WAYNE KUBLALSINGH
THIS YEAR marks the 60th anniversary of Master/Lord Funny’s first stage appearance. He performed on Carnival Friday night at the Queen’s Hall in 1965. Funny is now 85. On February 6, he performed two of his songs at the Calypso Review tent in Arima. The first was about time, the second about a true story that is not true.
While walking in the city, Funny met an old girlfriend. The twosome began reminiscing. About their childhood days, in school, their green days by the river. Funny recounts the encounter:
We grew up from small,
She was surprised to see
How muscular that I got,
And so handsome and tall;
She say, it doesn’t seem like long,
We were so very young.
You mean so much time went by?
Like was just the other day
We used to run and play;
Oh, how time could really fly.
Funny regaled his friend with the following treatise on time:
Day before yesterday
Was yesterday yesterday;
Yesterday was today yesterday;
Today was tomorrow yesterday;
Tomorrow today, go be yesterday;
Day after tomorrow, tomorrow,
Go be yesterday.
Funny’s chorus (response) supports his paradoxical lesson (call):
Time does fly.
How time does fly.
How time, does flyyyy.
Many great bards, philosophers, scientists have given us their provocative and paradoxical epistles on time.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me (Richard II);
What is past is prologue (Tempest).
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time (Macbeth). Albert Einstein, in his General Theory of Relativity, posited that time is not constant; it is relative to space.
Time flies. Even before today rounds the corner, it seems, it becomes yesterday. After tomorrow will soon become a yesterday, today’s tomorrow. The day before yesterday was yesterday’s yesterday. All our histories and lives are soon heaped into a layered rack of yesterdays. No one may stop life, their futures from becoming yesterdays. Thus says Master Funny.
Funny’s diction, enunciation are crisp and studio clear. His intonation, phrasing, modulation, timing are impeccable. Following the dictum of Polonius in Hamlet, “never a borrower or a lender be,” he neither begs, borrows, nor buys songs. For over 70 years, he has been mining his own wit, stirred by everyday happenings, a newspaper story, a line in the Students Companion, a conversation, to create masterpiece after masterpiece of wit.
Polonius avers that “brevity is the soul of wit.” I say that wit is the soul of kaiso. And Funny epitomises the highest estate of wit. He is not merely a funny or jokey man; fun and jokes are not the end of this songs. He uses wit and humour to instruct the king and court, all of us.
[caption id="attachment_1137099" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Wayne Kublalsingh -[/caption]
Like the historic griot or court jester, he does not bludgeon us with condemnation. He spices unsavoury truths with the salt and spice of wit. He uses puzzling language,
