Two Cats who got Replaced by a Clown

Neal’s Belch no. 166 for 11th Oct, 2004

I’ve always been a great believer in the dictum “quad ete demonstrandum”, which of course means “buyer beware”.

People should always be very careful when buying things. Once, for example, a friend of mine bought a crocodile skin handbag for his wife. It was not untill three weeks later that it emerged that the crocodile was not dead, just in a deep coma. Luckily it didn’t wake up, and his wife simply detached the crocodile from it’s life support machine, which was sewn into the inner lining.

Of course, this raises various ethical questions. But I’m not going to answer those here. I am, after all, not a theologian. I just happen to give off an air of great wisdom and higher knowledge, so people tend to ask me these sorts of questions.

I suppose, in a way, I’m a bit like the doctor who, whenever he goes to the pub, gets asked to look at people’s discoloured tongues and faulty limbs.

When I go to the pub I’m invariably asked which end of the bar the two cats will be sitting at when they arrive. Everybody always wants to sit beside the two cats, because they know from reading this website that when two cats walk into a bar, things are going to happen.

Personally I think it’s sad that people have to live vicarously off the exitement of other patrons in a bar. In my day, we used to create our own entertainment. I remember as a child, being told to stand on top of the televison, my arms outstretched, so that it looked like I was standing on top of the girl on the tightrope on The Paul Daniels Show.

This often backfired, and I was made to look really stupid when the camera shot changed to show a bucket of elephant droppings. My family would shout things like “you’re standing in a bucket of elephant crap, you numbskull”. I of course retained my dignity and explained that I was merely dropping my standards in order to entertain my low brow siblings and parents with the only sort of childish humour that they were capable of understanding.

After that one of them invariably proved me wrong by switching over to Newsnight, and apparantly understanding every word of it. Which doesn’t really make sense to me because “newsnight” is, itself, not a real word.

It was made up by a broadcasting organisation that was too trendy to use real words, so they had to make one up. Of course that all misfired on them when it turned out that by sheer chance, the new word with which they came up happened to look exactly like a combination of the words “news” and “night”.I do hope you’re following this.

Anyway, two cats walk into a bar. One of them drinks some Guinness and nothing much happens to him. The other cat also drinks some Guinness, and nothing of any great interest occurs in his evening, either.

So of course the barman panics, realising that his customers are going to become infuriated when they realise that they are to be deprived of the usual entertainment derived from the two cats’ antics.

He decides to rent a clown for the night.

So the clown turns up, and tells a few jokes but unfortunately he doesn’t do anything cat related. So the audience applaud politely but clearly they are not satisfied at all. And the barman also realises that perhaps if he got out of the habit of referring to them as an “audience”, and just called them patrons instead, they might lower their expectations of their night out, and he would be under less pressure.

But it’s too late, he realised, to worry about that now. Anyway, the barman fails to come up with anything else to entertain the aud- I mean patrons, and many of them go home perhaps twenty or thirty minutes earlier than they otherwise have, due to there being nothing to keep them there.

The upshot of all this was that takings for the evening were around eight percent lower than normal, although the accounts have not yet been signed off on for this year, and that figure is not official.