hilarious, but nobody laughs at this joke, because that is what happens when you take all the humor out of religion - it's just not funny anymore!

Then, of course. there are the jokes that read like a letters to a Latin language Penthouse magazine; an ambitious young man invited two MLF's to his house for an afternoon diversion, and on arrival ordered his servant to “Mix a drink for one of these lovely ladies, and have sex with the other, if she wants to." And both women immediately blurted out, “I'm not thirsty.” 

Or consider the rich old man who bought a stupid servant boy to attend for his wife while he was out of town. Returning from a business trip a week later he was greeted by the boy. “And how are you getting on” asked the master. A big grin spread over the boy's face. “Oh, Master” he said, “very well. Saturday night I had sex with one of the dancing girls, and when I took off her mask, your wife was inside.”(Ba-dum-bump.)

For something over a thousand years the Greeks had a comedy-industrial complex, which allowed the sheep herders to rule the known funny world. Four hundred years before Christ, the father of Alexander the Great, Phillip of Macedonia,  paid the Athenian Friar's Club to send him a collection of their best gags. But, unfortunately the collection did not survive, perhaps because in 336 B.C. E., the assassins got tired of waiting for Phillip to die laughing, and they had him was murdered. 

Eight hundred years later Greek culture produced the epitome of funny for another thousand years, the comedy equivalent of the Parthenon, when that great comedy duo of Hierocles and Philagrius produced the oldest surviving joke book in the world, “Philogelos”, or the “Joke Lover”. There may have been better stuff written in the the post ancient world, but I get the feeling that the notation, A. D. actually means  “After the Death of Funny.” Jokes wouldn't be this good again until the Catskill Bosch belt.

To the post-ancient Romans, the Thracian city of Abdera was the equivalent of the Yiddish comedy capital of Minsk a' Pinsk – every resident was an idiot, for the purposes of a joke. Goes one - a worried Abderite mother calls in an astrologer to cast a horoscope for her ailing son. He assures the desperate woman that her boy will live happily and productively for many years to come, She thanks the prophet and then promises “Come around tomorrow and I will pay you.” The astrologer is indignant. “I don't do business that way,” he tells the woman. “If your son dies tonight, I could lose my fee.” 

Or - after many years two old friends accidentally meet on a Abdera street corner. The first man says, “Thank the gods, Alexios had told me you had died years ago.” The second man says, “Well, you can see, I am very much alive.” And the first man agrees but adds, “Of course, Alexios was always more reliable than you.”

An Abderian man complains to a trader that a recently purchased slave dropped dead on the way home from the slave lot. “Well” says the trader, “He was alive while I owned him.” (Ba-dum-bump.) 

A local merchant saw a donkey counting to ten with his hoof, and was so impressed by the money being offered for the creature he decided to teach his own ass to do tricks. After some thought about which trick would draw the largest paying crowds, he set about teaching his donkey not to eat. Three weeks later the broken hearted merchant explained to his wife, “And just when I had taught him not to eat, he died”  

Two thousand years later, this would be re-written as the "Dead Parrot Sketch".

Even Medieval Christian monks, shivering in their isolated monasteries, praying for forgiveness right up 'til the Vikings showed up to slaughter them, even these poor filthy religious louts told the same jokes we do today. 

This one made the rounds of monasteries thirteen hundred years ago; question - what man can kill another man without being punished? Answer; a doctor. Of course this was before the Sisters of Charity became a For-Profit Health Insurance Provider, which is the modern punch line of the same joke.

It is a sad fact that not only have humans not gotten smarter in the last 10,000 years, we haven't gotten funnier, ether. And that is the real joke on all of us.

                                                       - 30 - 

TALE TELL POE

 

I smile at the stories, published in August of 1835, by the  “Penny Dreadful” New York Sun, under the title of “Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel…”  Now, John Herschel was a famous astronomer who was the son of a famous astronomer. According to The Sun,  using a new telescope Doctor Herschel had observed on our moon “…nine species of mammalian …” including tail-less beavers that walked on two legs and lived in huts, unicorns, and four foot tall people with bat wings.

