Some improvement health wise today, though still a bit under the weather, but luckily our neighbours remained quiet, at least until bedtime when for the first time they realised that they could also annoy us by playing loud music with the bass turned up. But I was tired enough to sleep through their ruse. Maybe tomorrow when we have to get up at 7 o clock I might repeatedly ring their doorbell and run away!
That's the kind of guy I am - a right joker! I have been keeping my girlfriend amused with my hilarious gags all holiday. I think it is important when you come up with a joke, especially in a situation where you are with someone who literally can not escape, that you run it into the ground until it becomes funnya again. My girlfriend doesn't always seem to agree, but I have to continue working under the assumption that it just takes her longer to get to the situation where an annoying joke starts to amuse again and to keep ploughing on. Her run up time is impressively long. Even after two weeks she is still not finding some of the jokes amusing.
Two of my favourites from this holiday (and believe me there have been many more) have been:
1) The face crumb gag - sometimes when I am eating (increasingly as I get older it seems) a small piece of food will get stuck on my lip or chin without me realising. Usually at this point my girlfriend will attempt to alert me to the potential embarrassment by pointing to her own face, using the mirror image technique to indicate that something is where it ought not to be (it also works with stuff like sun cream that has not been properly rubbed in or sleep around my eye). My hilarious joke is that every time she does this in her helpful and considerate manner I pretend to think she is working not on the mirror image system that she always use, but on left to right similitude. So I will make a show of rubbing off imaginary crumbs from the other side of my face and asking if I have removed the offending article. She tends to groan and look Heavenwards at which point I then widen the search for the crumb by wiping everywhere around my mouth (or whatever part of my face) cleverly entirely missing the one place that I know the crumb is. For the joke to be really funny you have to keep earnestly asking if you've got it yet. Remember I am a professional comedian so don't worry if you are not able to pull this off as well as I can. Keep pracitising and you could be literally this amusing.
My girlfriend is so nice that when she was tired of it (on about day 2) she said that she would start deliberately indicating the crumb at the opposite place to where it actually was, thus causing me to get it straight away. I hadn't thought of that and if she had just done it rather than telling me she could have turned the joke on me. But now I use my poker skills to check that she is not bluffing and so far she has not used her reverse psychology trick. But I will be ready for it when she does!
2) The "cut to" gag- this is an extension of a catchphrase I gave to one of the characters in the play
Playing Hide and Seek With Jesus. Pete, as I believe he was called would constantly drop into conversation the phrase "cut to" when someone gave a sitcom style comment along the lines of "There's no way we're going to go to the cinema" (ie he would say "Cut to us, watching Toy Story at the local Odeon). Unlike in a sitcom though the action would not (apart from on one occasion) cut to the next scene. It was just Pete trying (and largely failing) to be amusing, in an affable and annoying way. I started doing this on this holiday, but with an added twist. For example during dinner I would say something like, "I can't wait for breakfast, it's going to be a lifetime until we get to eat it...." then I would say "Cut to us at breakfast" and make a slashing sign with my arm. But the new twist is that then the next day at breakfast I would act as if the intervening twelve hours had been edited out of our lives and make the cutting motion again and then say "Wow that was fast." Or something along those lines. It's a bit of a riff, I suppose, on my pretending to be Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap gag (which is another excellent joke you might like to play on your partner until they find it amusing - keep ploughing onwards until they do, no matter how annoyed they seem to be getting), but this is better as it has a much longer lead in time. In fact I am really looking forward to the plane journey home because about six days ago I said, "I know the holiday has been going fast, but don't worry, we're only just over half way through. It'll be ages til we're sitting on that plane." Then I said "Cut to us on the plane..." And tomorrow I will be able to give the pay off, pretty much a week after the feed line. I am very excited. Hope I don't forget. I might try and extend the timeline of this joke and go for a world record. I could say to her, "We're still young. It'll be a long time before we're grandparents sitting in our cardies in front of a log fire smelling of wee..... Cut to." Then in around about 40 years time I will provide the punchline. It's the fastidiousness of remembering that makes it amusing. If she doesn't think that's funny then I will definitely chuck her at that point. It's important to share a sense of humour.
So yeah, as you can imagine, my girlfriend has had the time of her life, pretending to find my antics annoying, rather than hilarious which is her own little joke on me, the tinker. And I hope some of the women who knocked me back or chucked me in the past are reading this and realising what they missed out on. Yeah, this could have been you trying to help me remove crumbs from my face, but oh no, you thought you were too good for me didn't you? Well, cheg on, who's laughing now?
See you back in the UK folks. Though I am probably going to refuse to leave when the boat comes to pick us up in the morning and am going to stay here forever. Cut to me in Shepherd's Bush, looking sad.
