The Curious Diary of Mr Jam

by Nury Vittachi

  But as he goes into detail, I realize that his brainwave is a hot candidate for the title of Worst Idea in History. He wants me to write slogans. But how could I write something that he would approve of? Flaks like him want to focus only on the good bits, while Fearless Humorists like me are genetically programmed to follow The First Rule of Comedy: “Thou shalt focus on the negative as that is where the laughs are.” I repeatedly try to explain this to him, eventually using the classic intellectual debating technique of grabbing his jacket lapels, but he refuses to see my point.

  “Just try it,” he says. “It could lead to a highly paid job as a tourism copywriter.”

  “Fine. In that case, I accept the challenge.”

  Saturday, February 16

  The last vidushak buries himself in his burrow and spends the day writing original promotional slogans for the countries of Asia. They spring into my head at astonishing speed. I realize that the region has been crying out all its life for snappy lines. Asia has been waiting for me, epigrammatist extraordinaire! In some cases, I think of more than one. They are listed below in the random order that they poured from my pen nib.

  Accurate Travel Slogans for Asian Nations:

  Laos: Landmine capital of the world.

  Kazakhstan: Visit us and feel better about your home country.

  Mongolia: Poor, cold and miserable, but mountain sheep like it.

  China: 1.3 billion people can be wrong.

  Maldives: Beautiful, clear blue waters, and islands shortly to disappear beneath them.

  South Korea: Right next door to a demented man making nuclear weapons.

  North Korea: Paradise on earth, yeah right.

  Taiwan: The most popular destination for Chinese missiles.

  Bangladesh: Sometimes not flooded.

  Thailand: Come and see how long you can stay Prime Minister.

  Japan: You think our game shows are weird, wait till you meet our people.

  North Korea: Proud to be the world’s maddest country.

  Nepal: Compare the legend of fabled, exotic Kathmandu, with the grimy, bar-lined reality.

  Hong Kong: Quite nice, unless you do something dangerous like breathe in.

  Pakistan: Visit us for the best chance of being part of the world’s first all-out nuclear war.

  Kyrgyzstan: Proud to be the world’s least spell-able nation.

  East Timor: Now transformed from a violent, poverty-stricken occupied land, into a violent, poverty-stricken independent land.

  Philippines: Corrupt but cheap.

  Singapore: Developing ways to arrest people for thought-crimes.

  Cambodia: We now have electricity in places.

  Brunei: Imagine a land totally free of pubs, nightclubs and alcoholic drinks.

  China: We have more ways to detain you than you ever thought possible.

  Myanmar: Home of the world’s nastiest leaders.

  India: Your upset stomach might not last the whole trip.

  Monday, February 18

  On a freezing morning, I deliver the list to Mr. Rai over a US$20 breakfast at the Mandarin Oriental (he’s paying). He goes through them, his eyes getting bigger and bigger. He whistles. Then his jaw drops. “I see what you mean,” he says, and suddenly he splutters, laughing tea over his salmon. Putting down the pages, he smiles broadly, despite the fact that his dream campaign to summon tourists to Asia is disappearing. I wave at the waiter for more salmon and comment: “The truth hurts, doesn’t it?” Rai gently withdraws his job offer. I realize I am not born to be a tourism copywriter. Thank God.

  Tuesday, February 19

  It’s Tuesday. Dear Diary, this morning I decide to spend the day at home to psyche myself up to be edited by the chainsaw sub. The phone rings at 2 pm, right on cue. As usual, Hendrick has a complaint.

  “In your column this week, you write: ‘He had the expression of a dyspeptic orang utan who had just received a massive tax bill.’”

  “Right.”

  “In our country, orang utans don’t get tax bills. I believe no animals do.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’d better edit that bit out then.”

  “I already did.”

  “I thought you would have.”

  “All part of the service.”

  “Thanks.”

