Klarinet Archive - Posting 000300.txt from 1998/06

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: [kl] This story is copyrighted. Don't copy it, please!!
Date: Mon, 8 Jun 1998 18:59:23 -0400

This is one of about 7 stories scheduled for publication in 1999.
Just read and enjoy it. Any basset horn player will understand
the problem.

Dan
=======================================================

BASSET HORN BLUES (1948-1987) [1686 words]

Daniel N. Leeson

When I was a teenager in 1948, we moved to Suffern, New York. One
of the benefits that I learned living in Suffern (and which could
not have been learned almost anywhere else for reasons that will be
clear in a moment) was a valuable lesson about human deportment,
one that affected an aspect of behavior for my entire life.
Paradoxically, it had to do with the pronunciation of the town's
name.

When asked where I lived, I would give and even spell the name of
the town, "S-U-F-F-E-R-N," and an astonishingly large number of
people responded identically, probably with the intent of showing
how clever their shoot-from-the-hip bon mots could be.

"Suffern?," they would say; "are you suffering?" and then they
would collapse in a paroxysm of self-congratulatory laughter.

Now this doesn't sound like much. It's a small attempt at comedy
derived from observing a similarity of pronunciation, a sort of
harmless homophonic humor. But repetition of it soon began to
drive me crazy as I discovered that reinvention of the same tired
play on words was an unknown genetic flaw present in Homo erectus.

Was that the way I spoke? When people gave me a fact on some
subject, did I independently create an unoriginal and not
particularly clever joke based on the sound of the words of that
fact? I didn't think so but it was time to pay close attention to
how I spoke.

The first 100 "Suffern? Are you suffering?" statements quickly
grew to the level of a major irritant. After that, its
exasperation quotient spiraled upwards like an H-bomb cloud. Then
my paranoia took over and I began to believe that meetings were
being held while I was asleep, meetings to encourage additional
strangers to repeat that dumb line and, thus, drive me into an
ever-deepening schizophrenia.

"Okay everybody. Let's keep it down to a quiet roar. Now
listen. I know its late, but we just found out that this
idiot from Suffern is going to be driving through here
tomorrow and he'll probably stop for gas. So we've called
this 2 a.m. town meeting to alert you to the visit which is
going to enable us to create a faster slope for this jerk's
descent into insanity.

"Now listen up all you gas station owners. He is going to
need gas and if you happen to be the one he chooses, be sure
to ask where he is from. Then, when he says 'Suffern,' you
all know what to do. But don't get fancy. Just say the
standard line: 'Suffern? Are you suffering?' You got it?
Don't deviate from orthodoxy. This guy doesn't have much in
the brains department, and he can't deal with change. Just
keep it simple.

"And Elsie, he'll probably want to eat something about that
time so if he goes to your diner, get a couple of customers to
ask him where he is from. And put him at Helen's table.

"Helen, make goo-goo eyes at him while you take his order.
Let him see two buttons worth of cleavage. He's a sucker for
that. Then, when he is defenseless, ask him where he's from.
OK?

"We figure he's half crazy now what with raging hormones and
his lousy gene pool. By constantly using this same dumb,
trite, threadbare, shaggy, moth-eaten line, we can have him
six bricks shy of a load in four to six months.

"Folks. Let's get ready here. We don't want any criticism
from the governor. This is an opportunity for our city. You
all know that last week he was in Syracuse and they zinged him
about three dozen times. Let's see if we can Suffern him 144
times. That's a gross of bad puns. OK? It'll be good for
business and tourism.

Would you believe that this thing became a state effort and the
governor himself got daily reports on it?

I intended to begin injuring people who came out with the Suffern
line having read somewhere that courts will dismiss murder or
mayhem charges when the accused offers the defense of provocation
through multiple repetitions of the same tired, old joke. It was
called the "Joe Miller" law.

But despite my bravado, I rarely retaliated. Mostly, I turned up
the corners of my mouth to let the joke-teller know that I wasn't
brain dead, and then added a hatch mark on the total count of
repetitions. When we moved away from Suffern in 1958 it read
15,763. Thank God we didn't move to Intercourse, PA.

