Wicked humour

My favourite genre of entertainment is comedy; I like to laugh; I like funny people and I am sometimes considered very silly by those very close to me. It is always surprising to hear people describe me as very serious and even austere. I think life for the most part is serious; reality is a mixed bag of events that will either reduce you to tears or have you double up in laughter.
I have no control over the happenstances of the world so I roll with the punches. But I can at least control my own entertainment and my choices are determined by the laughter quotient. I am intrigued by involuntary actions and reactions that are comedic and lately I have been inundated by quite a few. There is comedy that comes from entertainment and there is the natural occurring comedy. This is when spontaneous responses and accidents lead to mirth and I have chosen to brand this type of comedy, wicked humour. Its wicked because most of the time the laughter is at someone else’s expense.

Almost everything is funny from the right perspective and I was tickled into a long bout of uncontrollable laughter by a scene from a Sitcom last week on television. A thief had threatened everyone in a diner with a gun, asking everyone to unload their purses and wallets on a table. One of the waitresses just froze and couldn’t move; this seemed to upset the gunman who then shouted at her with hilarious consequences! Her face contorted into a comical mask and a few seconds later it relaxed with a hiss! The lady just peed!! Urinating while being robbed was funny to me on several levels. The scene it self was funny but it reminded me of a real life robbery incident some years back. Armed robbers had gained entrance into a home and had everyone lying face down.
The parents weren’t home and they were trying to get the cook and two of the children to tell them where the valuables were. On finding the rotund cook unresponsive; they dealt him a rather vicious slap. Now I know the cook would not have been amused but everyone else present  certainly found his reaction funny. The shock or maybe pain of the slap triggered an involuntary release of repeated farts! From all accounts the robbers were stunned for a few minutes before they started laughing!
There must be some unwritten or unspoken cosmic law that embarrassment naturally translates to laughter. We are all guilty of laughing at others when they embarrass themselves. The laughter has a dash of malice when it is at the expense of someone we don’t like. In the case of Monsieur Etienne (the messing cook as he came to be known thereafter), fear seemed to give him gas and being slapped was the trigger for him to release the said gas!! I should give you a brief history of the household in question.
At the time of the event, there was a mother and father, two sons in the university,  household staff that included Monsieur Etienne who doubled as cook and daddy’s right hand man. He ran a tight kitchen and acted as spy on the boys to the parents; so he wasn’t very popular. This happened in the mid-nineties and my senior brother was a friend to the boys (now middle aged men) in question. The boys moved with friends and like locusts, they ate a lot. They had a habit of eating everything and anything and it had caused the cook to lock the kitchen to protect his job. They accused him of eating all the food himself and starving them; they had a good case, he was gaining weight all the time.
So back to the slap. The robbers decided to have fun at the cook’s expense and they slapped him a few more times. Unfortunately each slap produced more farts so it went on for a while. I should add at this time, that the robbers couldn’t gain access to the upper floor so they were just being entertained by Monsieur’s fart fest! They were persuaded to leave by the sound of sirens and they had everyone tied face down before they made their getaway.
You would think the fun ends now but no!! Remember me describing the cook as rotund? Well, his pot belly prevented him from lying flat so he was tied sitting on the floor. The robbers locked them up in a room and switched off the lights and there they stayed for 4 hours before being rescued when the parents came home. According to one of the boys; it felt more like days because they were suffocating! Monsieur continued to fart intermittently and they suspected he may have even defecated at a time.
I wasn’t there but I have never not laughed crazily anytime I remembered the story and the peeing waitress certainly brought it back to mind. Lately I noticed quite a few comedians use wicked humour to great success; there are some that cross the border of good taste but most of them are pretty fun. You should catch a Nigerian comedian known as Clint da Drunk; I would crown him the king of wicked humour.