  At the bar that night, I am approached by a slick Chinese-American man in an expensive suit. He introduces himself as Harold S.T. Woot, a fund manager. He has a warm, ingratiating smile and a firm handshake.

  “Let me offer you some advice for nothing. May I?” he says, lowering his rather large bulk into a seat next to me. “I appreciate your efforts at making Asia funny over the years. I think lots of people do.”

  “So why do I keep getting sacked?”

  “You’re doing the wrong job in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he says in drawl which sounds like Texas or somewhere round there. “You live in the least funny part of the world. Asians aren’t funny. Go west, young man. Or if you want to stay in Asia, get a job in marketing or public relations. Those are your only choices.”

  I shake my head. “Not true. There’s unemployment. You can’t discount that as a lifestyle choice. One doesn’t have to wear a suit and the hours rock.”

  Harold smiles and we start chatting. He is a very smart, very smooth, very successful individual who looks thirty-something but is clearly well into his 40s. I start off by commiserating with him about the crashing stock market. “It must be a stressful time for you,” I say.

  “Stressful? What makes you think that?”

  “Er, the crash?”

  Harold shakes his head and smiles. “I see you don’t know how the game works. The market goes up. We get paid. The market goes down. We get paid. We’re the casino staff. We get paid whatever happens. You’re the punter. You’re the loser. Widows and orphans and columnists. If the market ends the year up, by chance, we get paid AND we get a bonus.”

  He told me how he’d got into the business, by investing the money of his family and friends and their acquaintances. “It was a brilliant system. I spread the money over a range of investments. I told them I put my own life savings in the same pile. This made them feel very comfortable. In fact, it should have made them feel exactly the opposite. When most of the investments went up, we celebrated together. When most of the investments went south, I happily discovered that my particular lump of savings just happened to be the one or two that bucked the trend. So my pile just kept on growing. And of course I took a salary as well.”

  My eyes widened. I wondered why he was telling me this. Did he think I would be impressed? “Isn’t that, er, unethical?”

  “You want ethics, talk to a priest. Investment banking is about moving money. That’s all it is. It’s about finding the loopholes and slipping the money right through them. It’s about taking slices off the top. And the bottom. And ring-fencing one’s own share. Haven’t you noticed? Financiers only take risks with your money, never their own? But you’re right. What I did then wouldn’t be allowed in a formal situation, only an informal one. Eventually, I decided I wanted a bit of scale. So I upgraded into regular investment banking. I run funds these days.”

  You know when you sit down and start talking with someone who looks charming, and then you gradually realize that you are hanging out with an ax-murderer? I felt my shoulders tensing and fight-or-flight chemicals start racing through my body. I kept smiling but sort of leaned away from him, hoping that Pure Evil was not infectious.

  Harold Woot continued telling tales in the above vane. Talking to him was an education. Now I could see why the wealth gaps in Hong Kong and many other cities in Asia were widening instead of falling. The system was set up so that the income of utterly useless money-shufflers like Woot were ring-fenced and guaranteed to grow. Not only that, but he was supplied with teams of lawyers and accountants to make sure that he could never be brought to justice. His share of the pile got bigger and bigger at th
e expense of everyone else’s—at the expense of people who actually did some work, or made things, or improved the world in some way.

  “Look, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job,” he continues, suddenly sounding sincere and concerned. “But I don’t mind telling you where to do your job. If you want to exploit people and move money around, do it in Asia. If you want to make the world a happier place, make everyone laugh, don’t do it in Hong Kong. Don’t do it in Asia. Do it somewhere where culture is valued, where comedy has value. Which is not here. Here, take a look at this.”

  He pulls out his laptop and conducts a series of Google searches: the top ten funniest comedians, the top ten funniest columnists, the top ten funniest movies, the top ten funniest books, et cetera. There are no Asians anywhere on any of the lists. “Even if I listed the top 100 of each category, there would still be probably no Asians,” he says. “Asians, and I am primarily talking Chinese here, and to some extent Indians, are good at money. But they aren’t entertaining, they aren’t creative, and they definitely aren’t funny. Isn’t that proof enough you’re in the wrong place?”

