Callahan's Place 10 - Off The Wall At Callahan's (v5.0)

by Spider Robinson

  One day, a planet is discovered out Antares way whose sole inhabitant is an enormous humanoid, three miles high and made of granite. At first it is mistaken for an immense statue left by some vanished race of giants, for it squats motionless on a yellow plain, exhibiting no outward sign of life. It has legs, but it never rises to walk on them. It has a mouth, but never eats or speaks. It has what appears to be a perfectly functional brain, the size of a condominium, but the organ lies dormant, electrochemical activity at a standstill. Yet it lives.

  This puzzles the hell out of the scientists, who try everything they can think of to get some sign of life from the behemoth—in vain. It just squats, motionless and seemingly thoughtless, until one day a xenobiologist, frustrated beyond endurance, screams, “How could evolution give legs, mouth and brain to a creature that doesn’t use them?”

  It happens that he’s the first one to ask a direct question in the thing’s presence. It rises with a thunderous rumble to its full height, scattering the clouds, thinks for a second, booms, “IT COULDN’T,” and squats down again.

  “Migod,” exclaims the xenobiologist, “of course! It only stands to reason!”

  —Long-Drink McGonnigle

  Did you boys ever hear of the planet where the inhabitants were mobile flowers? Remarkably similar to Earthly blossoms, but they had feet and human intelligence. The whole planet was ruled by a king called Richard the Artichoke-Heart, and one day at a court orgy his eye was caught by Fuchsia, a pale-eyed perennial. Her beauty was so great that it almost made up for her stupidity.

  Refusing to believe the ancient principle that beauty times brains equals a constant, the smitten monarch engaged royal tutors of all sorts for Fuchsia, to no avail. All failed to engage the attention of the witless concubine, whose only apparent interest was in gathering pollen. At last the embarrassed Richard gave up and had Rotenone slipped into her soup.

  As he exclaimed to his prime minister later that night, “I can lead a horticulture, but I can’t make her think!”

  —Doc Webster

  (according to Jake Stonebender, Fuchsia had a child before she died—and dark rumour suggests that Richard, a notoriously forward-thinking ruler, spent his declining years riding the Waif of the Fuchsia.)

  One night the conversation turned to Richard Adams’s book SHARDIK, about an ancient empire which is ruled by an enormous, semimythical bear. This triggered Doc Webster:

  The only way to become a knight in Shardik’s empire was to apply for a personal interview with the bear. This had its drawbacks. If he liked your audition, you were knighted on the spot—but if you failed, Lord Shardik was quite likely to club your head off your shoulders with one mighty paw. Even so, there were many applicants—for the peasantry were poor, and if a candidate failed for knighthood his family received, by way of booby-prize, a valuable sheepdog from the Royal Kennels. This consoled them, for truly it is written:

  “For the mourning after a terrible knight, nothing beats the dog of the bear that hit you.”

  If you’re under 35, and not passionately interested in health food, this one may go over your head. If so, count your blessings:

  Until very recently, a tribe of killer monkeys lived undetected beneath Greenwich Village.

  To some extent it was not surprising that they escaped notice for so long. They had extremely odd sleeping habits, hibernating for 364 days out of every year (365 in Leap Years) and emerging from the caverns of the Village sewers only on Christmas Day. Even so, one might have thought they could hardly help but cause talk, since they tended when awake to be enormous, ferocious, carnivorous, and extremely hungry. Yet in Greenwich Village of all places on Earth they went unnoticed until last year, when they were finally destroyed.

  Everyone knows that Yule Gibbons ate only nuts and fruits…

  —Ralph Von Wau Wau

  I commanded a submarine in Her Majesty’s Navy during the last World War, and had at least one secret mission. The famous spy Harry Lime, the celebrated Third Man, had developed a sudden and severe case of astigmatism—and many of his espionage activities forbade dependence on spectacles. At that time only one visionary in the world was working on the development of a practical contact lens: a specialist at Sir Walter Reed Hospital in America. I was ordered to convey Lime there in utmost secrecy, then fetch him home again.

  Lime was an excellent actor, of course, but I began to suspect that there was nothing at all wrong with his vision. I learned that he had an old girlfriend who lived twenty miles from the hospital. So I called him into my cabin.

  “I can’t prove a thing against you,” I said, “but I’m ordering you to go directly from the sub, Lime, to the Reed oculist.”

  The toilet tanks on commercial airliners often leak. This results in the formation of deposits of blue ice on the fuselage. The ice is composed of feces, urine, and blue liquid disinfectant.

