Funny Boy Versus the Bubble-Brained Barbers from the Big Bang (11 page)

Purple is my favorite color.
That’s it! The word “color” sparked something in the farthest corners of my memory. Jokes started flooding into my brain.

“Speaking of the color purple,” I said, “what’s the difference between a grape and a chicken?”

“Me not know,” Bo Barber said.

“They’re both purple, except for the chicken.”

“Please stop that,” Barry said. “It’s annoying.”

“More jokes!” Punch shouted. “Quickly!”

“What’s red and shaped like a bucket?” I asked.

“Me not know.”

“A red bucket!”

“Please!” Barry moaned. “Nobody wants to listen to that. You’re giving me a headache.”

“Tell another one!” Bob Foster yelled.

“What’s black, white, and a zebra?” I asked.

“Me not know.”

“A zebra!”

“Ugh!” Barry said. “How does he do it? Just when I think he has told the worst joke in history, he comes out with one that’s even less funny than the one before!”

“Ask me if I’m an orange,” I commanded them.

“Are you an orange?”

“No!” I replied.

“Ugh!” Barry Barber moaned. “I think my head is going to explode if I have to listen to one more of these.”

“What’s pink and fluffy?”

“Me not know.”

“Pink fluff!”

“My brains hurt!” moaned Bo Barber. “My brains hurt.”

“No more,” Burly Barber groaned, holding his hands over his ears. “Me do anything! No more stupid jokes!”

“Okay,” I said. “I want the three of you lunatics out of here. Understand? Hop on the next barber pole heading for Depilatory and never come back. You read me?”

“No!” Barry Barber shouted suddenly. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and rolled it up. Then he wrapped it around my head so it covered my mouth. He tied it tightly.

“That ought to shut him up,” Barry said.

“But it won’t shut
me
up!” came a voice from behind us.

“Who said that?” Bob Foster asked.

I turned around.

It was Salvatore, that big guy in my class at school! The three barbers shrank back in fear.

“Salvatore!” I shouted, after he cut me loose with his pocket knife. “What are
you
doing here?”

“I had to save you,” he explained. “Mrs. Wonderland always hated me. Then you came into the class telling those dumb jokes, and she hated you even more. She left me alone for a while. But then you got all depressed and stopped telling jokes, so Mrs. Wonderland got on my case again. I have to bring you back so you can tell more jokes at school. It’s the only way I’ll ever make it out of fourth grade.”

“But how did you get to Toronto?”

“I stowed away on your limo and your plane,” Salvatore said.

What a pal!

“I’ve got a joke, too,” Salvatore said to the cowering barbers. “Who is big and strong and is going to hurt you?”

“Me not know.”

“I am!” Salvatore announced, raising his fist. “Now scram before I turn you into shredded wheat.”

The three barbers started running toward their spaceship so fast, their toupees fell off.

“See?” Punch said. “I told you everything would turn out okay in the end. It always does in these fictional stories.”

“That was a close shave,” I said.

After It Was All Over ...

Well, once again I have conquered the forces of evil. I couldn’t have done it on my own. With you doing the reading and me hitting those creepy barbers with my jokes, goodness and niceness have prevailed.

Together, we have made the world safe. Safe for individually wrapped slices of cheese. Safe for WrestleMania and Mr. Potato Head. Safe for talking toys that start talking in the middle of the night when you’re trying to sleep. Safe for Slim Jims and junk E-mail and Kmart.

As a gesture of goodwill, I walked over to the spaceship on the launchpad. Bo, Barry, and Burly were just about to get on board. They looked depressed and defeated.

“To show you I have no hard feelings,” I told them, “I would like to give you a small gift to take back to Delipatory.”

I took a red plastic comb out of my pocket and handed it to Barry Barber.

“A comb?” he asked, puzzled. “Why are you giving us this? Everyone on our planet is bald. What are we going to do with a comb?”

“I wanted to give you something you would never part with,” I said.

Barry Barber looked at me.

“It’s a joke!” I exclaimed. “Get it? Never part with?”

“Get inside the ship!” Barry Barber shouted to his brothers. “Quickly! He’ll never stop telling those awful jokes!”

