The Curious Diary of Mr Jam

by Nury Vittachi

  The youngsters love it, and run around doing cute childish things such as nearly drowning, nearly feeding parts of their body to giant stingrays, nearly stabbing each other to death with live swordfish and so on. My kids, with help from a registered chartered professional fisherman, catch a large sea-creature which one of them dubs: “Fishy the Fish”. So imaginative! How do kids come up with these things?

  The fisherman grabs Fishy the Fish and, holding him upside down, beckons us over to another part of the village. I am a bit dismayed at how roughly he treats our cute new finny companion. Misgivings set in.

  The fact is, we Asians are generally not kind to fish or other animals. Take zoos for example. In western zoos, each animal has a sign on its cage saying where it comes from, what it likes to eat and so on. But I can remember a sign on a cage in Shanghai zoo, not long ago, which said (this is not a joke):

  1) Edible.

  2) Fur Can Be Used.

  3) Evil Animal.

  Then there was the zoo in Shimoga, a town in southern India, which decided to solve its budget problems by loaning out tiger cubs to residents in high crime areas for use as guard dogs. The crime rate fell. As did the criminal population, after a while.

  Anyway, we soon reach the other side of the fisherman’s village pontoon. The charming, gnarled old fish-catcher flings Fishy the Fish to the ground and starts hacking away at him with a large chopper. Blood spurts like fountains. Palpitating organs fly in all directions. Cute little Fishy the Fish is soon Fishy-the-Writhing-Fish-Chunks.

  The adults are horrified. We cover our eyes and run off, knocking ourselves out on lampposts. The children stay put and watch, their eyes open wider than they had ever been. “Look!” says my youngest child, pointing to a tiny lump of something that had ended up in the corner. “Fishy the Fish’s heart is over there—and it’s STILL beating.”

  At the end of the tour, the children are fine, but the adults are horribly queasy. Personally, I think reality is over-rated. I must warn Mr. Rai.

  Chapter Nine

  A MESSAGE TO INDIA

  In which the vidushak visits the motherland of his profession

  Monday, September 1

  The phone rings. “Good news,” says a recording of Fanny’s voice. “You have a series of gigs. It’s a road show. First stop is India, then China, finish back in Hong Kong. It’s perfect for you. We’re talking megabucks. By your standards.”

  Hooray, I tell the noodle shop.

  Fanny’s voice continues: “And here’s the bad news. You start on Wednesday.”

  Boo.

  Tuesday, September 2

  This is actually big news. But also rather worrying. Let me explain how the system works. Anyone who wants to be funny for a living has a choice of career paths, with various entry and drop-off points. This is pretty much the same everywhere, I believe, although the pickings are much slimmer in Asia.

  If you think you are mildly amusing, you torment friends and family with your witticisms, join a drama group, and may end up doing things like local newspaper or magazine columns, where they put up with you for a year or two before your column and/ or the publication disappears without trace.

  If you are medium funny, you do after-dinner speaking events, starting with Lions Clubs and Rotarians’ meetings, and graduating to events where people may pay small honorariums. You may graduate to a local comedy club, if there is such a thing where you live. This is the “comedy as hobby” stage.

  The big break comes when you get onto the international circuit. Your humor columns are printed in lots of countries at once. Your appearances schedule has you flying from city to city. Your columns appear bound together in book form every year or two. You appear regularly on TV.

  That’s when you get “on the circuit”. The two main live circuits are the pure comedy one, where you appear billed as a comedian, and the professional speaker one, where you do humor on corporate themes for gatherings of specialists in derivatives or telecoms or condominiums or whatever. The first is far more well known that the second. But I prefer the second. Comedy club audiences in Asia are dominated by westerners who are looking for western-style comics delivering pure entertainment. In contrast, business meetings tend to be filled with hard-working sales executives from all over Asia, and they want to talk about real life. Both options at this level are reasonably well-paid, although spasmodic. Lucky for me, there’s very little competition on either circuit in Asia. In the west, the best players end up with their own TV shows, but that’s a tiny percentage of people.

  My new assignment is ostensibly good news. It’s a series of corporate gigs, all for one financial company. If one does well with this sort of thing, one becomes a regular member of the team, with lots of repeat work, year after year. Yet I have a bad feeling about this one.

  “Why so glum?” Mrs. Jam asks. “You’ll be paid well.”

  I explain to her that if you are booked several months ahead, they really want you. If you are booked a week ahead, the person they really wanted dropped out and you are a hasty substitute. If they book you a day or two before a major gig, it means that the person they wanted dropped out, and the gig is so horrible that none of the usual substitutes would agree to do it.

  Wednesday, September 3

  It’s all happening too fast. Already I’m in the airport lounge on the phone to Fanny, checking last-minute details. I decide to ask her flatly for the truth. “Hey, give it to me straight. Did I get picked for this one because the sponsor is desperate and scraping the bottom of the barrel?”

  There’s a long pause before the reply comes. “Listen, the bottom of the barrel is not a bad niche to have,” Fanny says. “There’s not so much competition there.”

  I fly to India.

