Happy Gaughan's Day

"At one-thirty in the afternoon of what will no doubt be known as Gaughan's Day and celebrated as a national festival, Richard Gaughan (29), of 75 Sherman Avenue, entered the studio of the Columbia Broadcasting Company during the rehearsal of a television show, armed with an eight-inch knife.

"I hate all television!" he announced. "I hate commentators. I hate the whole lousy bunch. There ought to be a law against television. I want to kill a TV operator."

Having spoken these words, which must have touched a responsive chord in many bosom, this splendid fellow proceeded to stab a cameraman and to hit the producer on the frontal bone with a carafe. And lest you purse your lips at the latter statement, saying to yourselves "Hullo! What's this? Did Gaughan weaken?" I must explain that a carafe, picked up on the set, was all he had to work with. After he stabbed the cameraman, the knife broke. He had paid only fifty-nine cents for it, not reflecting that you cannot get a really good carving knife as cheap as that. If you are going to stab a cameraman, it is always wisest to go as high as a dollar.

It was as he was about to attack the director that the police came in and scooped him up, a sad disappointment to the better element. It appears that there is some law against wiping out television directors with carafes, one of those strange laws that get passed occasionally, nobody knows why.

Where Richard Gaughan - Gaughan the Deliverer most of us are calling him now - went wrong, in my opinion, was in confining his activities to a rehearsal, for by doing so he missed the studio audience. He should have bided his time till one of these gangs had been assembled.

Where everything about television is so frightful, it is difficult to say which is its most repulsive feature, but the majority of connoisseurs would, I think, pick the studio audience. If it would only stay quiet, nobody would have any complaint, but it won't. It laughs like a congregation of hyenas at everything. The other night on what was for some reason described as a comedy program a girl said to a man, "You are selfish."

To which re replied: "How dare you call me a shellfish?"

The studio audience let out a bellow of mirth which was audible as far downtown as the Battery, and all over America strong men gritted their teeth and muttered, "Gaughan, thou shouldst be living at this hour!"

But a time will come. In ninety days or whatever it is he will be with us once more. Good huntng, Richard Gaughan. And don't make that mistake again of trying to do it on the cheap. Avoid bargain prices. Even if it costs as much as two dollars, get a good knife."

(P.G.Wodehouse, "Gaughan the Deliverer", um capítulo de "America, I Like You", 1956)

Posted by Alexandre S. at February 19, 2007 06:08 AM