Of course Sir John Herschel had made no such report because he wasn’t nuts. But neither was Richard Adams Locke (above), who was the grandson of the 17th century philosopher and the actual author of the moon-beavers story. He was a one-time editor of the Sun, and an close acquaintance of Edgar Allen Poe - who claimed he knew of “…no person possessing so fine a forehead as Mr. Locke”.

The story about the moon-beavers raised the Sun's circulation for a few weeks from 15,00 to more than 19,000, which gave it an advantage over it's rival the New York Herald.  On 18 September, 1835,  the Sun admitted the joke, and the only people not laughing were the editors of the Herald, who felt they had been made to look foolish for not knowing it had been a gag. But it is helpful to remember that in our age with unlabeled Corporate Video News Releases (VNRs) padding out local news programming from sea to shinning sea, and FOX news lying on a nightly basis,  it’s gotten easier to fool the fools, not harder. In Edgar Allen Poe’s day fake news had to be an inside job. Edgar even did it himself.

Poe had already written “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Murders in the Rue Morgue” but when he moved to Baltimore with a sick wife he had just $5 in his pocket. And myself , as a hungry writer, who has produced articles for such distinguished men’s publications as “Velvet” and “Velvet Talks”, (back in the 1980's they paid $125 for 1200 obscene words and $25 for three accompanying obscene “letters”) I sympathize with Edgar.

Now, Edgar Allen Poe was “odd”. Both his parents died when he was young. He was adopted by a wealthy manic-depressive patriarch who was alternately loving and vicious toward him. The result was that Edgar became an un-socialized morose alcoholic who as a college student confided to his roommate that he had “joked” that he was going to murder their landlord, and the landlord had believed him: ha, ha.

Edgar had gotten married when he was 25, to the sickly Miss Virginia Clemm, who was just 13 years old - Sigmund Freud would have had a field day with this guy. Faced with imminent starvation Edgar sought out Locke’s advice, and probably based on what Locke told him, Edgar wrote what would later would be called “The Great Balloon Hoax of 1844”, or as I like to call it, “72 Hours of Hot Air”.

The headlines in the Baltimore Sun read, “Astounding News by Express, via Norfolk! The Atlantic Crossed in Three days!...in the Steering Balloon “Victoria”, after a passage of Seventy-five hours from Land to Land! Full Particulars of the Voyage!”

According to the 5,000 word front page story, the plan had been to cross the English Channel suspended beneath a silk dirigible filled with 40,000 cubic feet of coal tar gas. But once airborne above Wales, and impressed with their “Archimedean Screw” propeller, the decision was made “on the fly” to sail to North America instead. “We soon found ourselves driving out to sea at the rate of not less, certainly, than 50 or 60 miles an hour…as the shades of night have closed around us, we made a rough estimate of the distance traversed. It could not have been less than 500 miles…The wind was from the East all night…We suffered no little from cold and dampness…

"Sunday, the 7th, this morning the gale…had subsided to an eight or nine knot breeze, and bears us, perhaps, 30 miles an hour or more…at sundown, we are holding our course due West...Monday the 8th, the wind was blowing steadily and strongly from the North-East all day…Tuesday, the 9th. One P.M. We are in full view of the low coast of South Carolina. The great problem is accomplished. We have crossed the Atlantic – fairly and easily in a balloon! God be praised!”

According to Edgar’s unbiased reporting, on the day of publication the Baltimore Sun’s offices were besieged. “As soon as the first copies made their way into the streets, they were bought up," wrote Edgar, "at almost any price. I saw a half a dollar given, in one instance, for a single paper…I tried, in vain, during the whole day, to get possession of a copy.” And according to Edgar, Edgar was there in the crowd, telling anyone who would listen, that he was the author of the story, and…that it was a gag. Now why would he do that?

Poor old Edgar had a number of personality traits that confused even the people who liked him. For instance, he could not stop himself from maintaining contact with Elizabeth Ellet, a carnivorous little “pot-stirrer” and bad writer who made passes at Edgar in German. I mean, German has always been the language of love, hasn’t it? “Halten Sie mich schlieben, meine little Turtle Dove?” And then, when Edgar cut off all contact with her, she told her brother that Edgar had insulted her. And he challenged Edgar to a duel. Luckily, since Edgar didn't own a gun the two fools ended up beating each other up, over a woman who clearly didn’t think much of either of them. Men. Sigh.

