When I collected my mother from hospital the other day, I was expecting her to be looking ‘tense but dignified’ (as in EL Wisty on Royalty: "‘I’ve always wanted to be a member of the royal family. I’ve always wanted to be part of the royal family because there are great advantages to being royal. If you’re royal, whatever you do is very interesting. Whatever you do, people are very interested in it. Even if you do something very boring, people are still very interested in it. If a royal person does something extremely boring, people say, ‘Oh, isn’t it interesting that he’s doing something extremely boring.’ If I do something extremely boring, people say, ‘Oh, how extremely boring,’ it’s not so good. You never get newspaper cuttings about me, you never see headlines saying, ‘EL Wisty was looking radiant as he got off the 17A bus from Hounslow.’ You don’t see pictures saying, ‘EL Wisty was looking tense but dignified as he entered the municipal baths.’ You don’t get that sort of treatment.") As it turned out, my mother was looking 'radiant'.
The reason my mother was looking radiant, I discovered as we drove back to her farm, was that none of the nurses would believe she was over 80.‘You don’t look a day more than 75,’ they all told her. It’s made her year.
You seem to have remembered that sketch word for word - as indeed I can :-)
ReplyDeleteIt must be very helpful in making sense of the world to have EL Wisty at your fingertips.
ReplyDeleteMy brother and I spent many Saturday afternoons listening to a record of EL Wisty monologues in my father's tiny flat - he took us to Battersea Funfair once but was so appalled by how much he had to spend that after that we just stayed in when he had us over - he also had a Shelley Berman record that was pretty good, but EL Wisty was the biggest influence on my world view (as a member of the World Domination League [also a Wisty invention]) from then on. I specially love the time he goes to the patent office and the clerk drives him away with another person's patent device, a nit-poker, which is a sponge dipped in jam on a long stick. Actually I specially love lots of bits but I have to go and make some dinner now, luckily for all concerned. This could be the longest comment in history otherwise.
ReplyDeleteThe nit-poker is, indeed, a glorious thing.
ReplyDeleteLet's hear it for The Bee Of Ephesus!
Kevin - do you think if you'd had one at Helminthdale T Aldous might have been out of your hair some months ago?
ReplyDeletePeace through Nudity!
ReplyDelete