War and Peace

A young fellow at the safari guesthouse asks me whether gorillas are fond of jungle warfare. I smile benignly at the boy before answering. 

“We make every effort to resolve our disputes peacefully, son,” I explain. “Raiding, pillaging and the scorching of enemy private parts are activities we leave to chimpanzees and humans.” 

The boy looks disappointed, so I give him a stick of liquorice and send him on his way with an avuncular pat on the head. In time, he will realise that life is not a video game where you can survive being blasted to smithereens by a bazooka and return to the fray with your pectoral muscles glistening like Rambo. 

Humans, of course, are quite capable of behaving like gorillas when they want to. Consider the recent case of a small town in Ohio, where a long-running and bitter feud between the local church and the local strip club has ended in a great big love-in. After weeks of name-calling and face-pulling, the churchgoers realised the strippers were just fellow human beings who happened to make a living by wiggling their jahoobies in front of salivating men. Much credit must go to their pastor, who softened their hearts with a moving sermon: 

“Were not Adam and Eve naked in the Garden of Eden before Satan laughed at their private parts and made them ashamed?” he declared. “Who are we to cast the first stone at our fallen sisters, some of whom have breasts like two young roes which feed among the lilies?” 

Brimming with compassion, members of the congregation then approached the strippers with opened arms to hug them and give them succour. Two of the strippers were immediately touched by the Spirit of the Lord, while affirming they wouldn’t be quitting their jobs anytime soon. 

"Our hearts are with Jesus, but our bodies are at the Foxhole," said one of them. 

Meanwhile, the owner of the strip club and the pastor are discussing how to settle the dispute amicably. If I were mediating, I would propose the following four-point plan: 

(1) Find the strippers rich husbands so they don’t have to work anymore. America is full of dirty old billionaires like J Howard Marshall who are looking for trophy wives whose breasts can be stroked with their nose hairs. 

(2) To avoid depriving the owner of the strip club of his income, the ladies of the congregation should work for him on a no-fee basis. This would allow the strip club to make the necessary reduction its entry charge while still making a profit for its proprietor. 

(3) The strip club’s customers would themselves be required to disrobe before watching the volunteer strippers. This would avoid the degrading spectacle of fully-clothed men leering at naked Christian ladies. 

(4) A chaperone would be hired to prevent the whole thing degenerating into an orgy. Most gorillas would be well-qualified for the job, but I wouldn’t do it myself. Too much human nudity gives me the willies. 

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Pie damages in Canada

A tourist once asked if I ever had an egg thrown at me during a circus performance. 

“Never!” I declared emphatically. “Not even a person who hated my act would have dared! By God, I would have caught the egg and hurled it back with interest!” 

I was reminded of this conversation on hearing that the police in Vancouver have paid damages to a lawyer they believed was plotting to throw a pie at the prime minister. In their zeal to protect the nation’s chief executive, they arrested the lawyer and subjected him to a strip search, expecting to find a pie hidden in his rectum. But the lawyer was much too crafty to hide the pie there, realising it would be the first place the police would look. So the police found no evidence of the conspiracy, and the lawyer rubbed salt into their wounds by suing them for wrongful arrest and unjustified digital penetration. 

The Vancouver Police Department might have avoided this ignominy if they’d studied the modus operandi of other crooked lawyers. We Africans remember the case of an American lawyer involved in diamond smuggling. He hired a local transvestite to pose as his wife so he could hide the gems in her empty bra cups. Fortunately, a drunk passenger reported the transvestite to a security guard after groping her tits and concluding she was carrying a bosom bomb. Even a drunkard knows what a woman’s breasts are supposed to feel like. The transvestite broke down under interrogation and confessed to everything, revealing that the lawyer had insisted on conjugal rights as part of the deal. These legal vultures will squeeze every last drop from a contract. 

So, as with most plots and intrigues, the motto to follow when investigating scheming lawyers is cherchez la femme. If the VPD had rounded up the lawyer’s female associates and threatened to strip-search them, the guilty women would have surely pulled out hidden pies from under their skirts and blouses. There’s no point trying to conceal your ammo when you’re going to be probed from head to foot. 

The deeper question thrown up by this affair is whether politicians should be protected from people who want to throw pies at them. Getting a pie in the face is an unpleasant distraction if you’re not expecting it, but it never does serious damage. I must have seen hundreds of clowns get facialized without being harmed by the experience. 