The point of all this, it seems to me, is that idiots who spend their time and energy perpetuating a hoax on the public are hoping the public will not be insulted. But even if the public is willing to laugh at themselves once, the chances are they will not trust the same source a second time, ever. Or, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, "...fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

The very day after the Sun published the balloon hoax there appeared on the back page of the same paper the following notice; “…the mails from the south…not having brought confirmation of the balloon from England…we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous”. Well, that’s one way to maintain journalistic integrity: NOT!

Me, I’m willing to bet that Edgar was paid $25 for writing the back page mea culpa. The publishing business hasn’t changed much in 200 years. And neither has the life of writers. Edgar’s wife died of tuberculosis in New York, three years after the Balloon Hoax.

And two years later the New York Sun, which sold for a penny a copy, was bought for $250,000 (more than $6 million in today’s money). That was the same year Edgar Allen Poe died in Baltimore, flat broke as usual. Writers. Sigh.

- 30 -

IT IS BALOON! Japan Bombs America

 

I draw your attention to one rather peaceful fall morning.  A lone sailing vessel tacks gracefully across an empty silver grey horizon. It could be anytime in history after 1430, and it could be a vision on any sea. Violence must have seemed a million miles away from that sleek wooden hull. But it was Saturday, 4 November, 1944, and war was about to intrude upon grace.

The sailing vessel was a member of the "Corsair Fleet" – private sailing yachts which patrolled the outer approaches to American ports on both coasts. This particular ship was criss-crossing the Pacific, 66 miles outside of San Pedro and the Port of Los Angeles. The owner, too old for military service, was her acting captain. But she was crewed by uniformed members of the United States Coast Guard. Being wooden and small, these vessels were often missed by the radar of the day. While under sail, they were invisible to submarines listening for the grinding of propellers from patrol craft. And then a lookout's  shout pierced the morning serenity.

Rolling with the swell was a large section of white cloth. The captain reefed his sails and hove to. As the sailors pulled the cloth on board they became aware that suspended beneath the fabric was a large metal ring resembling an oversized bicycle wheel, upon which was mounted electronic equipment, all marked in Japanese.

Three months earlier, in August, students at the Yamaguchi Girl’s High School received a visit from a major from the Kokura military arsenal. He informed the girls they were now members of the Student Special Attack Force, and would be working on a secret weapon which would fly directly to America and would have a great impact upon the war. The girls were thrilled at being asked to participate directly in the war effort, especially considering the traditional subservient and hidden role of Japanese women.

One of the girls, 15 year old Tanaka Tetsuko, explained later. “Stands (above) were placed all over the schoolyard and drying boards were erected on them.... We covered the board with a thin layer of paste...and then laid down two sheets of Japanese (mulberry)  paper and brushed out any bubbles." 

"When dry, a thicker layer of paste, with a slightly bluish hue…. was evenly applied to it. That process was repeated five times".

"We really believed we were doing secret work, so I didn’t talk about this even at home. But my clothes were covered with paste, so my family must have been able to figure out something. We didn't have any newspapers, no radio. We didn't even hear the news announcements made by Imperial General Headquarters. We just pasted paper”  The first of the Fu-Go balloons was released on 3 November, 1944.  Carried by the jet stream it would reach San Pedro just 24 hours later.

Over the next few months some 300 balloons fell to sea and earth off Hawaii and in Alaska, Oregon, Washington State, California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Texas, as well as British Columbia and Alberta, Canada.

 The balloons were all 33 feet in diameter and made of mulberry paper, glued together with potato flour and then inflated with hydrogen. 

Each balloon was programed during its three to five day flight across the north Pacific to control its height by dropping 2 lb. bags of sand ballast each evening as the gas in the paper envelope cooled.

Once they had flown long enough to be over North America they would then drop their cargo of 33-lb fragmentation and incendiary bombs.  

