The Curious Diary of Mr Jam

by Nury Vittachi

  On the way home, my daughter asks me why I am cross. I tell her that I am going on a journey so I will need a different type of money. “In ancient times, when the world was young, and the Rolling Stones were only on their 43rd album, people decided that you would have to change one form of money to another whenever you crossed borders.” This was particularly bad news for people from South Asia, I explain. “The money where your Daddy started life was set at a very low exchange rate: one rupee was equal to one speck of dirt. Things went downhill from there. I moved to a different country, and changed my savings to a different currency—which immediately fell in value.”

  As the bus, like my career, hurtles downhill, I tell her about my own father’s long face every time we used an airport money-changer. “We got a handful of dirt. And those were the GOOD days. Other times we just got a laugh.”

  A gentle, thoughtful child, she nods sagely, so I continue: “Today, the various brands of rupee are still worthless, but thanks to decimalization, the situation is expressed far more elegantly. We now say 0.9897 rupees equals 0.9897 specks of dirt or 1.075 seconds of laughter, which I think you’ll agree sounds better.”

  She continues to nod, or perhaps nod off. The bus gets stuck in a traffic jam, so I decide to take the opportunity to educate her about western currency as well. She doesn’t object, and sits quietly with her eyes closed in deep contemplation of my words, or asleep.

  “In the old days, the most confusing currency was the Pound, a British banknote which was divided into shillings, pence, florins and penny-farthings, coins which were so large they were used in Britain as bicycle wheels.”

  She opens her eyes wide. “Bicycle wheels?”

  “Correct. I read it somewhere. The British also had a huge variety of coins, such as guineas, half-crowns, tuppences, quids, grands, optics, drams and snifters.”

  Talking about money-changing reminds me of the first transaction I ever had on a visit to London, as a child. It went something like this:

  ME: How much is that?

  SHOPKEEPER: Two grand, a guinea-half-crown, three shillings, half a snifter and tuppenny-ha’pence-farthing.

  ME: Oh. Do you accept rupees?

  SHOPKEEPER: Yes, young man. That’ll be forty googillion rupees, but I will have to give you the change in dirt and sneers.

  As we walk the final kilometer home, I finish my lecture: “Only after I became an adult did I learn how the system worked. I learned that the main world currency was the US dollar, colloquially known as the Greenspan. The Greenspan was divided into bucks, dimes, nickels, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, semi-colons, jots and iotas.”

  As we reach our block, my daughter looks suspicious. “Why are you complaining about money so much? Does this mean you won’t be able to bring me back a present from your trip?” (Modern children can be rather sharp.)

  “That’s right, so don’t expect anything,” I reply. (Adults can be rather sharp too.)

  Saturday, January 12

  The day of the Beijing expedition has arrived. By noon, I’m on a Cathay Pacific flight, walking through the aisle of the economy class cabin, looking for my seat. A flight attendant taps my arm. “Didn’t you used to be Mr. Jam?” she asks.

  “No,” I reply. “I used to be Johnny Depp. Then I became Scarlett Johansson. I’m planning to be Mr. Jam next.”

  She looks puzzled for half a second and then laughs. Who says Asians don’t get irony?

  A Singaporean is eavesdropping. “You’re Mr. Jam, izzit? I used to read your funny columns in magazines all the time-lah.”

  “I got sacked.”

  The flight attendant says: “I used to read you in the newspapers.”

  “I got sacked from them as well. I am proud to say that there is almost no media outlet which has not sacked me. I am very consistent.”

  The Singaporean continues: “Shame. Asian businessmen got no sense of humor. But we need jokes. What with the end of the world approaching and all that. Science has proved it, you know.”

  “So. An optimist.”

  It turns out that my seat is right next to him. My guess was nearly right. He tells me he is an optometrist (Latin for “octopus-measurer”).

  The Malaysian woman in the seat on the other side has an even sadder tale. “My husband ran off with a woman eleven years older than me,” she says. “That makes me the most humiliated woman on this planet.”

