I like to think my humour comes from my parents, particularly my mum who had a wicked, sarcastic, confrontational sense of humour. When the kids were little, I played a lot of jokes on them, that part of me contained an element of my family’s wickedness.
When the kids were in primary school, I was walking through the Adelaide Arcade and saw the joke shop on the Gays Arcade corner. I called it the joke shop but it was actually a shop selling equipment for magicians. Of course curiosity led me into the shop, and looking around, I found a number of things I thought would entertain the kids.
My kids have very different personalities. Andrew my eldest is a bit more reserved, while Robbie has a wicked element to him and a willingness to play. The whoopie cushion became the favourite of Andrew’s, and he would place it on seats and we would hear the air, fart like, expelled from the rubber pillow. The boys would be in hysterics at the sound and looks on the adults’ faces. It was a cute joke and they had hours of fun.
When I picked the boys up from school, Robbie, with a look of both pleasure and self-consciousness, had a confession. He had taken another of my presents to school. At recess he had opened the packets of Fart Powder into the boys’ toilet. Apparently, the powder has a very strong reaction when mixed with a liquid and the resulting smell that acrid the boys were not able to use the toilet block, and it had to be closed down. In the telling of the story I began to laugh and of course, encouraged him to laugh as well. I hadn’t thought through the gift, and I hadn’t thought through what the kids would do with them either. My choices from the shop were made because we were a family known for its scatological humour.
When the boys’ father left and we were in emotional chaos, we were gifted a cat, Hobbsie. Robbie commandeered the cat, and when they moved in with their father, the cat went with them.
The dad, a night shift manager in the pokie room, would get home very late and tired. After brushing his teeth and into his jarmies he would pop into bed, but this night, in the middle of his doona, was a pile of cat shit.
Robbie recounted how they were woken by their dad’s angry outburst. Yelling, “Oh, shit, oh shit!” he picked up the doona and took it to the toilet and threw the brown pile into the toilet bowl and flushed. It, the brown blob, wouldn’t go away. The boys awake at the commotion and watching, laughed at their father’s attempts to rid himself of the offender. No matter how many times he flushed the toilet, the brown plastic imitation cat poop remained solid in the bottom of the bowl.
Robbie telling the story left me in hysterics. The story became my revenge in telling others and, my appreciation of Robbie’s sense of humour.
Burnside Writers Group 