Wednesday, November 01, 2006

More Epitaphs

The morbid streak in my humour has always been attracted to this glib inversion of the churchyard standard:
"Not sleeping, only dead."

Or, mischievously, cantankerously (in very small letters, obviously):
"If you can read this - you're walking on my f***ing grave, you bastard!"

Or (the drinker's heaven):
"Gone to the final 'lock in'
With the Great Landlord in the Sky."

Or (gratuitous, irrelevant Monty Python reference):
"But I didn't eat the salmon."

Or (gratuitous Bill & Ted reference):
"Might yet be back. Still playing 'Twister' with Death."

Or (gratuitous Fu Manchu reference):
"The world shall hear from me again."

Or.... well, I need a little story to introduce this one. The splendidly lugubrious, facially expressionless American comedian Steven Wright once appeared in a short TV comedy playlet about an eternal graduate student who is suddenly pitched into the real world when, after several years of failing to complete his doctorate, his parents finally cut off his allowance. Forced to search for a job for the first time in his life, he strikes lucky when his first application lands on the desk of an HR manager who used to be his undergraduate girlfriend. She takes pity on him and invites him in for a 'straighten-you-out' talk. "So, what have you been doing for the last 8 years?" she asks. "You have my resumé," he responds with imperious unconcern. She glances disbelievingly at the almost-blank sheet of A4 on her desk, and says,
"I wouldn't call 'Did no harm' a resumé."
Ah, but I would.

Or, finally, the only one I can think of now that is perhaps even better than that one, even more appropriate to me - a 'Wizard of Id' cartoon I was particularly fond of (and had pinned on my wall for several years... accompanied by the woefully small first payslip from my first long-term job), in which two ancient peasant women are standing in the churchyard contemplating the grave of one of their husbands:
"He never had much success in life, did he?"
"No. He was a closet intellectual."

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