  “Wow, you REALLY are,” I agree sympathetically.

  The octopus-measurer says: “Never mind. She’ll die before you do.”

  “That’s the plan,” the woman mutters darkly.

  During the flight I study my seatmates. The Singaporean, whose name is Tan (there’s a legal requirement that 65 per cent of residents of that city-state carry that name), turns out to be a standard Singaporean yuppie: suit by Crocodile, shirts by Van Heusen, shoes by Bally, waistline by Bread Talk. He shows me the war crimes hearings, drug arrests and corruption crackdowns on the front page of his newspaper. “The news is so depressing,” he says.

  The world’s most humiliated woman, a Penang-born doctor named Lok, cuts in: “We need more laughs. Laughter expands blood vessels, decreases serum cortisol and boosts the immune system. A humorist can in theory boost your health better than a doctor.”

  “You flatter me. You after my body?” I ask.

  “Eww, no thanks,” she squeals, wrinkling her nose.

  The fat Singaporean chuckles. (References to my Mr. Puniverse body always guarantee a laugh.)

  * * *

  Astonishing. Nine hours later, the vast crowd of telecom executives at the gala dinner actually laughs at my jokes. And no one looks angry. (I somehow manage to avoid joking much about senior Chinese officials, several of whom are present.)

  “They’re drunk, you see,” my host, a Beijing businessman, explains afterwards. “They’ll laugh at anything.”

  I thank him for his vote of confidence in my skills.

  “No problem,” he replies.

  I revise my earlier statement: SOME Asians get irony.

  As I leave the ballroom, I spot the event organizer marching across the foyer and race to catch her. “Ms. Sun, may I ask a question? How come you hired me for this gig when you seemed to have a downer on me in Macau last week?”

  “It was touch and go,” she replies. “The Chinese co-organizer wanted a comedian, but the western partners advised against it, saying that anything like satire was too dangerous. I suggested a compromise: an Asian comedian. Asians are not really funny. I suddenly realized that an unfunny comedian could be a hugely useful resource for me.”

  “But I WAS funny. A bit.”

  “We all make mistakes,” she says, taking her leave.

  Sunday, January 13

  It’s six in the morning and a new day is struggling to dawn in polluted Beijing. So what if the air is full of particles? Don’t you like to see what you’re eating? Anyway, however thick the fog may be outdoors, your friendly neighborhood vidushak is always in a sunny mood after a good gig. So, Dear Diary, I’m up and about bright and early, a spring in my step and a song in my heart. I have a cunning plan to meet a contact in the events organizing business there before heading home.

  At the hotel’s breakfast buffet I meet one of the audience members from the night before, and relate the conversation I had on the plane coming over.

  “Laughter, good for you?” scoffs the man, who is British. “Not necessarily. In my country, a man laughed himself to death watching a TV comedy called The Goodies. His wife wrote to the actors thanking them for making her husband’s last moments so happy. I’d be careful if I were you. You don’t want to get sued.”

  Aiyeeeah. This worries me. His warning reverberates in my head as I finish breakfast and head off for my meeting. Much of my work is done in authoritarian places. What if a senior Communist Party official in China has a heart attack laughing at one of my jokes? Surely that would earn me the death penalty. Under Chinese law, ANY offence can attract the death penalty,
including jaywalking and having a bad hair day.

  Thinking about this in the taxi, I find myself reminded of The Funniest Joke in the World, a 1969 Monty Python sketch. In it, a British comedy writer laughs himself to death after composing the world’s funniest joke. British soldiers leap on to a battlefield and read a German translation of the joke, causing attacking Nazis to drop dead on the spot. And then there was that ancient Greek guy who died of laughter. It occurs to me that all idioms about humor have violent connotations: “He laughed till his stomach hurt;” “She split her sides;” and the horrific: “They laughed their heads off.”

  Using my mobile, I dig out a business card and phone the doctor I met on the plane. Can a person die laughing?

