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Serious satire
"Humor is a funny way of being serious"
-Thomas Edison
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To have your emails deleted please write to me at renatoobeid@hotmail.com
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Copyright© 2001-2010, Renato Obeid
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"Top blog/Renato Obeid's World/Today's pick: This rambling weblog is worth reading not so much for its satirical posts but more for its insight into the minutiae of life in Lebanon, including the etiquette of road accidents and how to hire a taxi.”
-Jane Perrone, The Guardian
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Sunday, August 26, 2001
Caught up with (I hate that Sydney expression) Anthony in Sydney last night.
We had dinner, went on a harbor cruise that Anthony was performing on and then carried on swanning around Kings Cross with some friends of Anthony’s until about 6.00am.
During the Comedy Cruise (as it’s called) the waters got a bit choppy (figuratively speaking).
As always, there were hecklers but there was a particularly persistent whole table of them who were trying to give Anthony and the other comedian a hard time.
They were pretty indicative of the type of people on the good ship Yobbo – people on bucks and hens nights etc.
Anthony gave as good as he got – “I’m working here! Do I get into the bed when you’re working!?!” (to an especially disruptive hen) and the more direct but apt “shut up you c***s” to some others.
A Chinese comedian (funny only in that his English was so incoherently bad) was impressed with Anthony’s comeback lines and even went as far as asking Anthony to repeat them to him after the gig, whereby he actually wrote down the latter insult for future use.
“How you say it? – ‘shut up you c***’?”
In an aside, Anthony told me that his was classic stuff that you just couldn’t write.
Just after that, somebody came up to them (as some people always do after gigs) to commend them on how entertaining they were and whatnot.
I tried to get the Chinese gentleman to use his newly inscribed comeback line on her but it was to no avail.
We also benefited from this peculiar cultural exchange, I recalled Deng Xiao Ping's "it doesn’t matter of the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice" quote and Anthony asked him to say it in Chinese.He did and it sounded absolutely nothing like it!Shifty Asiatic pulled a fast one on us!
Many of the post-gig well-wishers were disavowing themselves from and condemning the hecklers.
Surprisingly one of the hecklers even approached Anthony and apologized – saying that he was only mucking around and that Anthony didn’t have to respond so (he thought) aggressively.
“I’m nobody and your somebody”.
That, to me, sums up the psyche and impetus of a heckler.
I observed that it was strange that people on boats wave to people on other boats but didn’t do that sort of thing when they were on land, say in cars or buses (you don’t see people in cars or buses waving to people in other cars or buses do you?).Anthony kindly obliged me by mentioning it in his act.
Maybe they’re waving because they’re about to crash – Sydney ferries crash far too often for my liking.
Put it this way – Sydney gives Bangladesh a good run for its money when it comes to ferry crashes.
3:30 pm
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