Page 26 - The Villager April 2021

Humour

the need

for failure

by JameS ClarKe

or 30 years (I’ll have you know) self-proclaimed president of the Not least help the world go round.
I was President-for-life of terribly good Club in britain (our similar Pile cites an instance in Pillsbury,
FDensa, the club I founded for roles were purely coincidental). Pile North Dakota, where on election Day
those of us too stupid to pass the IQ agrees with me that failures play an for the six-person council nobody voted,
test to qualify for mensa. mensa, as important role in society. not even those manning the booth. the
everybody knows, is the international Some years ago, I was invited to mayor, a farmer, had been too busy in
society for the unusually intelligent. deliver the after-dinner speech at the fields to attend and his wife too busy
and for 30 years I tried to organize ‘the mensa’s national annual gathering. ‘the running her shop.
great Densa Congress’. Need for Failures’ was my theme. So the county auditor ordered the
I failed. but failure is Densa’s code. the problem with intelligence (I told defunct council to appoint six people.
I was planning to feature some of this them) was that it was limited. mensans they appointed themselves. they were
country’s greatest and most glorious have to have an IQ of over 135 and I have each paid about r400 a year which,
failures. I was going to ask the fellow in met one with an IQ of 185 – the absolute they said, went mostly on doughnuts for
charge of our potholed suburban roads limit of intelligence. but stupidity, note, their meetings.
and the chaotically dysfunctional traffic has no limit. Pile recounts a failed stage production
lights to deliver the keynote address. I gave an example of the economic in Frankfurt’s prestigious Schauspielhaus
the theme: “Failure as an art” but, value of what we mistakenly regard where vodka, as an experiment, was
unsurprisingly, nobody knew how to get as ‘failure’. I said how a supposedly used as a prop instead of water. after
hold of him. successful waiter would never drop a all, the production was about binge-
I also had in mind an Italian barber tray or spill soup. yet a waiter who trips drinking russian workmen.
in Pretoria who spent three years in the over his own feet would create jobs. at first, the audience enthusiastically
Italian airforce during world war 2 – in Carpet cleaners and dry cleaners would applauded the acting. then the actors
command of a large anti-aircraft battery. have to be called in; more food would began falling about and forgetting
his unit shot down only one plane in the have to be cooked; more plates bought. their lines. one, unaccountably stood
entire war – an Italian airforce plane. minutes later, after I had sat down, a on a table and then fell off. another
on board was the chief of the Italian waiter waltzed in bearing above his head fell off the stage. the star of the show
airforce. a tray of really expensive liqueurs. and, I began ranting and raving like King lear.
but I have now come across a whole kid you not, he tripped over the carpet the backstage crew had to call for an
catalogue of new failures: Stephen Pile’s with spectacular results and, to his utter ambulance. the actors objected, so the
The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures. puzzlement, received a spontaneous ambulance crew called for police back-
Pile, a fellow journalist in london, was standing ovation. Failures, you see, at up.

24 • Issue 4 2021 • The Villager