A: Would you like to attend <some event that is guaranteed to be so
boring, you would want to cut your wrists just to pit yourself out of misery>?
B: I think I am washing my hair.
A: Wahhh... you wash hair take so long time one, meh?
Okay... somebody here seriously needs some lessons in euphemisms and sarcasm. The above example may not really have happened. But believe me, I have heard of / read about very similar episodes in real life.
These are what
I call “potong steam” (Malay: Lit. “cut off the steam”, or kill-joy) responses to
really cheeky one-liners that were meant to be funny – not taken literally or seriously.
And I’ve read quite a few such singularly obtuse responses on Facebook
recently. It just takes all the fun out of dry
wit. I really feel like wringing the buggers’ throats and saying, “Which part of the joke don’t you get?” Come
to think of it, if you have to even ask the question, then the exercise of
explaining it is futile in itself. Perhaps it’s a language thing, no two ways
about it.
Neil Humphreys even devoted
one chapter of his book “Notes
from an Even Smaller Island” to this. I couldn’t agree more. These sad sods need to stop
taking things so literally, and get a life.
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