  Now: occasionally, when a plane must descend very rapidly from a great height, as in the Rockies, chunks of blue ice ranging up to two hundred pounds can—and do—break off and shell the countryside. I have seen a UPI wirephoto of an apartment in Denver which was demolished by a fifty pound chunk of blue ice. (The airline bought the occupants a house. Neither was hurt…and for awhile—until it began to melt—they were actually grateful for the coolness the bolus provided. It was summer, you see, and the impact had destroyed their electric fan…)

  So even if you live where there are no strategic military targets, you can still be attacked by an icy B.M.…

  As many of you know, I just got back from visiting Juan Ortiz, an obstetrician friend of mine in L.A. He was nominally on vacation, but one day there was an emergency delivery he just had to attend, so he deputized his brother-in-law Obie Stihl—honest to God, that’s his name, I’d never make up a name like that—deputized Obie to show me around town. We went to Disneyland. Obie turned out to be a dedicated Star Wars freak, with a sense of humor even more depraved than my own—we were passed by three sailors on the way in, for instance, and when he noticed they were all Chief Petty Officers, he made sure to point out the “Three C.P.O.s”…

  So he took me to Adventureland, where you go on a Jungle Boat Ride. It could have been fun except for the damned boat captain. Through the whole voyage he kept up a running monologue—that had shin splints. Bad jokes, worse puns, even mother-in-law jokes.

  As we got back to the wharf, just as I was stepping off the boat, Obie leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Now you’re getting to see the dock side of the farce…”

  —Doc Webster

  (Abominable as this particular pun is, it was immediately topped by Jake Stonebender. He announced that the most amazing feature of the Doc’s tale was his claim to have toured Disneyland with a fictional character: O.B. Juan’s kin, Obie…)

  Puns (II)

  -

  Spontaneous Conversational

  Eructations, Mercifully Brief

  Note: as these are mostly unattributed, blame cannot, at this late date, be positively assessed. But it is safe to assume that better than half of them were perpetrated by Doc Webster.

  We were going to explore the Kama Sutra…but at the last moment her Kama turned into a period…

  Be he never so humble, there’s no police like Holmes.

  —Bill White

  The success of a pun is in the oy of the beholder.

  Got a date with the doctor who did my vasectomy. She believes in reaping what she sews.

  The Buddhist hamburger joint: they’ll make you one with everything.

  The hackers’ burger joint: you can have chips with it.

  The junkies’ hot dog stand: they’ll sell you one with the works.

  I know you’d like to screw like a bunny—but I just washed my thing, and I can’t do a hare with it.

  Bulimia is one of those subjects which can only be discussed ad nauseam.

  He acquitted himself well at the trial. Regrettably, the jury did not follow his example…

  (He was blamed
for something he didn’t do. He didn’t wear gloves…)

  He learned about sex by trial and error. Now they’ve got him on trial for one or two of those errors…

  —Ronny Corbett

  Name a cowboy hero you can’t even call by his first name without going insane.

  (Answer: Paladin, from HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL. His first name is "Wire"–it says so right there on his card: "Wire Paladin, San Francisco"–so to call him by name, you have to go, "Hey, Wire!")

  The shortest distance between two puns is a straight line.

  —David Gerrold

  Songs

  -

  From the repertoire of

  Jake Stonebender and

  Fast Eddie Costigan,

  as performed on

  Fireside Fillmore Nights

  at Callahan's Place–

  Those unattributed must be

  assumed to have been written

  by Jake and Eddie.

  The Drunkard’s Song

  A swell and wealthy relative of mine had up and died

  And I got a hundred thousand from the will

  So a friend and I decided to convert this into liquid form

  The better our esophagi to fill

  So we started in the city, had a drink in every shitty

  Little ginmill, which is really quite a few

  Then a cabbie up in Harlem took us clean across the river

  Into Brooklyn, where he joined us in a brew

  We was weavin’ just a trifle as we pulled into Astoria

  At eighty miles an hour, in reverse

  But it was nothin’ to the weavin’ that we did as we was leavin’