  I point out that the lists on the internet were all created by westerners, so it’s not a surprise that they limit themselves to western entertainers. Harold responds by asking me, as a representative of Asia’s creative community, to name the world’s ten best comedians. “All the names that flash into your mind are also western, too, right?”

  He continues his lecture, which clearly he has given before. “In this part of the world, the only thing that counts is capital. If you have a job close to the capital, like I do, you get rich. If you have a job a million miles away from it, you get nothing. Your job, telling funny stories to cheer up the man on the street, is as far from the capital as it’s possible to get.”

  He leans back in his chair and links his hands over his over-sized belly. By this time I am actively looking for things to despise him for, so I derive some pleasure from the fact that he has a serious weight problem.

  “Not everything that counts can be counted,” I tell him. “Einstein said that. Which would you rather have, a million smiles or a million dollars?” Yeucch. I realize I am sounding like Deepak Chopra.

  Suddenly he leans forwards and thrusts out his hand. “Wanna put yer money where yer mouth is?”

  I look at his hand, not knowing what to do with it. “Take a bet with me,” he says. “We’ll race. I’ll make a million dollars. You write a million jokes or something, I don’t know. Get a million readers. See who gets there first.”

  It was time to use Fanny’s trick. I looked at my phone, which wasn’t even turned on. “Oops, gotta go. Busy busy busy.”

  Wednesday, February 20

  The morning finds me at the noodle shop deep in contemplation. The issues raised last night by Woot the Coot had left me depressed. Was there any truth in what he said? Is Asia a humorless place? What was needed was a major market research project. I move to a computer at a Pacific Coffee shop in Wan Chai and write questions, which I email out to people all over the world.

  Are all groups of people equally funny?

  Are some groups of people not funny at all?

  Do groups of people exist who have no sense of humor?

  Is there anyone on earth who you think it would be impossible to successfully compose a joke for?

  Do Asians have a sense of humor? And if they do, what is it and where can it be found?

  Thursday, February 21

  As soon as the kids have been placed on the school bus this morning, I race to the coffee shop and bound, gazelle-like, onto the stool in front of the computer. My eagerness is rewarded: my survey has produced a huge number of responses (three).

  Asians aren’t funny, says the first letter.

  And the second.

  And the third.

  My mind sharpened by a double espresso, I realize that a pattern is emerging. As I sit and mull, a guy called Brian Chin emails me with a thoughtful note trying to explain why: “We are taught by our education systems to think in sensible, logical ways. westerners are raised on a diet of sitcoms to think in offbeat, ironic ways. We need to teach ourselves to be less sensible and more silly.”

  I’ve been doing silly all my life, and I don’t seem to be getting very far.

  Friday, February 22

  An invitation arrives in my email inbox. Would I like to give a talk at a Rotary Club dinner? Why not? But first, I need to think of a subject.

  “Why Asians have no sense of humor,” Ah-Fat suggests.

  “Asians DO have a sense of humor,” I reply. “It’s there, but people aren’t aware of it, or how it works, or what it does. It’s a bit like the thing inside us which mystifies doctors, the spleen or the appendix or the vulva or whatever it is.”

  “You don’t know what a vulva does?” Ah-Fat asks.

  “Of course I do. It’s the dangly blob at the back of your throat.”

  A tall European woman at the next table laughs.

  In the afternoon, more replies to my survey come in via email. “Asians’ idea of comedy is slapstick,” says one. “Irony doesn’t exist in Asian discourse,” says a letter from a professor. “There are no usable, multi-national comedians from Asia,” says a note from Davison Liu in Beijing. “And I should know. I’ve tried booking them. I’m offered drag act after drag act—or I import comedians from the US and the UK, and market the show to English speakers.” “In my opinion, Muslims are the worst,” says one writer, and then goes on to say that in his opinion, “Chinese are the worst”.

