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Soap in one hand

1 Feb 11 | Re: Non-observational comedy

You know when you drop the soap in the bath and it’s really difficult to find it again? No? No? No, me neither. I’ve heard a number of jokes and humoristic allusions predicated on the idea, but I have never experienced it myself. You just feel around, find it and then pick it back up. Dropping the soap into the bathtub is a non-event. It seems to be one of those lazy observational-comic tropes, like man-flu, that doesn’t exist in reality but that everyone recognises from previous comic material.

In normal circumstances, that is. Just lately I’ve had a little patch of bad skin on one hand that I’ve been trying to avoid getting wet. I can tell you, readers, that finding the soap in the bath with only one hand is difficult. So, mystery solved. Clearly, all the original stuff about losing the soap in the bath was written by a one-armed man. Everyone must have found his allusions to the problem so hilarious that they repeated them without first-hand corroboration, and so the idea caught on. People would occasionally drop the soap in the bath themselves and not have trouble picking it up; but since it is, as noted above, a non-event, it wouldn’t particularly have stuck in their minds.

Posted by VICTORIA NORTHWICH at 18:14

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