James was a mime artist – a very good one too – who for many years had made an excellent living performing his mimes in the streets and squares of London before large admiring crowds. However, of late he had noticed that the audiences for his performances had been steadily declining. He blamed Television, of course, but there was no denying that the coins thrown into his hat had become fewer and fewer, and of smaller and smaller denomination, and all in all it was becoming difficult for a chap to keep body and soul together.
He was musing thus one afternoon as he entertained two small boys and a bored Jack Russell outside Regents Park Zoo - one of his former more profitable venues - when a uniformed attendant came out through the turnstiles and grasped his arm. “Look here, do you want a steady job for a bit – free food and reasonable wages?” “Doing what?” asked James warily. “One of our main attractions – Ernie the Gorilla – has just died, and we need a mime artist to impersonate him for a few weeks until we get a replacement. We`ve already got a suit from last time it happened, but we need someone to start right away”. After a brief haggle about wages James agreed, was taken into the zoo, donned the gorilla suit, and was let into the empty cage by the back entrance.
James soon got into the swing of things (literally – he was a bit of an acrobat as well), and in no time at all he was pulling in the crowds with his antics. After a time he got more adventurous and found that he could squeeze through the bars of his cage into the adjoining cage occupied by a large and fearsome lion, and once there his favourite trick was to would hang from the top bars of the lion`s cage, gibbering and pulling faces at the lion who would roar in rage at him and stand on its hind legs lashing out at him with its great claws. The crowds absolutely loved this, and would cheer James on to even more bravado.
Unfortunately, one day James tried one trick too many, and, losing his hold on the bars, fell with a crash onto the floor of the lions cage, landing on his back and knocking all the breath out of him. Before he could recover the lion had turned, snarled, and covering the width of the cage in two great bounds, was standing over the prostrate James, his giant forepaws either side of James`s chest, and his great jaws agape ready to bite James`s head off and his feotid breath almost suffocating him. James, terrified out of his wits, could only think of one thing. He yelled “Help! Help”. The lion lowered its head, thrusting its gaping jaws closer to James`s face and…..
said “Shut up you fool. Do you want to get us both sacked?”