  Thursday, September 4

  On arrival, I get the full story from the executive who picks me up at the airport, a Canadian woman named Agnetha. Yes, the person they originally brought out for the tour, a guy called Erik M. Duggan, came to India with them but then dropped out, and they couldn’t get a substitute to take the assignment.

  But the company is convinced that I will be better for this series of comedy routines than their original choice, says Agnetha. “Duggan said he couldn’t work under the restrictions.”

  “What restrictions?”

  “Well, er, nothing for you to worry about. We’ll go through the details when we meet at breakfast tomorrow. There’s just a few things that we don’t want you to mention, that’s all. Fanny told us that you were used to working under these sorts of conditions, because you do lots of stuff in China and India and so on.”

  I slump into silence in the back of the limousine. How curious that my experience of being repressed has won me this high-paying job.

  After checking in to the hotel, I decide that I better get the FULL full story from the horse’s mouth (what an insulting idiom that is) so I check the register and discover that Mr. Duggan has not checked out yet.

  We meet in the Indian Coffee House down the road. Amazingly, he DOES have a mouth like a horse. It’s horseshoe-shaped with a perfect line of large teeth. They are probably made of marble or alabaster or Corian.

  “The roadshow is organized by a life insurance company, as you know, and your job—formerly my job—will be to do comedy as part of an entertainment-stroke-information package,” says Erik, a gruff guy who from a distance looks young, and who from close-up looks ancient, leathery, even long-dead. If you wanted him to play a zombie, you’d take the make-up off, rather than add more. “The audiences will be a mixture of executives and housewives. It’s upmarket middle-class stuff, they speak English.”

  “Why don’t you want to do it?”

  In response, he digs into his bag and gets out a wad of paper. “The contract specifies that there will be no material that references sex or sexuality, romantic relationships, intercultural issues, morality or immorality, religion, drugs, alcohol, politics, democracy, censorship, class or society issues.”

  “W
hew,” I say. “That’s pretty much everything.”

  “Whaddayamean pretty much? That IS everything.”

  We end up having a long talk. He tells me that the organizer is assuming extremely conservative attitudes. Some of the talks are to religious organizations, and some to political party groups which are communist, nationalist or both.

  He leans back in his chair, obviously feeling real pleasure at escaping from a job he had dreaded. “Now tell me, good Mr. Jam, what is the one subject that every human being is conditioned, by millions of years of evolution, to be interested in?”

  “Needlepoint embroidery.”

  “Sex.”

  “Right. That’s what I meant.”

  “There’s probably NOT ONE LINE in my act that doesn’t deal with some aspect of relationships, male-female politics, sexuality and so on. I’d have to throw away the whole thing.”

  “Did you ask them what you CAN joke about?”

  “Yes, married relationships.”

  “Well, that’s a pretty fertile area for humor.”

  He suddenly barks like a dog. He does this so loudly that he scares a waiter into walking into a door jamb. I realize after a moment that he is making a sardonic exclamation.

  Duggan leans forward. “You would think so, wouldn’t you? But get this. The comedian can only say POSITIVE things about marriage.” He pauses.

  I whistle. Now I understand why he doesn’t want this assignment.

  He continues: “There ARE NO positive things you can say about marriage in a comedy routine. I am talking about ZERO. In real life, maybe, if you are lucky, you can say good things. But in the world of stand-up comedy, positive comments about marriage do not work.”

  I nod. Leaning back, Erik is off and running on a creative rant: “Saying positive things about your marriage would kill your act. Can you imagine going on stage and raving about your wife? Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I have something to tell you. I love my wife. She loves me too. She is beautiful and has huge bazookas. They are absolutely massive. We are so happy. We are happy every day and we are happy every night. Don’t you wish you were me? Ha ha hardy ha.”

  He leans forward before continuing: “Say nice things about marriage and everyone’s going to hate you from the moment you open your mouth.”

  “I see your problem.”

  For the first time, he gives a really wide smile. “No. It’s not my problem,” he says. “It’s yours.” He drops the contract in front of me and after a few minutes takes his leave. He is heading to the airport to pick up his wife and her bazookas so that that the four of them can do some sightseeing before leaving India.

  Later that morning, I sign the contract. My host is a guy called Tomasz, a Swiss national, and we hit it off well. I decide that I will ad-lib about Asian marriages and see where that leads.

  Then I get an unexpected call from Fanny. She sounds curiously friendly. This is highly distressing. Fanny trying to be nice is weird and makes you feel uncomfortable, like discovering that you’ve married your sister or something. It is clear that there is more that I don’t know about this gig. I let her stew while slowly exchanging pleasantries, and she eventually tells me the full full full story.

  One of the directors of the company is a reader of my columns and was keen to have me do this series of talks, with a view to becoming a regular “face” for the company. But a member of the board, an investment banker in Hong Kong, was hostile to the idea, she said. “He seemed uncomfortable about paying you a large sum of money.

  I took a shot in the dark. “It’s not a guy called Harold Woot, by any chance, is it?”

  “I’m not naming names,” she said. But there was a micro-second pause before her answer which made me think it was him.