  “Actually, yes,” replies Dr. Lok. “Laughing raises the heart rate and causes the body to go into a convulsive state which can trigger a heart attack. Ideally, you should pitch your jokes to raise your listeners’ heart rates to no more than 85 per cent of maximum.”

  “How do I tell what their heart rates are?”

  “Not been asked that before. Lemme think-ah. The only way would be to stop and take each audience member’s pulse after each joke.”

  “That might spoil the rhythm of the show. Can a guy actually laugh his head off?”

  “Not at your jokes,” she says.

  I dial the number of a lawyer friend in Hong Kong. “Should humorists take out limited liability coverage? What if the President of China splits his sides at one of my columns?”

  “It would be cheaper to add a disclaimer,” he advises. “Now, where do I send my bill?”

  The taxi reaches the café at which I have arranged to meet my contact, Davison Liu, a London-educated son of a minor Chinese communist tycoon. I find him sitting at a bar, breakfasting on a quart of warm beer (a tradition religiously upheld by all Brits, Davison tells me, including the Queen).

  I raise the issue of legal liability. He says it’s not an issue for funny guys on the eastern side of the planet, largely because there aren’t any. “Stand-up comedy in any language is only just starting to emerge in Asia,” he adds. “Even Little Shenyang can’t get airtime in China for his best material. Drag acts are the only things allowed. And in many countries in the region, comedians disappear as soon as they appear. If they’re any good. Look at you. You disappear at regular intervals.”

  He tells me that westerners laugh more easily, and take out lawsuits more easily: “We Asians don’t like to show our feelings, right? I’m not sure if it’s upbringing, or genetic, or something to do with our education systems. But it makes my job a challenge.”

  This solves a mystery that has puzzled me for some months. Last year, I attempted a comic routine in front of an all-male audience of Japanese bankers. They sat in stony silence. No one smiled. Visualizing my paycheck, I gamely soldiered on. When my time was up, I dragged my miserable bones off the stage, feeling horrible. But the audience raced up to intercept me, quoted vast chunks of my speech back to me, slapped my shoulders, told me they’d never heard anything funnier and made me promise to make a return visit. Hiding their feelings? Or concentrating on keeping their heart rates at 85 per cent of maximum?

  In the airport on the way home, I note the thought-provoking sign adorning the wall: “If you are stolen, call the police at once.” Asia is a funny place. Just not intentionally, that’s all.

  Monday, January 14

  Home, sweet home, they say: but given the sizes of Hong Kong apartments, “cell, sweet cell” might be more accurate. Over dinner, I explain to the kids how I had changed my money from one currency to another and back again, and how most of it disappeared in the process, preventing me from buying a single tacky souvenir from Beijing for them.

  “Who took it?” my son asks.

  “Bankers,” I say.

  “They’re naughty.“

  “Pustule-covered, evil, rotting demons from the third level of hell where the hottest flames are,” I explain, anxious to maximize the educational value of the exchange. “Write that down and learn it.”

  My attempts to explain currency to my heirs reminds me once more of my earliest encounters with foreign money. The first time I visited the west, as a child from Asia, I found a system of counting which could only have been designed by lunatics. Arriving in the United States, I asked my host’s child what I thought was an obvious question: “Why is ‘S’ short for dollar? The word dollar doesn’t have an ‘S’ in it.”

  The boy, whose name was something like Wayne Krzyzcowski, looked faintly annoyed. “The ‘I’ over the top of the ‘S’ makes it stand for dollar, stupid,” he replied.

  “But dollar doesn’t have an ‘S’ or an ‘I’,” I said.

  He told me that he had never met anyone as dumb as me. He got out a pocketful of coins. One had an eagle on it. “This is 25 cents, also called a quarter or two bits.”

  Trying to redeem myself, I point to the smaller coins. “I get it. The big one is two bits, so one of these must be one bit.”

  He shook his head. “No, that’s a nickel and that’s a dime. There’s no one bit.”

  This puzzled me: “But what if something costs three bits?”

  He said: “Nothing costs three bits. It’s not allowed.”

