THE last time I learned something was one summer during my college years. I was a waiter in New York, and occasionally the cook needed me to, say, break a thousand eggs (to this day I can break an egg the way Michael Chang returns a serve). One day hetold me to come back at five o'clock. 'Will you be here?' I asked.
The cook had 15 centimetres, 25 years, and 90 kilograms on me. 'No,' he said, in a voice resembling a passing Concorde, 'I'll be at Radio City Music Hall.' The kitchen staff had a good laugh.
I learned that day not to ask stupid questions.
In school, teachers tell us there is no such thing as a stupid question; what is stupid is not asking questions. But then some student will ask: 'How did they know the Hundred Years' War was going to last a hundred years when they named it?' Yes, there are stupid questions. I find many of them are job-related, and they come in two different types. Firstly, there is the innocent stupid question. When saxophonist Paul Desmond told people that he played with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, he would often hear: 'Oh. Uh, how many people are there in your quartet?' Then there is the sarcastic stupid question. When a bass fiddle player hauls his enormous instrument to a gig, at least one stranger, thinking himself an authentic wit, will come up to ask: 'Don't you wish you had taken up the flute?' or possibly, 'How doyou get that under your chin?' The sarcastic stupid question may seem funnier than the standard stupid question by comparison but, before you ask one, be warned that it has surely been heard before. You may be tempted to ask a dentist: 'Are you of German extraction?' or possibly 'Wheredid you learn the drill?' Do not. Other favourites to avoid: 'I suppose your theme song is The Yanks Are Coming,' and 'Let me know if you strike oil.' I once told a percussionist he did a bang-up job, and he just looked at me. And never tell a trombonist: 'I bet you're not really swallowing that thing.' Genuine moronic queries appear to be linked to human nature, for they persist from age to age. Well over a century ago William Dean Howells asked Mark Twain during a rainstorm: 'Do you think it will stop?' Twain replied: 'It always has.' Yet people still ask this question as if Twain had not closed the matter.
Twain, of course, was perceptive enough to understand that stupid questions were often concealed in profound-sounding ones.
'Mr Twain, in a world without women, what might men become?' 'Scarce, madam. Mighty scarce.' Twain was good at quick retorts. So was the painter James Whistler. 'Whatever possessed you to be born in Lowell, Massachusetts?' a society woman asked him. 'I wished to be near my mother,' Whistler replied.
