Kibitzer King

     Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

     Yes but don’t because it is really an heirloom.  A legacy.  It was invented by my Uncle Morty who was a kind of gag genius and I have the original scrap of paper in the album to prove it.

     Morty was an artist in a sense, the only one in a family of teachers and lawyers.  I imagined him painting portraits in a dim light when I was little but in fact, as I found out, he drew the weather map for a big city newspaper.  I wasn't disappointed because a big city, as anyone knows, has a lot of weather in it.  So he was a very busy man.

     But he was also a kibitzer king, not of stale jokes and dumb puns but of visual tricks and tricky bits.  One time he put the head of Mickey Mouse instead of a sun over a nice day in Florida, or at least that’s what he told me.  I believed him because he was the one who showed me how to juggle with a single orange and how to make a newspaper tree.  Very entertaining that.  I still can do it.

     One day I went to visit him at his office and with a few moments to spare, he told me about the buzz that day, the big news.  Not on his weather map but from Page One.  I was twelve and very impressed that he was in the loop about all that.

     He said these archaeologists digging in Israel had discovered a cave with strange symbols carved on the wall.  To make it all more vivid to me – because at that age I needed things spelled out – he drew them on a piece of paper.  The one above which I must have saved and stuck into the album somewhere along the line, sensing its importance.

    He gave me some time to study the images on the paper, then explained that after weeks of study, a team of Jewish scholars finally made sense of the strange set of symbols.

     My uncle put his finger on the first symbol and told me how one of the scholars, a sociologist, had explained:  "This is a figure of a woman and shows that women were important to that society.  Even then our people were socially advanced."

     Then the second scholar, an anthropologist, pointed to the second symbol, he explained, and said: “And this is clearly a donkey which shows that they used animals to cultivate the land.  They knew agriculture and therefore commerce.  Very industrious."

     “And that must be a shovel,” added the archeologist, ”which clearly proves that they were also sophisticated enough to create and use tools and even dig wells.”

     Finally the religious scholar explained the meaning of the last two symbols: “The fish and the Star of David,” she said, “show that they were Hebrews who were not only advanced in all these ways but also knew the sea and respected its bounty.”

     The scholars were very pleased with themselves, my uncle said, and very proud of their heritage.  But then the kid who had been pouring water for them and was not much older than me, suddenly spoke up. 

     “Yeah, they were Jews all right,” he said, “but you're all forgetting one thing."

     "What's that?" they asked, slightly insulted.

     "Remember that they were Hebrews and they read from right to left.  So obviously what this says is: ‘'Holy Mackerel, Dig The Ass On That Woman.'”

     I know what you are thinking because I thought it too.  Why am I telling you this?  It’s just an old joke with a new life online and in the cloud.  Repeated endlessly like everything else out there, a million iterations.

     To you maybe.

     But to me, this is another piece of my mazel.

     Because like I said, my uncle was an artist, the only one in a family of teachers and lawyers.  That fact inspired me when I was a kid.  You can make art with that in your genes and that is no small thing.  

     Yes, but the older I get the more I realize that it is even better to have a kibitzer king in there as a twist in the old double helix.  Because with that you can make funny and as some smarty pants once said, the world runs on only two things - tears and laughter - and it is no great sorrow if we run out of the former.