1. The three opening sections of " Pleased As Punch " :
Prologue.
In the beginning, the word :
"Oh!"
What happened next and next, was a bumpy evolution of beauty and logic
and a lumpy confusion of beauticians and logicians.
No like is the same.
One world wrapped in a shifting blanket of swirling gases.
Half of the sky covered by clouds : the shape of Australia, the face of a gargoyle.
The cover which saved Kokura and sent a thousand suns to bake Nagasaki.
It rains on us all, living or dead, hollows changed into puddles, soil into mud,
the earth's dirty washing hung up and strung out, disturbing the depths
to which we have sunk....
A finger tip. A fist. A twisted arm.
Matted hair. Eyes staring, seeing nothing.
Limbs akimbo. Identity in limbo. A man abolished.
Truth will be told, flaking away as flesh from bone.
In the end, a second opinion :
"Oh, shit!"
Another Prologue.
" When he went to the door and asked, 'Are you there?' to a person supposed to be
in the passage, the answer in the unusual voice was immediately ascribed by the audience
to a person actually in the passage ; and upon shutting the door and withdrawing from it,
when he turned round, directing his voice to the door, and said, 'Stay there till I call you'.
The answer, which was lower, and well-adapted to the supposed distance and obstacle
interposed, appeared still more strikingly to be out of the room. He then looked up to
the ceiling, and called out in his own voice, 'What are you doing above? - Do you intend
to come down?' to which an immediate answer was given, which seemed to be in the
room above. "I am coming down directly.' .... Other scenes which were to follow
required the imagination to be too completely misled to admit of the actor being seen.
He went behind a folding screen in one corner of the room, when he counterfeited the
knocking at a door. One person called from within, and was answered by a different
person from without, who was admitted ; and we found, from the conversation of the
parties, that the latter was in pain, and desirous of having a tooth extracted. The dialogue,
and all the particulars of the operation that followed, would require a long discourse,
if I were to attempt to describe them to the reader. The imitation of the natural and
modulated voices of the operator, encouraging, soothing, and talking with his patient,
the confusion, terror, and apprehension of the sufferer, the inarticulate noise produced
by the chairs and apparatus, upon the whole, constituted a mass of sounds which
produced a strange but comic effect. Loose observers would not have hesitated to
assert that they heard more than one voice at a time ; and although this certainly could
not be the case, and it did not appear so to me, yet the transitions were so instantaneous,
without the least pause between, that the notion might be very easily generated.
The removal of the screen satisfied the spectators that one performer had effected
the whole. "
from : 'Account of the Performances of Different Ventriloquists,
with Observations on the Art of Ventriloquism'
- Edinburgh Journal of Science, (1828).
A Third And Final Prologue.
Exploding - Bottle Opener 1.20p
Exploding - Chewing Gum 1.20p
Exploding - Cigarette 1.40p
Exploding - Coins 1.20p
Exploding - Golf Ball 1.99p
Exploding - Hand Shaker 1.25p
Exploding - Money 1.25p
Exploding - Pen 1.20p
Exploding - Soap 1.20p
Exploding - Toilet Seat 0.50p
Exploding - Bomb 2.75p
.
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