A suspected Covid-19 male patient is lying in bed in the hospital, wearing an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose.
A young student female nurse appears and gives him a partial sponge bath. “Nurse,”’ he mumbles from behind the mask, “are my testicles black?”
Embarrassed, the young nurse replies, “I don’t know, Sir. I’m only here to wash your upper body and feet.”
He struggles to ask again, “Nurse, please check for me. Are my testicles black?”
Concerned that he might elevate his blood pressure and heart rate from worrying about his testicles, she overcomes her embarrassment and pulls back the covers. She raises his gown, holds his manhood in one hand and his testicles gently in the other. She looks very closely and says, “There’s nothing wrong with them, Sir. They look fine.”
The man slowly pulls off his oxygen mask, smiles and says very slowly, "Thank you very much. Now listen very, very, closely:
The thing about Caribbeans is… we just say we’re Caribbean… makes life a whole lot easier… which suits our laidback demeanour, as a Carib ain’t got time for none of That… hence the Jamaicans in that video identifying as Jamaican.
Black Caribbean… me a Caribbean, seen
White Caribbean… me Caribbean, ok
Chinese Caribbean… me Caribbean, u nuh
Indian Caribbean… when’s the roti ready?
Mixed Caribbean… stop asking me stu-pidness!
What’s so brilliant about this guy is - aside from his physical ability to impersonate and sound like - how he is able to improvise the lines around the basic theme he has before hand. He knows the joke he has in mind before he starts, but he doesn’t have a plan to deliver it; he not reading from script, in other words. So he’s got to be able to carry us through at least two minutes on the fly while he sets up. This is difficult, but for him it’s some of the richest moments of perfect impersonation. When he’s having to think quickly he’s able to almost instinctually intuit what trump would have said… this is why he never fucks up and does it so well. These are the greatest comedians- the parodists - in my opinion.
The delicate and precise art of extracting behavioral nuance from extremely difficult places. The littlest things - a sudden dive in tonality, the brief pause, stuttering, use and resuse of signature words and phrases at the right time… etc.
See this is what I mean. In the bounty one, he says the ‘paper towels’ phrase a few times in the same timbre… then suddenly says it differently at the end when Putin orders the paper towels (right before ‘dont you feel stupid now’). It’s right there… as if act were a written piece of music building to its coda. That last line when he changes the timbre. That’s such a subtle gesture, such a beautiful ‘last lick’ in the lead as it reaches its conclusion. This man is a genius.
I explained once before how of all the possible bathotic turns of plot in human drama, the comedic creates the greatest tonic feeling… and that’s not for nothing. Even better than the tragic because the tragic yields only brute force and it isnt clever enough.
It’s not for nothing that congenial displays of friendly wit are very often the first exchanges that unfold between strangers, and when two are able to recognize a good, sophisticated irony (pun for example) together, the kinda rise out and above themselves together. N said something to this effect, but much better, about the power of laughter. We add that it isnt always a catharsis… not always a discharge of nervous energy. If there is anything mysterious about human nature, it’s in the hows and whys we find things funny.
