Page 43 - Silver Lakes April 2021
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HUMOUR
THE NEED FOR FAILURE
By James Clarke
or 30 years (I’ll have you know) I was were purely coincidental). Pile agrees with Pile cites an instance in Pillsbury, North
President-for-Life of Densa, the club I me that failures play an important role in Dakota, where on Election Day for the six-
Ffounded for those of us too stupid to society. person council nobody voted, not even
pass the IQ test to qualify for Mensa. Mensa, those manning the booth. The mayor, a
as everybody knows, is the international Some years ago, I was invited to deliver the farmer, had been too busy in the fields to
society for the unusually intelligent. after-dinner speech at Mensa’s national attend and his wife too busy running her
annual gathering. ‘The Need for Failures’ shop.
And for 30 years I tried to organize ‘the was my theme.
Great Densa Congress’. So the county auditor ordered the
I failed. But failure is Densa’s code. defunct council to appoint six people.
The problem with intelligence (I told them) They appointed themselves. They were
I was planning to feature some of this was that it was limited. Mensans have each paid about R400 a year which, they
country’s greatest and most glorious to have an IQ of over 135 and I have met said, went mostly on doughnuts for their
failures. I was going to ask the fellow one with an IQ of 185 – the absolute limit meetings.
in charge of Johannesburg’s potholed of intelligence. But stupidity, note, has no
limit.
suburban roads and the municipality’s Pile recounts a failed stage production in
chaotically dysfunctional traffic lights to Frankfurt’s prestigious Schauspielhaus
deliver the keynote address. The theme: I gave an example of the economic value where vodka, as an experiment, was used
“Failure as an Art” but, unsurprisingly, of what we mistakenly regard as ‘failure’. I as a prop instead of water. After all, the
nobody knew how to get hold of him. said how a supposedly successful waiter production was about binge-drinking
would never drop a tray or spill soup. Russian workmen.
I also had in mind an Italian barber in Yet a waiter who trips over his own feet
Pretoria who spent three years in the would create jobs. Carpet cleaners and At first, the audience enthusiastically
Italian Airforce during World War 2 – in dry cleaners would have to be called in; applauded the acting. Then the actors
command of a large anti-aircraft battery. more food would have to be cooked; more began falling about and forgetting their
His unit shot down only one plane in the plates bought. lines. One, unaccountably stood on a table
entire war – an Italian Airforce plane. On and then fell off. Another fell off the stage.
board was the chief of the Italian Airforce. Minutes later, after I had sat down, a The star of the show began ranting and
waiter waltzed in bearing above his head raving like King Lear. The backstage crew
But I have now come across a whole a tray of really expensive liqueurs. And, had to call for an ambulance. The actors
catalogue of new failures: Stephen Pile’s I kid you not, he tripped over the carpet objected, so the ambulance crew called
The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures. Pile, with spectacular results and, to his utter for police back-up.
a fellow journalist in London, was self- puzzlement, received a spontaneous
proclaimed president of the Not Terribly standing ovation. Failures, you see, at least
Good Club in Britain (our similar roles help the world go round.
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