Page 42 - Fourways Gardens April 2021

Humour

the need

foR fAiLuRe

B y Ja M es c larke
IMAGE BY ALExANDRA FROM PIxABAY

or 30 years (I’ll have you know) I proclaimed president of the Not Terribly standing ovation. Failures, you see, at least
was President-for-Life of Densa, the Good Club in Britain (our similar roles help the world go round.
club I founded for those of us too were purely coincidental). Pile agrees with
Fstupid to pass the IQ test to qualify me that failures play an important role in Pile cites an instance in Pillsbury, North
for Mensa. Mensa, as everybody knows, is society. Dakota, where on Election Day for the six-
the international society for the unusually person council nobody voted, not even
intelligent. Some years ago, I was invited to deliver the those manning the booth. The mayor, a
after-dinner speech at Mensa’s national farmer, had been too busy in the fields to
And for 30 years I tried to organize ‘the annual gathering. ‘The Need for Failures’ attend and his wife too busy running her
Great Densa Congress’. was my theme. shop.
I failed. But failure is Densa’s code.
The problem with intelligence (I told So the county auditor ordered the defunct
I was planning to feature some of this them) was that it was limited. Mensans council to appoint six people. They
country’s greatest and most glorious have to have an IQ of over 135 and I have appointed themselves. They were each paid
failures. I was going to ask the fellow met one with an IQ of 185 – the absolute about R400 a year which, they said, went
in charge of Johannesburg’s potholed limit of intelligence. But stupidity, note, mostly on doughnuts for their meetings.
suburban roads and the municipality’s has no limit.
chaotically dysfunctional traffic lights to Pile recounts a failed stage production
deliver the keynote address. The theme: I gave an example of the economic value in Frankfurt’s prestigious Schauspielhaus
“Failure as an Art” but, unsurprisingly, of what we mistakenly regard as ‘failure’. I where vodka, as an experiment, was used
nobody knew how to get hold of him. said how a supposedly successful waiter as a prop instead of water. After all, the
would never drop a tray or spill soup. production was about binge-drinking
I also had in mind an Italian barber in Yet a waiter who trips over his own feet Russian workmen.
Pretoria who spent three years in the would create jobs. Carpet cleaners and
Italian Airforce during World War 2 – in dry cleaners would have to be called in; At first, the audience enthusiastically
command of a large anti-aircraft battery. more food would have to be cooked; more applauded the acting. Then the actors
His unit shot down only one plane in the plates bought. began falling about and forgetting their
entire war – an Italian Airforce plane. On lines. One, unaccountably stood on a table
board was the chief of the Italian Airforce. Minutes later, after I had sat down, a and then fell off. Another fell off the stage.
waiter waltzed in bearing above his head The star of the show began ranting and
But I have now come across a whole a tray of really expensive liqueurs. And, raving like King Lear. The backstage crew
catalogue of new failures: Stephen Pile’s I kid you not, he tripped over the carpet had to call for an ambulance. The actors
The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures. Pile, with spectacular results and, to his utter objected, so the ambulance crew called for
a fellow journalist in London, was self- puzzlement, received a spontaneous police back-up.

Fourways Gardens • 40 • April 2021