The Sunday News
Lighterside Christopher Mlalazi
TODAY let’s call those hard-working guys who operate from the streets in the townships as self-employed public servants.
These are, namely, the vendor, cobbler, the barber, the car tyre repair guys, and then we will throw in a few others although they are not self employed — the newspaper vendor, the milkman, and the water meter checker.
And who among these do you think is the funniest when it comes to reeling off jokes?
Experience has taught us that these guys, once they start doing these jobs, and maybe through their daily contact with all sorts of people, quickly evolve to be masters of the art of street comedy.
A proof to that is that most times when you visit these guys, you will always find one or two people hanging around them even if they don’t need their service, and laughing their lungs out.
And some customers too go away laughing from them, or with smiles on their faces.
There are other self-employed public servants who are very funny, but these are the itinerant ones, that is they don’t have one particular place where they operate from, but are the travelling type who walk all day selling their stuff and leaving people in stitches behind them.
These travelling public servants are the guys who mend pots with holes and who carry portable oxyacetylene torches, the amateur plumbers who fix water taps and blocked toilets, the ones who sell floor polish, and also those who vend trinkets — that is cheap jewellery, mirrors and confetti.
And what’s up with the postman and the water meter checkers — for we never hear any jokes from them, but they just rush into yards with terse faces, and the next moment they have vanished. Is that the reason why most dogs in yards have uneasy relationships with them?
Sometimes one tends to think, are the street public service guys naturally funny, or is it something they learn as soon as they start doing these jobs, which is part of their carefully calculated customer care service, and as soon as they knock off from their jobs at the end of the day, all pretence of being comical immediately vanishes?
A simple question would be, who is the most comical between a cobbler and a street barber? Kikikiki. Personally, I think it is the barber, they handle so many funny heads when they are shaving them bald, and surely that is enough to make one become a champion joker in the long run isn’t it so?
There are several names for types of bald heads that the barber must derive his sense of humour from. You know a good crop of hair hides a lot of things. There is the “bus”, meaning a long rectangular skull, also called a “loaf”. Then there is the “highway”, this is also a long, but narrow skull. Then there is the “hump”, and you can guess the type of skull called this.
I am lucky, my skull, when shaved, happens to have all those properties mentioned above. And you can guess why I wasn’t one of the happiest kids in our family when we were always ordered to go and shave our heads by our parents when schools were opening from the holidays.
I think marketing or public relations organisations have a lot to learn from our street public servant, if only they could invite them to workshops to have them make presentations on topics like “how to keep a client laughing”, or something like that.
Imagine a street cobbler in his work overalls walking into an executives PR workshop to deliver his presentation — I think the workshop organiser would get a resounding round of applause. Now, if you want to see the funniest of all spectacles, just be lucky and witness our street public servants fighting among themselves, that is a barber fighting with a cobbler. Kikikiki. Ama funny ayebe esuka lapho.
You’ve just got to love these guys!
Wow, I forgot one other public servant who is a master of street comedy. That is the kombi tout. But this one we won’t dwell on too much, as you know a great percentage of them take their comedy a bit too much further, which, instead of making us laugh, leave us with our jaws hanging in surprise, if we are not rolling in laughter.
But just go to any bhombi store any day, and look for a guy who has a record of arriving there everyday at the break of dawn, and can still be found there when the bhombi store closes at night, and there you will find a rich archive of all township funnies.
Asihlekeni.
