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The 'Stretch' in Fiction and Real Life Barry Farber Sometimes an offensive joke can win its way through the political-correct checkpoint provided it carries sufficient humor to disarm the flint-face frowners. I think this one qualifies, despite our compassion for the mentally challenged. The director of an asylum had budget problems and was looking to see who he might allow to be discharged. He gathered three likely inmate candidates and asked them each, "How much is five times eight?" "Five times eight is a hundred and forty-nine," replied the first with giddy confidence. Clearly, no discharge for him. "Five times eight equals Wednesday," said the second. No discharge for him, either. The third said, "Five times eight is forty."
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As the director was helping that soon-to-be-ex inmate to the front of the institution with his belongings he asked him, "How did you manage to come up with the right answer; five times eight equals forty?" "Oh, nothing to it," he replied. "I just divided one hundred forty-nine by Wednesday." The purpose of the foregoing is not to spread uncontrollable hilarity across the land. It's intended to demonstrate what I mean by a "stretch." There's a "stretch" TV commercial that begins with a panic-stricken team in the control room of a nuclear power plant trying to prevent what looks like something between a China-Syndrome meltdown and the end of civilization as we know it. One of the scientifically garbed and masked men barks cool and emphatic orders and almost instantly the crisis fizzles out and the world is saved. As they all cheer, one of the men asks the hero, "How long have you been on the team?"
"Oh," confesses he. "I'm not really a scientist, but I DID spend the night at a Holiday Inn Express!" You may have wondered how a commercial can dare suggest you can acquire earth-saving knowledge of nuclear power plants only by spending the night in a certain motel. There's a doctrine in advertising that gives you permission to make wild claims provided they're wild enough so that everybody knows you're kidding. Usually "stretches" are fictional, but not always. I've told you about the Hungarian refugees in Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, in 1956, who refused offers of resettlement in Indianapolis because they were afraid of the Indians. War correspondent Robert St. John, in his book "From the Land of the Silent People," wrote about the Greek woman in 1941 who, as the Nazi Stuka dive-bombers were destroying Athens and Hitler's infantry was swarming all over Greece, went to the American Embassy and swore to a clerk she had slept with an American sailor during World War I so could they please furnish her with papers that would allow her to leave Nazi-occupied Greece and enter America. President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave us a new kind of stretch, half-kidding but the other half enough to send anxious Japanese intelligence officers scrambling for atlases of Asia. Within five months of their devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, American B-25 bombers appeared over Tokyo and, even though for less than one full minute, bombed the arrogance and confidence out of the Japanese, who up to that moment had every right to assume everything in the war was going their way. Where could those planes have come from? Everybody knew America lacked bases that could launch such an attack. And refitted aircraft carriers couldn't accommodate planes as big as B-25s. A jubilant President Roosevelt, not revealing that a refitted carrier with bomber crews trained to lift off with less than a five-second tolerance had staged the raid, told America and the world, "Our planes were based in Shangri-La." Shangri-La was a fictional Tibetan location in the then-current novel "Lost Horizons." We didn't learn about the aircraft carrier until much later. Now, at last, angry Moslem mobs in Pakistan have given us the stretch that has everything – idiocy, incredibility, violence, a beheading of logic, a flogging of reason, and the unconditional surrender of intellect to emotion. When President George W. Bush visited Pakistan in early March of 2006, the rampaging Islamic mobs demonstrated against the American president. And why were they demonstrating against the American president? They were demonstrating against George W. Bush because of the cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad in a newspaper in Denmark! So we have to thank those Pakistani Moslems for taking an old and awful joke about bigotry and bringing it raging to real life on real streets by real angry mobs. You saw the real-life unfunny part played out on the streets of Pakistan. Now to the joke. Two Irishmen pull up in front of a Chinese laundry. One gets out, enters and says to the owner, "Wong, I don't have my ticket with me, but that's my bundle right there," pointing to a package on an upper shelf. Wong did NOT say, "No tickee, no laundry," but you're free to dub in an acceptable equivalent. "Wong," said the Irishman, "That's my bundle. My buddy's double-parked. Let me have it!" "Sorry," came the reply. "No ticket, no laundry." "Dammit, Wong," he said, "Open the package. I'll turn around and hold my hands over my eyes and tell you everything that's in there. Quit fooling around and let me have it." "I'm sorry," said Wong. "If you don't have a ticket, there's no way I can give you your laundry." "Wong," said the Irishman in pre-terminal exasperation. "I've been your customer for eighteen years. You give me that bundle or you will never see me or any of my friends again." "Sorry," repeated the implacable Wong. "Lacking a ticket, I cannot give you your laundry." The explosively infuriated Irishman stormed empty-handed out of the laundry, got back into the car, slammed the door, and said to his friend, "Damned Jew!" "Whaddaya mean, JEW?" His friend replied. "He's not Jewish. He's Chinese." "I know, " said the Irishman. "They're the worst kind. They don't even LOOK like Jews!"
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