#76 🐓 Hit that JOKE on the head, but not too hard 🤪
In brief 🩲
- Journal: Hear the one about the chicken and the margarine?
- Practical: A sometimes misguided quest for LOLs
- View: Crossroads; a distinct lack of quills
From the journal 📖
Our local council sponsors barbeques to encourage neighbours to get out and talk to each other. A few weeks back we attended one such barbeque at dusk, where I met Alvin, an English guy in his fifties who works in IT and keeps a large lizard in his backyard. Alvin explained that the lizard has its own fenced enclosure: to stop it wandering off; but also to protect his reptilian asset from marauding cats.
“Sorry, but we’ve definitely upped the cat population around here,” I apologised to Alvin. (But also silently apologising to myself, for caving in to a relentless campaign by my cat-crazed family to double our cat count from two to four.)
“No, no,” said Alvin. “There are so many cats around here it makes little difference.”
We talked a bit about what Alvin’s lizard eats, and that eventually led us to chickens.
“The chickens eat almost anything,” I said to Alvin. “We give them kitchen scraps (and a nice space to live), and in return: they give us eggs. It’s basically magic.”
“Is there anything they like in particular?” asked Alvin.
“Well, it’s funny you should ask,” I said.
Then I told Alvin about the Olivani.
By the time I finished my anecdote, Alvin and I were crying with laughter. After we’d wiped our eyes and taken some deep breathes, we went our separate ways to eat, before all the food was gone.
I’ve rewritten the tale of the chickens and the Olivani. While audience testing to date (thanks Alvin, and others) suggests that it’s particularly funny, what I don’t entirely understand is why.
Is it the material, or the delivery, or a touch of both?
Richard Allardice