Friday Funnies No.1

In the olden days when my children were teenagers, we were always together on Friday nights for Shabbat (Friday night) dinner. After the food was the time for Friday funnies, which any of us had picked up through the week. For some reason, I kept some of them and now I can share them with you.

First is a list of Staff Development Courses allegedly run by the University of Queensland. Under the heading of Self-Improvement Courses come: “Creative Suffering, Overcoming Peace of Mind, Guilt Without Sex, Moulding your child’s behaviour through Guilt and Fear, Whine your way to Alienation and How to overcome Self-Doubt through Pretence and Ostentation.”

There were Craft Courses including “Self-actualisation through Macrame” and “Bonsai your pet”. Health and Fitness courses include: “Creative tooth decay, The joy of Hypochondria, Bio-feedback and how to stop it, Tap Dance your way to social ridicule and Optional Body functions.”

And under the list of Interdisciplinary Courses there are: “Money can make you rich, Packaging and selling your child, Career opportunities in El Salvador, Looters’ guide to American cities, Sinus drainage at home, Basic kitchen taxidermy and 1001 other uses for your vacuum cleaner.”

Another funnies list required a knowledge of the Greek alphabet which I had at the time. It used words written in Greek which had an English meaning. For example “klepto” for I take, “omo” for I wash, “oderono” for I smell sweet, “bloto” for I forget, “so so” for I am average, “no no” for I must not, “dodo” for I am extinct, “pillo” for I sleep, “limbo” for I am lost, “kompos” for garden, “dedloss” for dropout, “dragon” for mother-in-law, “gorgon” for wife 1^st thing in the morning, “akordion” for musician, “dismay” for exam results and “holiday” for students’ dream, “organ” for church music, “bigbos” for fearless leader, “hotair” for political speech and “failia” for Greek test.

And then there was the world according to student bloopers. There were various iterations of this idea, but the one I have was put together by Richard Lederer from student bloopers collected by teachers from US high school through to university level.

“The inhabitants of Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and travelled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irrigation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. The Pramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain.”

And there’s this: “The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked “Am I my brother’s son?”. God asked Abraham to sacrifice Issac on Mount Montezuma, Jacob, son of Issac stole his brother’s birthmark” and so on.

Another offering dealt with Greek history: “Without the Greeks we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns: Corinthian, Doric and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth”. It goes on to talk about myths, including the one about Achilles, whose mother dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Socrates, according to the students, was a famous Greek teacher who died from an overdose of wedlock. In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits and threw the java. The reward to the victor was “a coral wreath”.

That’s it for this week but if you’re really good I’ll give you more next time.

 

Quote for the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Creations.

US humourist Robert Benchley allegedly sent this telegram to The New Yorker on arriving in Venice: “Streets full of water. Please advise.”