The production markings made in grease pen by the Japanese workers on the captured "Foo-Go" bombs revealed the balloons had been made only a few weeks before being launched, and even recorded the hours required to make them. 

There was initial panic among officials because of the real fear was that these balloons might carry a biological attack.  American intelligence sources had already heard rumors of the Japanese Unit Number 731, which was experimenting with plagues on prisoners of War in Manchuria. Some 200,000 unwilling test subjects, mostly Chinese, would die in misery as guinea pigs. 

American authorities clamped a total press blackout on any information concerning the balloons, to prevent the Japanese from learning of their effectiveness. 

And they stationed squadrons of fighters along the west coast to seek out and shoot down (above) as many of the approaching balloon bombs as possible. They were able to intercept only 20.  Meanwhile, a search was begun to find their launching point. The Military Geology Unit within the U.S. Geological Survey, provided the answer.

Geologists examined the sand in the ballast bags under a microscope. They found several species of extinct single-celled plants, described by prewar Japanese marine biologists.

In addition the sand contained enough trace minerals to narrow their source to one of  two beaches, one of which was at Ichinomiya, Japan along the Boso Pennisula (above)

In February of 1945, surveillance flights identified two plants near Ichinomiya which manufactured hydrogen. On 19 April, American B-29 bombers (above)  burned over half of Ichinomiya to the ground, and destroyed both of those plants. There was a third plant, left undamaged because it was undiscovered, But without any information on the effectiveness of the 9,300 balloons released by March of 1945,  the Japanese military decided to cut off funding for any future balloons.

On the morning of Saturday, 5 May, 1945, 27 year old Reverend Archie Mitchell and his wife Elsie (above), who was five months pregnant, were accompanying children from their church on a fishing outing to Laenord Creek, at the foot of Gearhart Mountain, five miles outside of Bly, Oregon. The  children's parents were all working overtime to produce lumber and food for the war effort, and the minister and his wife were trying to restore a small piece of a normal childhood which their students had lost to the war.  

Archie dropped his wife and the children off at a bend in the road and drove a mile ahead, to the river bank. He unloaded the fishing gear, and had just returned to the car to unload the picnic supplies, when he heard Elsie (above) and the children approaching. Then Elsie call out, "Look what I found, dear.  A weather balloon". Mitchell started to shout a warning not to touch it when one of the boys tried to dislodge the balloon from the tree, and set off the 33 pounds of fragmentation explosives.

 By the time Archie had reached the scene, his wife and unborn child and all five of the other children were dead, peppered with shrapnel.

Sherman Shoemaker, age 11, Jay Gifford, age 13, Edward Engen, age 13, Joan Patzke, age 13, and Dick Patzke, age 14; these and Elsie Mitchell age 26, and her unborn child, were the only American civilian casualties during the Second World War, giving the Japanese balloon bombs a kill rate of just 0.067% of the 9000 balloon bombs launched.

The last of the Japanese balloon bombs was discovered in Alaska in 1955. It’s explosives were still lethal. The remains of another balloon bomb were discovered in 1978 near Agness, Oregon. It can be seen in the Coos County Historical Museum.

But it was not until the 1986 that now 55 year old Tanaka Tetsuko learned what one of the bombs she had helped to construct, had achieved. 

She and two of her classmates carefully folded 1,000 paper storks, and in 1987 arraigned for them to be delivered to the community of Bly, with her heartfelt apology.

It must be assumed that of the 9,000 “Fu-Go” balloon bombs launched from Japan, roughly 10% reached North America. Even 70 years later, less than 300 have been found. In all probability the bombs from some of the missing 200 of so balloons are still out there, hidden in the underbrush, tangled in tree branches and still capable of killing people, even those who think the Second World War is ancient history. And those who decry the dropping of two Atomic bombs on Japan would do well to remember the Japanese warlords were just as blood thirsty as their American cohorts. They just lacked the technology. 

Wars are not fought merely by warlords. And their violence does not cease merely because a peace treaty is signed. When Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar,  "Cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of war!", he knew exactly what he was talking about.

- 30