  “Why isn’t it allowed?” I asked.

  “Because it JUST ISN’T,” he said, exasperated. “Are all brown people as dumb as you?”

  It was my turn to be baffled by a question. “I’m not sure,” I said. “It’s possible.”

  Then there was my earlier-mentioned visit to the UK, which had an even more nonsensical financial system. Like the Americans, the British shortened currency terms to letters they did not contain. Penny was shortened to D and L was short for pound. A “cluster” or “herd” of pounds was pronounced “sterling,” which was abbreviated to GBH, meaning “grievous bodily harm”. A pound could be divided into 240 pennies or 20 shillings or 10 florins or eight half-crowns or 16 ounces. So a one-kilo bag of apples might typically cost two pounds, three shillings, seven ounces and a bicycle wheel.

  These days, the British have simplified things and gone metric, but the Americans have not. Not only is the US dollar still divided into quarters, dimes, nickels and semi-quavers (no one says “two bits” any more), but they now shorten the word “thousand” to “K”. On my most recent trip to that nation, I asked my paymaster what I thought was an obvious question: “Why is K short for thousand?”

  He responded: “K is short for grand, so you say 10 K when you mean ten grand.”

  I thought about pointing out that ‘grand’ doesn’t begin with K, but I am an adult now, and much smarter than I was when I encountered young Wayne. I no longer expect anything concerning western currency to make sense. I held up my hands. “Don’t try to explain it to me,” I said. “Just give me the money.”

  * * *

  As I stand washing the dishes at home that night, Ms. Sun calls with a tentative last-minute booking for Friday this week. “Keep it free, but don’t hold out your hopes. These guys don’t really want an Asian, they want someone funny.”

  Tuesday, January 15

  I wake up to find a message from Ms. Sun on my phone. “No gig Friday. Found client a real comedian.” She does it on purpose.

  * * *

  Asia is a huge region, but has only two seasons: Too Hot and Too Cold. Both are potentially lethal. So air-conditioners in Asia have only two settings: “Off” and “Brass monkey”.

  The best kind of job to get is one where you are on your feet and active, and thus get to move regularly from one environment to other, marginally raising your chances of survival. Which is why I volunteered to be a helper in an Asia-wide project to spread the green gospel to the community, which is not known for its environmental awareness. It starts Thursday.

  Wednesday, January 16

  My wife has a suggestion for me to fill in a blank day. “Since you have a bit of spare time, why don’t you help your daughter with her spelling?” Not a bad idea. Many adults l
ike to start their day with cryptic word puzzles. I have an in-house expert supplying them. “Dea Dad. Pliz bi me a pakit of grin tinsul bcoz we nid it for kwyer on tyuz da,” said the reminder note I found on the door last month. That was an easy one.

  Some are much harder. She once wrote an extra-long Christmas list which took half an hour to work out. (Her mother and I decided to translate it to save Santa the job.) It began:

  Bah bee stuf

  A poni

  Joolry

  A gam boy

  Rola bladz with nee padz and Lbo padz

  A compoota

  A gurl hamsta

  So that afternoon, I am waiting as the school bus returns my youngest child to our housing estate. I take her upstairs, sit her down and try to explain the proper way to spell things. “Knee starts with k,” I tell her. “And right has a g in the middle.”

  “Why?” she says. “That’s dumb.”

  “There’s a good reason for it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Er, I’ll tell you later.”

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  “I DO know.”

  “Tell me then.”

  “I can’t. It’s a secret.”

  “IT’S NOT A SECRET.”

  Later, I look up “phonetic” on the Internet and find an essay by George Bernard Shaw saying that it would be much better if we all spelt words as they sound.

  Thursday, January 17

  Today I rise early, keen to start work as an environmental activist. When I get to the venue, I find that the staff are all volunteers, but the audience is attending reluctantly, having been forcibly enrolled by their “work units”.

  We get off to a bad start when I ask attendees if they have any opinions about dealing with global warming. “The world is getting steadily hotter,” I point out.