JOKES THAT RECOILED.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 15, 9 April 1892, Page 370

JOKES THAT RECOILED.

HOW JOKERS HAVE BEEN HOISTED BY THEIR OIVN PETARDS. The beauty of a novelist’s plot is an unexpected denouement. In like manner, the outsider at any. rate, is specially diverted when a jest takes an unlooked-for turn, and perhaps victimizes the original jester. In the course of one of his journeys Sir Richard Burton entered a Persian village disguised as a fakir. The make up was perfect, and, moreover, the part was being played by a skilful and consummate actor.

Sir Richard was familiar with Eastern ways. He knew what he had to do and how to do it. But the humour seized him to figure as a holy man of phenomenal powers, and to trick the simple Persian further. He had obtained the grant of a house in the village, and he secretly wrote up a text from the Koran on the outside of his door ; it was done in phosphorus, and Burton waited for darkness, then he expected to enjoy his jest and to reap new advantage of his notoriety. But the furore led to a catastrophe, and the joke made Burton homeless. Every one wanted a relic of the house which could show such a marvellous sign, and it was torn down about the fakir’s ears.

A writer in a popular monthly mentions the case of a kinsman of his own who was a schoolboy at Harrow. Out in the fields one day he went to the assistance of a portly farmer on horseback, who could not easily open a gate, and did not care to put his horse to it. This was an act which indicated a well-conditioned mind. The farmer thanked him and asked bis name. The youth at once saw an opportunity for a good joke. ‘ Green,’ said the Harrovian.

* What is your father ’’ * A cheesemonger in London, in Theobald’s Road—rather a small shop,’ was the wholly imaginative answer.

‘ You are a capital young chap ; I shan’t forget you,’ said the farmer. And he left the youth chuckling over the incident and the ‘sell.’

Years passed, and the lively fancy of the Harrow scholar proved to have cost him a fortune. The newspapers had advertisements for a young gentleman of the name of Green, whose father at one time kept a cheesemonger’s shop in Theobald’s Road, and to whom a large legacy was devised in recognition of a service rendered at Harrow about ten years before. As the published clue to identity was wholly false and mistaken, through an ill-timed levity, the money could never be claimed.

In the correspondence of Sir John Burgoyne there is the story of a girl’s warlike jest that recoiled. It was during the height of the Crimean Battle storm. A young lady was corresponding with an officer at the front. She wrote in lively fashion, and she asked that when Menschikoff was taken her soldier friend would be sure to send her one of the buttons of the prince’s coat. It so chanced in the fortunes of the campaign that the letter containing this paragraph fell into Russian hands, and reached Menschikoff himself.

The Commander-in-Chief was grimly equal to the occasion. He returned the letter to its writer, and with it he enclosed a coat button and a message intimating that, as he might not be taken prisoner for some time, he preferred to avoid delay and oblige the lady at once.