Why This Daily Rant is Being Inflicted On You

This may boost your blood flow but don’t count on it                     

By Nury Vittachi
*

WE ARE PLEASED to announce that thanks to the miracle of modern science, this column may expand your blood vessels!

   Legal disclaimer: Or it may not.

   Medical warning: If it does not, just deal with it. Do not cut this column out and insert it into a blood vessel, or any other part of your body.

   Hmm, let me start at the beginning. Somewhere in the sky between Indonesia and China, a flight attendant tapped my arm. “Didn’t you used to be Nury Vittachi?” she asked.

   “No,” I replied. “I used to be Johnny Depp. Then I became Britney Spears. I’m planning to be Nury Vittachi next.”

   She looked puzzled for a second and then laughed.

   A Singaporean was eavesdropping. “You’re Vittachi is it? I used to read your columns all the time-lah,” he said. “But what’s to smile about in Asia these days?”

   He was a standard modern Asian yuppie. Suit by Crocodile. Shirts by Van Heusen. Shoes by Bally. Waistline by Starbucks. He showed me the earthquake, the stock crash and the ferry disaster in his newspaper. “The news is so depressing. Start writing funny columns again. You’ll do more good than a hundred doctors,” he said.

   The woman next to me, who was a doctor, cut in: “Laughter expands blood vessels, decreases serum cortisol and boosts the immune system. A humourist can in theory boost health better than a doctor.”

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

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

   The flight attendant joined in. “Make us laugh,” she said.

   Being a sensitive person, I spent the rest of the flight deep in thought. Before hanging up my typewriter, I wrote literally thousands of humour columns for more than a dozen newspapers and magazines in Hong Kong and around Asia.

   We live in an incredibly amusing place. Only in Hong Kong is your security guard eight times older than your building. Only in Hong Kong are hideous concrete blocks given names like “Lush Verdant Garden”. Only in Hong Kong can a man sue another because he persuaded him to buy a 25^th floor apartment on a building 21 storeys high. Only in Hong Kong does as car park space cost more than a car.

   I saw myself returning to the column-writing profession as a sort of physician-scribe: “Take two funny columns before bed and call me in the morning.”

   And then I came to my senses. I decided I would write a column a day, but offer no guarantee that they would expand your blood vessels. They may give you one more smile than you’d otherwise have had.

    But columns don’t work unless they are partnerships between writers and readers. So here’s the deal. You send in the funny stories. I get the money.

   And when I advised you at the top of this column not to insert this newspaper into a blood vessel or any part of your body, I should have added that it should not be inserted into your columnists’ body, either.

   We are deeply sensitive people.

**

Tomorrow: Jokes that kill.

***

Nury Vittachi is awaiting your funny stories so that he can steal them. Email him some!

Comments

[idle]

I'm reminded of the Readers Digest column "Laughter, the best medicine"

A (probably well known) joke on Quality Control:
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~rxv/sqm/equality.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_context_culture

In line with your usual regional/cultural themes :)

There is a saying in Italian:
si non e vero, e molto ben trovato (If this is just a joke, it's quite a good one)

Very much quotable, don't you think? ;)

[Nury]

Thanks, Idle, I followed your link -- I hadn't seen that story before -- it's a goodie and well worth using in a follow-up column.