  And from time to time it got a little worse

  Well, there’s nothing like drinkin’ up a windfall

  We was drunker than a monkey with a skinfull

  So goddam drunk it was sinful—and I think I ain’t sober yet

  We was feelin’ mighty fine as we crossed the city line

  Suckin’ whiskey and a-whistlin’ at the girls

  But the next saloon we try, a fella wants to black my eye

  ’Cause he doesn’t like my shaggy hippy curls

  So then a fist come out of orbit, knocked me clear across the floor

  But I was fairly drunk and didn’t really care

  And I was sorta disappointed when the coppers hit the joint

  As I was makin’ my rebuttal, with a chair

  Ah, but the coppers come a cropper, ’cause I made it to the crapper

  And departed by a ventilator shaft

  Met my buddies in the alley as they slipped out through the galley

  And we ran and ran and laughed and laughed and laughed

  Well, there’s nothing like drinkin’ up a windfall

  We was drunker than a monkey with a skinfull

  So goddam drunk it was sinful—and I think I ain’t sober yet

  Halfway out of Levittown we got our second wind

  In a dump so down and out I had to laugh

  So I had another mug, and my friend another jug

  And the hack another pitcher and a half

  When we got to Suffolk County we were goin’ into overdrive

  The word had spread, and crowds began to form

  We drank our way from Jericho along 110 to Merrick Road

  A-boozin’ and a-singin’ up a storm

  I lost my buddy and the cabbie in the middle of the Hamptons

  We was drunker than it’s possible to be

  But there finally came a time I didn’t have another dime

  I sat on Montauk Point and wept into the sea

  Well, there’s nothing like drinkin’ up a windfall

  We was drunker than a monkey with a skinfull

  So goddam drunk it was sinful—and I think I ain’t sober yet

  Afterglow

  (Iris’s Song)

  by Teodor Vysotsky

  Tending to tension by conscious intent,

  declining declension, disdaining dissent;

  into the dementia dimension we're sent:

  we are our content, and we are content.

  Incandescent invention and blessed event,

  tumescent distention, tumultuous descent:

  our bone of convention again being spent,

  I am your contents, and I am content

  to be living…to be trying…to be crying…to be dying…(I want)

  to be giving…to be making…to be breaking…to be taking

  all you have…

  Assuming Ascension, Assumption, assent,

  all of our nonsense is finally non-sent—

  with honorable mention for whatever we meant…

  You are my content, and I am content.

  Time Travel Blues

  You've heard of every kind of blues there is, I hear you say?

  Well, I'm leavin' here tomorrow…and I just got back today

  I got the time travel blues, look at the mess I'm in

  I'm sad for what the past will be… and what the future hasn't been

  I longed to know the future, like the Oracle of Delphi

  And then this cat knocked on my door: Goddam, it was myself! I

  got the time travel blues, since I met myself comin' in;

  I'd tell you all about it…but where the hell do I begin?

  He said that I was going to invent a time machine—

  That is to say, I told me, if you follow what I mean.

  I said, "I'm no inventor, man: I'll never ever get it."

  But he said "Copy this one, and we both can share the credit!"

  I cranked it up, it blew right up, and then and there I died.

  I wonder who that joker was, and why the bastard lied…

  Got the time travel blues: one of my life's most awful shocks

  Now I could use a doctor: in fact, I need a paradox

  If I am dead, my murderer can't logically exist

  But here I am in pieces, and I'm really gettin' pissed

  I got the time travel blues—it's only natural, bein' dead

  To want to think that time is really only in your head

  Spice

  And when I've just assuaged your lust

  By flicker-light of telly

  I love to lie between your thighs

  My cheek upon your belly

  To smell you and to feel you

  And to hear your small intestine

  And know that this is perfect bliss

  Just as it was predestined

  In the hour that my death draws near

  And I wonder what my life was for

  It'll be the afterglows

  With your fragrance in my nose

  I'll remember and relive once more

  And now I rest, caress your breast

  And sail in satiation

  On the oceanic motion

  Of your rhythmic respiration

  And now my lips and fingertips

  Are flavoured sweet and sour

  For I have nipped and fully sipped

  My favorite furry flower

  In the hour that my death draws near

  And I wonder what my life was for

  It'll be the afterglows

  With your fragrance in my nose

  I'll remember and relive once more

  I know in time I'll have to climb

  Up next to you for sleep

  With no regret, but not just yet

  This moment let me keep

  And suddenly it comes to me

  —how glorious and dumb!—

  I had so much fun making love

  I plain forgot to come…

  Please, Dr. Frankenstein

  I've walked a thousand miles in an effort to retain ya

  And I didn't come for charity: I fully plan on payin' ya

  But I've been so depressive, guess I'm ready for some mania

  That's why I've traveled all this way to gloomy Transylvania, singin

  Please Dr. Frankenstein, won't
you try and bring me back to life?

  Cause I truly have been grieving' since I got "Goodbye, I'm leavin" from my wife

  I'm slowly goin nuts because the memory of her cuts me like a knife

  Please Dr. Frankenstein, won't you try and bring me back to life?

  I cannot seem to find my pulse; my temperature is down

  And I can tell I smell like hell, the way that people frown

  I feel like rigor mortis, all I do is lay around

  You gotta help me Frankenstein, I'm halfway in the ground (I'm beggin)

  Please Dr. Frankenstein, I am up for any kind of change

  Spent evenings in this coffin just a little bit too often, and it's strange

  Please don't consider me more than some flesh for you and Igor to arrange

  Please Dr. Frankenstein, I am up for any kind of change

  I'll stagger like the victim of a wreck

  I'll wear those funny bolt-things in my neck

  I’d love to be in stitches—what the heck

  Do you need cash, or will you take a check?

  I'm not afraid of what you'll do—I'm immunized to pain

  Cause everything I ever had has bubbled down the drain