“Me get out of this place!” Bo shouted as he slammed the hatch behind him.

“Wait!” I hollered, pounding on the side of the ship. “I just thought of some more jokes to tell you.”

The engine fired up and a huge roar echoed off the sides of the Rogers Centre. I backed away as flames shot out the bottom of the barber pole.

Slowly, the pole rose off the ground. Bob Foster, Punch, Salvatore, and I waved as it gained speed and rocketed into the sky. “Some folks,” I said, “just can’t take a joke.”

Naturally, none of what you just read made the news. The government was careful not to let the public know how close Earth had come to being destroyed.
The Bo, Barry, and Burly Show
was on TV that night as scheduled, with three actors pretending to be Bo, Barry, and Burly. Nobody knew the difference.

When I went to school the next day, there was no banner welcoming me back as a conquering hero. Salvatore threw me a wink, but nobody congratulated me or thanked me for what I had done.

“You’re late!” Mrs. Wonderland snapped when I walked through the door. “Where’s your homework?”

“I didn’t do it,” I admitted. “I was busy saving the world.”

“Is that the best excuse you can come up with?” Mrs. Wonderland replied wearily. “I’m really not in the mood for your foolishness today.”

“Mood?” I said. “Speaking of mood, what do cows get when they’re sick?”

“What?”

“Hay fever!”

“Go to Principal Werner’s office!” she shouted.

“Way to go, dork!” Salvatore said as I passed his desk. He stuck out his hand and I slapped it.

Well, that concludes this adventure. Until we meet again, my friends, I leave you with one small piece of wisdom. A laugh, which brings so much happiness to the world, is merely the sudden discharge of air from the body. And so is blowing your nose, sneezing, belching, coughing, and farting.

Okay, you can stop reading now.

Dan Gutman was born in a log cabin in Illinois and used to write by candlelight with a piece of chalk on a shovel. Oh, wait a minute, that was Abraham Lincoln. Actually, Dan Gutman grew up in New Jersey and, for some reason, still lives there.

Somehow, Dan survived his bland and uneventful childhood, and then attended Rutgers University, where he majored in psychology for reasons he can’t explain. After a few years of graduate studies, he disappointed his mother by moving to New York City to become a starving writer.

In the 1980s, after several penniless years writing untrue newspaper articles, unread magazine articles, and unsold screenplays, Gutman supported himself by writing about video games and selling unnecessary body parts. He edited
Video Games Player
magazine for four years. And, although he knew virtually nothing about computers, he spent the late 1980s writing a syndicated column on the subject.

In 1990, Gutman got the opportunity to write about something that had interested him since childhood: baseball. Beginning with
It Ain’t Cheatin’ If You Don’t Get Caught
(1990), Gutman wrote several nonfiction books about the sport, covering subjects such as the game’s greatest scandals and the history of its equipment.

The birth of his son, Sam, inspired Gutman to write for kids, beginning with
Baseball’s Biggest Bloopers
(1993). In 1996, Gutman published
The Kid Who Ran for President
, a runaway hit about a twelve-year-old who (duh!) runs for president. He also continued writing about baseball, and the following year published
Honus & Me
, a story about a young boy who finds a rare baseball card that magically takes him back to 1909 to play with Honus Wagner, one of the game’s early greats. This title stemmed a series about time-travel encounters with other baseball stars such as Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, and, in
Ted & Me
(2012), Ted Williams.

In his insatiable quest for world domination, Dan also wrote
Miss Daisy Is Crazy
(2004) and launched the My Weird School series, which now spans more than forty books, most recently
Mayor Hubble Is in Trouble!
(2012).

As if he didn’t have enough work to do, Gutman published
Mission Unstoppable
(2011), the first adventure novel in the Genius Files series, starring fraternal twins Coke and Pepsi McDonald. There will be six books in the series, in which the twins are terrorized by lunatic assassins while traveling cross-country during their summer vacation. These books are totally inappropriate for children, or anybody else for that matter.

Gutman lives in Haddonfield, New Jersey, with his wife and two children. But please don’t stalk him.