My mental health got better. As I got older, I stopped being
furious at people who asked me where we I lived as a teenager. I
married a lovely woman who never once commented on the similarity
of "suffer" and "Suffern." I began what became a successful
business career, played a great deal of clarinet at a professional,
long hair level, and moved to Paris where jokes about suffering in
Suffern would make no linguistic sense. Life was good. I was
playing a lot of professional gigs in France and one of the finest
French players, Louis Cahuzac, once told me that I should broaden
my horizons by investing in a few of the rarer kinds of clarinets.

Cahuzac said, "there is always a need for players of the cor de
basset. If you own one of them, you play a lot, but if you get
two, you will never stop playing." It was the best musical advice
I ever had.

The name "cor de basset" didn't strike me as particularly funny.
I had heard of the instrument, but in French, there is little room
to make a pun on the name. It was the English translation that
would take me to the perimeter of hell. Not until we moved back to
the United States and I was invited to play the Mozart Requiem
(which calls for two "cors de basset") was the magnitude of my
colossal error made manifest. (That was Cahuzac's gift to me.
When you had two cors de basset, one for me and one for rent to the
other player, they had to hire you. At one point I was the only
professional clarinet player in the United States who owned two
cors de basset. And since I owned the bat and ball, they made me
the team captain.)

The contractor engaging me said, "We'd like you to play basset
hound, ... er, I mean basset horn (heh, heh, smirk, smirk, nudge,
nudge) for several performances of the Mozart Requiem."

My blood suddenly ran cold. Terror siezed my vitals. What had he
said?

"Basset hound? Basset HOUND??

My God. It was "Suffern? Are you suffering?," all over again.

But the basset horn jokes were worse, for the homophonic
possibilities opened up undreamed-of opportunities to the punster.

"What long ears your instrument has," the conductor would say.
(Better to hear your imbecilic and contradictory directions with,
said I, silently and to myself.)

"What big eyes your instrument has." (Better to see your
incompetent stick technique with, you blundering idiot!)

"And Grandma, what big teeth your instrument has." (Better to bite
you on your goddamn ass with, you unoriginal, stupid bastard!!)

One conductor stopped in the middle of a rehearsal of Strauss'
"Frau Ohne Schatten," to say, "Basset hound, your entrance `barked'
too much." And then he and the entire orchestra laughed at his
cleverness until they all wet their pants. The corners of my mouth
would turn up a trifle to show appreciation for his trite,
commonplace lack of originality. He was, after all, the conductor.
That didn't mean he was smart or knew anything about music. It
meant only that he owned a baton that cost $1.75 and with it
exercised control over your income.

It was retirement and the selling of my basset horn pair that
preserved what was left of my sanity. And I can, at this juncture
of my life, look back and examine the valuable lesson that I
learned at age 16.

Verbal puns simple enough to allow instantaneous riposte,
particularly those built on homonyms, were probably
independently discovered by at least 50,000 people before I
had learned to pee without a revolving team of adults to
assist me. Realizing this fundamental law of nature, I never
used puns. Ever. And in this way beautiful women were
attracted to me because of my brilliant social dialogue, one
that was completely without homonymic puns. Several wealthy
women established me in private New York apartments because of
my skill at avoiding all homonymic humor, and not an evening
went by without me becoming sexually exhausted as a result of
this knowledge, information which I pass along to all those
dumb enough to continue to use such shoot-from-the-hip stupid
jokes. You'll get damn little nookey if you do.

One of my last jobs before retiring, was to play Mozart's Gran
Partitta (which also requires two basset horns - merci mille fois,
Monsieur Cahuzac). It was in Reno. And there was this 98 year old
lady who was there, and she came up to me after the performance and
asked me if I enjoyed blowing into the dog. So I shoved my basset
horn up her nose, bell end first. And, due to the notoriety of the
1948 NY State law that allows one to maim anyone who makes
homonymic jokes, I wasn't even arrested. The last I saw, the body
of that 98 year old lady was left propped up in a casino by a
baccarat table, her head held up by that portion of the basset horn
that I was unable to get up her nose. She could still be at that
baccarat table, for all I know. She may even be winning, but she
no longer makes basset horn jokes.

(Postscript: during a spell check of the text of this story on my
word processor, I received the message "'Suffern' spelling appears
incorrect. Try 'suffer.'" I tell you those bastards are still
trying to get me and now machines attend their late night
meetings.)

=======================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
Rosanne Leeson, Los Altos, California
leeson@-----.edu
=======================================

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