  Many of the correspondents who are most skeptical about Asian humor are Asians themselves. “You can’t blame Asians for thinking this,” says Benny at the bar that night. “The west is overflowing with stand-up comics and comedy movies and witty cartoons. But comedy, well, intentional comedy, is harder to find on the eastern side of the planet.”

  On the way home, I note that a sign has gone up on the building site opposite my house. It says “Sorry For The Incontinence”. At first I think it is a spelling mistake. And then I get closer and catch a whiff.

  Monday, February 25

  All the replies to my informal survey have now been tabulated. Market research shows that the world (i.e., the people on my email list) believes that the following groups of people have no sense of humor:

  1) Muslims

  2) Chinese

  3) Asians in general

  4) Hindus, particularly nationalists.

  5) Asian leaders

  6) Western expats trying to suck up to the Asian elite

  7) Everyone else in Asia

  I chew my pen as I read this, eventually getting right through to the ink tube, and dyeing the center of my tongue black. It’s seriously bad news. This list neatly encompasses 100 per cent of the people who make up my audiences, my readers and the people who occasionally employ me.

  “The prognosis is not good,” says Ah-Fat, grimly, looking over my shoulder. I nod while trying to work out what this has to do with elephants’ noses.

  Tuesday, February 25

  At the Pacific Coffee shop computer, I look up “Asian humor” on the internet to check out the view prevailing in cyberspace. After all, it could just be my friends who think that Asians are not funny—and maybe that’s my fault for not being amusing enough.

  But I quickly find exactly the same view all over the world-wide web. There are thousands of war-mongering discussions about Danish newspapers’ Muhammad cartoons. A western internet writer called Instapunk says: “We have a couple-thousand year head start, and they have no sense of humor.” There’s a lament by Jack Lumanog, an Asian priest working in the US: “Asians are expected to be humorless.” There are various comments about a scene in the movie (500) Days of Summer. The main characters are endearingly cheeky westerners who go to a mall and pretend that the furniture display is their home. But they leave abruptly when they notice a bland Chinese family staring at them, their turgid Asian brains totally unable to comprehend wacky,
life-enhancing behavior.

  I log off in a state of gloom. No wonder my life as a humorist has been such a disaster. It seems that people everywhere agree with Harold S.T. Woot.

  One of my kids is off school so I spend the rest of the day taking her out for a jaunt. It cheers me up no end. But when we get home, I find three more bills have arrived. I place them with the others, in a drawer I never intend to open. I think about nailing it shut, purely for the physical satisfaction.

  Wednesday, February 26

  Breakfasters at the Quite Good Noodle Shop listen patiently to me moaning about my findings of the past few days. Ah-Fat has become unconvinced about the conventional wisdom that Woot has spouted. “That’s what the world thinks. But you and I know it’s not true. Asians ARE funny. I’m funny, you’re funny, and the kids are hilarious. Why don’t you go work with Asian kids for a while? You like kids, and you’ll learn the secret of making people laugh from them, if no one else.”

  Not a bad idea. I slurp my noodles and contemplate a change of career, perhaps temporarily. But should I teach kids? Teaching sounds like hard work.

  I realize that what I want to do is BE a kid. But can an adult get paid to do that? Probably not. I realize that the closest thing would be to be a children’s entertainer. I’m halfway there. I’ve written books for children, and I’ve spent years trying to be an entertainer.

  Thursday, February 27

  I find myself spontaneously writing a letter, perhaps to offer to Readers’ Digest or some such publication:

  Memo: February 27

  TO: God.

  FROM: Mr. S. Jam

  Dear Sir or Madam,

  I am writing to apply for a new position. The job I want to apply for is “Child”. I realize that I am past the usual age for this position, but I believe I can be retrained.