[115] in Humor
HUMOR: Classic Dave on Royalty
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Wed Mar 2 11:05:52 1994
From: abennett@MIT.EDU
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 94 11:01:35 EST
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 94 17:08:04 PST
From: ckleinja@Novell.COM (Connie Kleinjans)
Subject: HUMOR: Rapt on Royals (historic Dave)
RAPT ABOUT THE ROYALS
by Dave Barry
A woman I know named Linda is deeply concerned about world affairs.
Often, when a major development occurs, Linda will phone my wife to
break the news.
``Beth,'' Linda will say, with great urgency in her voice,
``according to `Inside Edition,' on several occasions, in Buckingham
Palace, Diana discovered Charles WAXING HIS LEGS.''
``No!'' responds Beth, also a keen student of current events. Soon
they're discussing Charles' and Diana's marriage with far more interest
than they would ever display in discussing, for example, the deficit,
unless the deficit were to date Princess Margaret.
And of course Beth and Linda are not alone. Millions of Americans are
fascinated by the British royal family and its large cast of intriguing
characters: the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, Princess Diana,
Prince Andrew, the Queen Mother, ``Fergie,'' Prince Todd, the Queen
Aunt, the Duke of Dempster, the Queen Uncle, Lady Catharine Herringbone-
Infrastructure, ``Doober,'' the Queen Distant Relative and the Earl of
Wonking-Upon-the-Shrubbery.
We Americans love them all. We cannot get enough of these people, who
are constantly making fascinating remarks such as:
``Rather.''
``Quite.''
``Very much.''
``I should say.''
``I rather should very much quite say.''
In 1985 I was in a large press corps on hand at the airport to watch
Charles and Diana arrive for a visit in Palm Beach, Fla. As they walked
past where we were standing, several journalists, looking for a News
Angle, yelled: ``HOW WAS YOUR TRIP?'' And Charles said: ``Very nice!''
You can imagine the stir this created. From the back of the crowd came
the panicked voices of journalists who feared they had missed the story.
``WHAT DID HE SAY??'' they shouted.
``He said, `Very nice!''' other journalists responded. Everybody
wrote this down as though it were a nuclear secret. During the same
royal visit I sat in a press bus next to two journalists who had a 45-
minute argument, becoming quite emotional at times, over whether to
describe Diana's shoes as burgundy or cranberry.
As well they should. Because we're fascinated by the royals' shoes,
along with their weight problems, their bald spots, their ears, their
hats and their yappy little royal dogs. We're even more fascinated by
the way the royals have to find marriage partners in a gene pool so
small that it is more of a gene raindrop, the result being that today,
after 273 generations of interbreeding, everybody in the royal family
has the same set of fingerprints. (If a royal person commits a crime,
the only way the police can tell which one did it is by analyzing polo-
pony droppings left at the scene.)
And we're EXTREMELY fascinated when the royals put on comical outfits
and hold massive fairy-tale weddings, which are so rich in tradition and
history that by the time the ceremony is over, both parties are so sick
of each other that they spend their entire married lives standing eight
feet apart and wearing facial expressions characteristic of a person
trying to suppress a burp the size of a Canadian air mass. We LOVE this.
Of course not all of you are fascinated. Some of you are saying:
``Why are we OBSESSED with these dreary people? Didn't we fight a
revolution to get rid of this self-appointed permanent ruling class of
bloodsucking parasites, so we'd have the right to be governed by an
ELECTED permanent ruling class of bloodsucking parasites? Besides, has
any member of the British royal family, in modern history, said or done
anything remotely interesting that did not involve falling off a horse?
So why on Earth should we CARE about them?''
It would be easy to dismiss the Americans who are fascinated with
British royalty as nothing but a bunch of brain-dead, no-life celebrity
moonies, but we must not do this, because one of them is my wife. No,
the reason we're fascinated by the royals is: They're better than we
are. Admit it! They are! For one thing, they have SENSATIONAL table
manners. Remember when President Bush launched his lunch on the Japanese
prime minister? If that had been Prince Charles, nobody would ever have
noticed, because the Prince would have suavely disguised it as a royal
remark:
PRINCE CHARLES: I should (suavely ducks his head under the table)
ratherrRRAALPHHGGACK (suavely raises his head back up) very much.
JOURNALISTS IN THE BACK: What did he say?
OTHER JOURNALISTS: He said ``I should ratherrRRAALPHHGGACK very much.
''
(Everybody writes this down, including the prime minister.)
Also you would never see Prince Charles playing saxophone on
``Arsenio.'' French horn, maybe. The point being that the royals have
WAY more class than we do, which is why we should continue to be
obsessed with them in molecular detail. Although in all fairness, I
should point out that I made up the part at the beginning about Charles'
waxing his legs. He was waxing Prince ANDREW'S legs. Linda, call Beth.
1992
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