Preserving the dignity of high office is fine in principle, but expecting the police to hunt down every pie-thrower is taking it too far. If I were the prime minister of Canada, I would prefer to take my chances and dodge the pies, while reserving my right to deliver summary justice to anyone who managed to land a lucky shot. I’d like to see how many subversive lawyers would dare to hatch a pie-conspiracy after watching me grab one of their colleagues and rub his face into my sweaty armpits. 

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Chelsea's wedding

I overheard the tourists at the safari guesthouse discussing whether the Clintons had snubbed president Obama by not inviting him to Chelsea’s wedding. It was a topic on which I could not hold my peace: 

“Not getting an invitation was the best piece of luck he’s had since the Republican phone sex scandal!” I exclaimed. “If he’d gone to the wedding, protocol would have required him to give a speech praising Chelsea. Flattering a girl he’s never given a second look would have made him look like a chicken-greaser!” 

“I dunno,” said one of the guests. “Lying convincingly shouldn’t be so difficult for a politician.” 

He had a point. I later pondered the words that Barry might have chosen for the occasion. Perhaps he would have said something like this: 

When I saw Chelsea at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, I thought: “Man, that white chick’s got a great ass!” If I hadn’t been married to my lovely wife Michelle, I would have definitely asked Chelsea to be my date at The Detroit Gospel Choir’s Annual Karaoke Dinner. 

A touching tribute like that would have surely transformed Chelsea into the perfect blushing bride. But it might not have impressed the guests all that much. They would have known that a woman always gets compliments on her wedding day, no matter how frumpy or boney-assed she is. Barry is pretty good at sounding sincere, but even his majestic oratory has its limits. 

He could have given another type of speech, of course – one harking back to all the fond memories he had of Chelsea since she was a tiny tot: 

When Bill Clinton was running for governor of Arkansas in 1982, I was privileged to be a junior staffer on his campaign team. One of my most important jobs was baby-sitting little Chelsea when her mom and dad were on the campaign trail. Now people: I can tell you her poop smelt just as bad as the possum shit I accidentally trod on when stuffing “Vote for Bill” flyers into mail boxes. But when she started hollering I said: “You wait ‘til your folks get home, Missy, changing your diapers is a task way above my pay grade!” 

This sort of reminiscence would certainly go down well with wedding guests. The one allegation that humans will always believe is that someone else’s shit smells bad. If I announced that Queen Rania of Jordan produced turds that smelt of buffalo crap, people would assume I’d worked as a lavatory cleaner at the Royal Palace in Amman. 

The downside of delivering such an anecdote is the risk of alienating the president’s core constituencies, who might think that smelling the poop of a white baby had taken him into Uncle Tom territory. Hilldog might then have to reciprocate by saying she’d smelled the poop of the president’s daughters, a confession which would make her surly and irritable. Much muttering and scowling would occur in the corridors of power. 

So all things considered, I think the Clintons did the president a favour by not inviting him to their daughter’s wedding. But they should have invited Monica Lewinsky – leaving her off the guest list was just petty. 

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Fringe benefits

Back home from Scotland, a place I normally avoid for fear of being nipped by icy breezes and accosted by intoxicated natives. It was only the lure of a cultural festival featuring artists such as Miss Behave, Mrs Bang and Ms American Cougar that tempted me to venture into Haggis Territory. 

I don’t want to say too much about Behave and Bang. The former was more bossy than naughty and the latter rewarded the audience for laughing at her jokes by exposing a portion of her milky-white flesh. I would have laughed like a hyena if I hadn’t been falling asleep, her act being well past my normal bedtime. 

It was Sandra Risser, the American Cougar, whose hot flashes of brilliance illuminated the dingy tavern in which she performed, leaving me with a tingling sensation in my toes. Her act broke new ground by being mainly interactive, and as a keen interactor, I was the first to raise my hand and catch her eye. I began, as one should on such occasions, with a compliment: 

“Ms Risser, may I say how positively radiant you are this evening? Your skin glows like the waters of the River Congo at sunset.” 

“It’s the menopause!” cried a cheeky Caledonian voice from the audience. 

I silenced the guffaws with a loud grunt. A gorilla does not appreciate having his compliments mutilated by a heckler. 