  Then she summed up her tale in a way that made it clear to me why she was calling. She had gone out on a limb to guarantee that I would be the perfect speaker for this roadshow. “I need you not to screw up,” she said. “If you do, we’re both in the hole. If you don’t, this could be a nice little retainer.”

  I told her that I was thrilled that she cared about my earnings.

  She said: “No, I meant a nice little retainer for ME. They’ll sign me up long term, get lots of speakers from me, and I may throw you a bone from time to time. No guarantees.” The planning meeting for the next series of roadshows would be taking place in early November. She would expect good news about a faultless series of talks, so that she could lock in a job for herself for the next couple of years.

  Hateful people are often good at acquiring money, sad to say, so I thought I might as well ask for some advice. “Hey, Fanny, I need to acquire a vast amount of money in a very short time. Can you advise me on how I can do that?”

  “Rob a bank.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I lack experience in conducting large-scale professional heists.”

  “Okay, what do you need the money for, and how much do you need?”

  “I need to buy a house in London.”

  “Borrow the money and then use the rental to pay off the mortgage. That’s what everyone does.”

  “The bank won’t give me any money because you pay me so little and so irregularly. And I won’t get any rental, because I’ve promised to buy the house and then give it back to the owner. Before the end of the year.”

  There’s silence while she mulls this over. “It’s not completely impossible. For a funnyman to earn half a million pounds cash by Christmas, you would have to do two things.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “First, have your brain removed and transplanted into Steve Martin’s body, so you look and sound exactly like him.”

  “Okay. And then?”

  “And then you have your brain removed from the cranium part, and his own brain re-inserted. Hey presto, you end up as a big-earning comedian-stroke-author.”

  “But I won’t be me. I’ll be him.”

  “And your point is…?”

  Fanny is getting quite funny. Who’d have thought?

  Friday, September 5

  My first audience in India is ready. Members look like they range in age from two to 102. This is normal in India. You go anywhere, a disco, a nightclub, the old folks’ home, and the inmates range from newborn to On the Cusp of Death. I’ve been to school discos in India where the average age was 75. Never mind. Our focus today is families, anyway.

  I open by telling them that the songwriter who said “love is strange” must have been Asian at heart. “I mean, take the mother of my Indian friend Shireen for example. She found a spouse who was quiet, polite, didn’t answer back, was deeply rooted in his community, and never, ever ran around. And yet she divorced him. He was a bit wooden. Okay, in fact, he was… a tree.”

  The audience is quiet but I can see that they are with me. “You see, the woman’s parents had been told by a fortune teller that her second marriage would work, but not her first. Wanting to save heartache all round, her mother’s parents married her to a nearby oak. ‘It’s easy to get divorced from a tree,’ they explained. ‘They were right. The tree did not contest the divorce. The divorce lawyer said it was the easiest case he had ever done. The tree represented itself and did not ask for costs). Once all the paperwork was done, they married the woman to a human.”

  The audience is gripped. “Mind you, my eyes well up when I think of this innocent tree, released back into the arboreal social market as soiled goods, but what to do? Life is hard. As for the human bride, I imagine she found her second husband a bit more talkative than her first. Or maybe not. He was an Asian guy, after all.”

  I pause for a few seconds to examine the audience. They are not exactly roaring with laughter, but it’s okay—they are clearly fascinated. In this situation, this reaction feels better than laughter. The material is something they understand, fresh yet familiar. Some are sitting forward in their seats and nodding vigorously. Clearly several have arboreal members in their own families.

  Keep going. “
In a region which values life-long marriage, it’s curious that the choice of partner is sometimes the least important item. Shireen told me about a guy she knew who learned from his bride that the wedding date he had chosen was the day of his fiancé’s final exams. ‘No problem,’ he replied, and changed the date of the wedding. No, of course he didn’t. This is India, right? He kept the wedding date and looked for another girl. I couldn’t help but wonder how a guy like that breaks the news to his fiancé. ‘You can’t do June 19th? Aw, shoot. Know any other chicks with unbelievably low standards?’”

  A fat woman in the front row bursts out laughing.

  “You may laugh,” I tell the audience. “In fact, you are commanded to do so.”

  They obey. Then everyone claps. Tomasz, sitting at the back, claps the loudest.

  Saturday, September 6

  On our next stop, I talk about Indian weddings again, and add a tale which drifts into my mind from my journalistic days.

  “I once reported on the wedding of one Jayalakshmi, a 21-year-old miss from Chennai, India. Halfway through the wedding, her groom Murugesan rose to his feet and announced he was outta here. He said he was disappointed that he had not received a motor scooter among his dowry presents, and was thus departing to find a woman with a better appreciation of a man’s deepest automotive needs. The bride Jayalakshmi promptly decided that her love for the idea of having a big Indian wedding was greater than her love for any particular individual, so she grabbed one of the male guests and hustled him into position. No doubt he found something suitably romantic to say, such as ‘Help, help.’”

  That evening, Tomasz tells me that the audiences are reacting very positively and the international staff are also enjoying my talks, to their surprise.