Age Brings Wisdom: The Mamas And The Papas

They say that age brings wisdom. I like to think that this is true. I've said before that it took me about 20 years to get a joke from 'The Two Ronnies' once. Which, incidentally, if you're wondering what joke it was, it was the one from "The Worm That Turned", the strange mock-serial thing they did one year, set in a world where women were all-powerful and men went around wearing dresses and skirts. The joke was that Mars bars were not called Mars bars, but "Pas bars".

This made no sense to me. Pas bars? What's that got to do with anything? Why was the name changed at all? What has a Mars bar got to do with women, such that it would make sense for it to be inverted for hilarious comedy purposes?

I never understood it. And indeed it was not until a long long time later, as I was walking to work, that eventually I got it. Mars. Sounds like "Ma's". Opposite? "Pa's." It made sense at last. Only took 20 years to work it out.

The weird thing is, it happened again the other day. In what I estimate to be something like 25 years since the original joke was first floated, suddenly a Benny Hill skit made proper sense to me for the first time.

It was never a particularly good joke to begin with. It all seemed to revolve around the title of a book, called "Please pass farther down the bus", which had inexplicably been typset onto two lines by placing a line break in the middle of the word 'farther'.

Thus, while the studio audience were busy killing themselves with laughter at seeing the word 'Fart' being written down, I was failing to see the humour. It wasn't a good joke because you do not spell Father like that. Father does not have an R in it, well, not in the middle, anyway, and since it was Father who was being passed down the bus (or at least some other people were being requested to pass him down the bus) it would at least make sense to spell the word properly. Shoe-horning the additional 'R' into Father was a forced and weak attempt at humour.

25 years on, the realisation arrived. There was no Father. He was not being passed anywhere. "Please pass farther down the bus" - please move further down. Further, farther... Not a person, but a direction. Suddenly the joke wasn't quite as laboured or unnecessary as it was before. (It was, arguably, still not very funny, but at least it made more sense now.)

Curiously enough it was at the train station on Thursday where this realisation come to me - which is literally yards from the street where I used to work, and the very spot where I had the Two Ronnies epiphany also. There must be something about that part of town.

It also occurs to me that both of these jokes are about - or not about - fathers. Spooky. Must be a comedy blind spot. It probably says something deep and meaningful about my youth. Or then again, perhaps it says nothing more than "Ed's a bit slow, you know..."