“I’ll hang you upside down by your ankles so you know what the menopause feels like!” I shouted menacingly. 

It was at this point that Ms Risser intervened. 

“Jeez, Mr Gorilla, you’re so gallant on my behalf! Are you married? Don’t answer that, I’ll settle for being your mistress. Living in a tree would make my butt sore. Actually I have a recurring menopause. My first one started when I was 35 and it comes back every 5 years with a brighter glow. If I walk into my garden at night moths fly around my head. Did you have a question?” 

“Yes indeed, Ms Risser,” I replied. “My question is this: Are there rules which if broken by a cougar would result in her expulsion from the ranks of cougardom? For example, is a cougar allowed to have sex with an older man?” 

“Sure, why not?” she replied. “Doing it once doesn't count anyway. You’re still a virgin after a one night stand. I lost my virginity to 23 different men.” 

She continued in this vein, improvising effortlessly in response to the jocular (and often impertinent) questions thrown in her direction. At the end of her act, she invited me to join her for a drink. As we sat at our table, she assured me that her offer to be my mistress had been a joke. 

“Of course it was, Sandra!” I exclaimed. “Your slender haunches could never bear the pressure!” 

“You used to perform in a circus, right?” she asked. 

“Yes,” I replied. 

“How did you manage to fill the void in your life after you gave it up? I’m 69 and the thought of retiring terrifies me.” 

“Well, Sandra, living in the wild helps. Your life is never empty when spiders and snakes are crawling nearby.” 

“You could be right,” she said with a smirk. “But I may have to get a pet snake at my age.” 

I nodded silently, judging that further serpentine matters could be left safely in her hands. She obviously knew more about pet snakes than I did. 

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Playboy's comedy venture

Playboy are setting up a new website based on comedy rather than naked girls. I wish them well, but I’m not convinced it will appeal to their loyal fans. Pictures of Hef stroking his pet raccoon would be hilarious enough to the right audience, but men who click on a Playboy site have other things on their mind. 

Combining comedy and sex is a stiff challenge for the most fertile minds. The best example I can remember was Mr Dickface, the comic book character with a penis where his nose should have been. The poor fellow couldn’t hide his erections, so women were constantly giggling at him, but a lot of them were secretly turned on as well. Eventually he got a steady girlfriend and made love to her using a snorkel to avoid suffocating. Sadly, the Dickface series had to be discontinued after Disney threatened to sue the publisher for plagiarising the Pinocchio concept. 

On a somewhat similar note, a man in Pennsylvania has robbed a bank wearing baggy clown pants and false breasts. Full marks to the fellow for trying to lighten the atmosphere and put everyone at ease, but people held up in banks aren’t usually in the mood for humour. Maybe his act would have gone down better if he’d held up a cosmetic surgery clinic instead and forced one of the doctors to examine his bogus boobs at gunpoint. Making the doctor declare they were superior to his own silicone creations might have got a few laughs. 

The busty bank robber reminds me of an incident in my circus days. We were discussing what costumes to wear at our end-of-season fancy dress party when one of the clowns announced he’d be putting on a pair of joke breasts for the event. The female acrobats expressed their strong disapproval. 

“What’s funny about a woman’s breasts, you sexist pig!” exclaimed one of them. 

The clown responded to this hostile question in the only way a clown can, by bending over, blowing an enormous raspberry, and wafting an imaginary fart in the direction of his inquisitor. It’s a good thing I was on hand to defuse the situation: 

“It is not the breasts, per se, which would be funny, ladies, but the presence of those succulent wonders of Nature on the torso of a buck-toothed ninny. It is the juxtaposition of the sublime and the grotesque that creates the humour.” 

The girls looked at me with a degree of scepticism. 

“I don’t care what position his juxta is in, it still wouldn’t be funny,” said one of them. 

However, I could see that my timely intervention had softened their opposition to the clown’s intended attire. He came to the party with fake titties puffed out, and no one did anything worse than snub him, which is a bearable insult for a clown. 

I can sense you’re curious about what I wore to that party. Some of you no doubt believe that a gorilla would not have required a costume. This would be an inaccurate and offensive supposition. If you must know, I went in the uniform of a Royal Navy officer, circa 1800, carrying a cat ‘o nine tails in my right hand to discourage impudent remarks.

Gorilla Bananas is taking a short vacation and will return on Monday 16th August.

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