Osama Bin-taking-himself-too-seriously

I THINK Coco the Clown started life as Attila the Hun.

You think not? You don’t see the connection between a bloke with a red nose and a permanent smile painted on his face and a man who destroyed most of Europe 1500 years ago?

Follow me through on this…

How do you deal with someone who seeks to strike terror in your heart? You laugh at him, that’s how.

Mark my words, in a few years Osama bin Laden will be the darling of circus tents the world over, doing funny walks and pratt falls and having goldfish poured in his baggy trousers. Possibly sooner, at the rate he’s going.

In the past two weeks I have received email messages from all over the world (no one I know – they just turn up as I suspect they are doing on computers everywhere) poking fun at the man who gave Terrorism a capital T.

I’ve had Osama bin beaten up; Rowan Atkinson with stick-on beard and two pancakes for a turban as Bean Laden; Bin Lager – the drink that will blow your mind; and suggestions that when he’s caught he should be subjected to a sex-change operation and sent back to Afghanistan to live as a woman.

The great thing about having someone really nasty in the world is that you can pick on him without feeling guilty about it. Hitler must have had more rude songs sung about him than Eskimo Nell.

It was all jolly good fun, too. Despite the London blitz and the anguish and the suffering, they were falling about in the music hall aisles over blokes with broomsticks down their trouser legs and toothbrushes under their noses.

When people hook false beards over their ears and drop ferrets down their baggy trousers they won’t be targeting Muslims or Saudi Arabians or Afghanis, but a nasty piece of work with a sick mind and not enough potty training.

I hear he rang up his mum before the dirty deed was done. I wonder how the conversation went?

“Hello Mum, you won’t hear from me for a few days because I’m going to kill a few thousand people.”

No wonder she ended up in hospital.

It will be Punch and Judy all over again. A bloke with a hump and a big nose (no offence to our olfactorily challenged cousins in the human race, but it’s interesting that Coco the Clown, Punch and Bin Horrid-to-his-mother all have big conks) shrieking: “that’s the way to do it!” while cudgelling seven bells out of a glove puppet shaped like one of the twin towers.

Bin Taking-himself-too-seriously has been taking himself too seriously, and there is only one suitable fate for people like that.

Not a fatwah nor a jihad, but a big red nose, a custard pie dripping off the beard, a firecracker tied to the coat tails and one foot in a bucket of water while being chased around the ring by a little fire engine with its bell ringing.