This week: Shakespeare - A Comedy Hero Edited by: Lornda More Newsletters By This Editor
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"Every time you are able to find some humor in a difficult situation, you win."
~ Unknown
"To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone, and a funny bone."
~ Reba McEntire - American Country Singer
"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson - American Essayist
Learn what a trip to Las Vegas, a bumbling fool, and a burrito all have in common.
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Life can have many challenges and sometimes they can stack up like a hero sandwich. I was reminded of this while I judged an entry for a contest I host and when I watched a hilarious British T.V. show. In both instances, the main character experienced a pile of disasters. I recalled how cool William Shakespeare was when he based this type of disaster for one of the plays he wrote in the year 1600, A Comedy of Errors. It’s all about a situation gone wrong with two brothers who were twins and separated at birth. They arrived at the same location by chance which leads to many mix ups and laughs. Shakespeare was a comedy hero because the term comedy of errors has cascaded down to our day and means much the same as what happened in the play. The dictionary defines it as a series of humorous or disastrous events, or a situation made amusing by bungling and incompetence. It reminds me of my life.
The problem with a comedy of errors in our life is that we usually do not laugh until it’s all over and ponder it two hundred times like a movie in slow motion. After this stage, we conclude the situations stack up to be funny. Some of us even write about it to entertain others.
While I read the non-fiction story, "Average Joe" by ദƖυҽყҽʐ 🤍 , I laughed so hard that I cried. People around me thought I was upset about the sixth wave hitting Canada. What? There’s a sixth wave going on? I’m moving to China.
ദƖυҽყҽʐ 🤍 wrote the story of her adventure to perfection. Here's a snippet:
I was dragging a ball and chain behind me with each jarring step. I looked over my shoulder. Yep, sure enough there he was, "tippy toes" (as I had secretly named him earlier that day), struggling to keep up. "Hurry Joe," I hollered over the roar of the traffic, "we gotta get off this freeway before the cops catch us out here!"
A secondary character named tippy toes. Hilarious. It was full of humor and disastrous events to keep you guessing until the end. Does happiness reign again in her life? You'll have to read it to find out! William Shakespeare would be proud of her comedy of errors.
Around the same time I read the contest entry, I blitzed a British T.V. show called, The Worst Week of My Life. It follows a young couple through three weeks in their lives and it pushed the boundaries of what a comedy of errors entails. The main character is a bumbling fool who cannot keep his mouth shut, and what ensues are many crazy incidents. Some of the scenes I had to pause and collect myself from the laughing and crying.
After I read and watched these two entertaining stories, I thought of one comedy of errors I had a few years ago. It involved my mother and one of her eight cats. At the time, my mother lived on the same road as me but on the other side of town. I had a full day of errands, shopping, and groceries for my mother. By the time 10P.M. rolled around, I changed into my T.V. watching ensemble and was comfy on the sofa.
At 10:36 P.M., my cell phone rang. It was my mother asking if my daughter was in her pajamas yet. Isn’t everyone at that time of night? My mother sounded panicked and said she was in a real bad situation. I thought I’d have to call the ambulance, but no, she needed my daughter, our resident cat whisperer, to come over because Muffy had a chicken bone stuck in her mouth. I had come to learn to never ask the why with any of my mother’s bad situations. My daughter changed out of her pajamas and drove her car across town to help her stressed grandmother.
At 11:05 P.M., my mother’s telephone number flashed again. It was my daughter asking me to come over because they needed another hand to hold the cat. I changed into some sort of proper clothing and zipped down to the house. I walked in and announced that I’ll have this solved in two minutes. I looked down and swirling around my ankles and purring was Muffy. I found out that it isn’t Muffy with the chicken bone problem but some look-a-like named Sheba. They had let her go and she was huddled in the hallway.
The cat whisperer and my mother sat on the sofa and waited for me to come up with a solution. I flung my shoes off, walked to the hallway, and stepped in cat barf with one foot and cat pee with the other. This is when my mother tells me to watch out for the pee and barf. I picked up the growling Sheba and placed her on my mother’s lap. I ran back to the hallway, jumped over the two cat misdemeanors and grabbed two large towels from the washroom. I wrapped the cat, or rather rolled it up in the two towels. All that showed was the cat’s head and crooked tail. I turned the now thirty pound cat-burrito to face my mother. I pulled its head back and opened its mouth. My daughter shined the small flashlight down its throat. My mother announced that she wanted to be the one to remove the bone. I’m glad because I don’t want that death on my hands.
Thirty seconds later the cat-burrito scrambled from the cocoon. The bad situation was cleared up in less than two minutes. I claimed the victory, calmed my mother down, and cleaned up the hallway mess of the scared burrito. Before my mother asked us to stay for tea and crumpets, the cat whisperer and I escaped at11:23 P.M.
I’m no William Shakespeare, but to me and many others, he’s a hero in the writing world. I’m glad he wrote a comedy play so famous that the title lives on to today. It gave me the opportunity to laugh at the challenges of others like ദƖυҽყҽʐ 🤍 and the hilarious antics of a British T.V. show. I’m glad I remembered and could finally laugh at the cat incident. It’s now a comedy of errors family classic, and who knows, Sheba the Burrito-Cat may soon be a play coming to a theatre near you!
Enjoy a snippet from the British T.V. show, The Worst Week of My Life.
The Worst Week of My Life
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Check out these items about some of life's challenges!
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Have you ever had a day when everything went wrong and laughed at it later? What happened?
Feedback from my last newsletter, "Comical Words" .
🌕 HuntersMoon : An exorbitantly edifying dissertation on the use of argot, my friend.
Love it!
Quick-Quill : "Time for me to skedaddle before brouhaha erupts! I love this!"
So glad you had a fun time reading about comical words.
Comments from the Newsfeed. I asked the question: If you had the opportunity to eliminate an overused or boring word in the English language, what would it be? Thanks for the answers. I had a blast reading them.
s : "Ooh... so many answers to this would get me cancelled by most of the WdC community because most have no sense of humour when it comes to too many things.
So, to be non-controversial: "like". Metaphors are better than similes, and if I never hear a teenager say, "Like, I, like, like her, like, okay?" again it will be too soon.
Bilal Latif : "I wouldn't eliminate it, I'd just want people to use the word 'literally' correctly."
Nobody’s Home : "Glad. "I'm glad you made it." Yuck.But "I'm pleased..." sounds pretentious to my ears. "I'm happy..." just doesn't work, because how often is one actually happy when they use a phrase like this?"
N.A Miller : "SOCK-IT-TOO-ME! *bonk!* (Laugh-in 1967-1974)"
🐺Wolfkingdom🏰 : "Orange. The joke may be an oldie and a goodie, but it gets real old, real fast."
THANKFUL SONALI Library Class! : "(AHA! A chance to vituperate!)
You know what I find annoying? FB posts full of #hastags that make #anyting more difficult to #read smoothly. So I would eliminate HASHTAG! Whooooooo that felt good!"
joemjackson : "Definately [yes it's misspelled]"
QueenOwl ~ A New Day Dawns : "Racist or racism. It’s so overused it has lost its meaning and relevance."
Neverwas : "Eliminate the word I."
keyisfake : "Because."
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