The Joke That Never Goes Away
by Don Hobbs

My wife Joyce has been taking Italian classes for the past two years. She is at the point where she understands enough to follow conversations in Italian. We are planning a trip to southern Italy next May. She signed up for an online Italian review site and gets periodic emails written in Italian with exercises for her to work on.

She received one of those emails yesterday and immediately called my attention to it  because there was a mention of Sherlock Holmes. By clicking on the link, a small Sherlock Holmes story came up on the screen. Joyce was having trouble reading it because it used future tense and this was an area her Italian had not yet mastered. I took a look and was able to relate the story to her in detail. This elicited a look of suspicion because she knows that I am not normally capable of reading Italian, especially as proficiently as I had just displayed.

My charade was soon revealed. I confessed to Joyce that the story she just received had already made its way around the Sherlockian community a few years back. What she had was the famous tent joke, only in Italian. Here it is once again, only in Italian.

Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes ed il Dottore Watson andarono a fare campeggio. Dopo una gustosa cenetta ed una bottiglia di buon vino, si sistemarono per la notte. Alcune ore più tardi, Holmes si sveglia e scuote il suo fedele amico.
«Watson, guarda il cielo e dimmi che cosa vedi.»
Watson risponde: «Vedo milioni e milioni di stelle».
«Che cosa ti dice tutto ciò?»
Watson pensò per un minuto, poi rispose in perfetto tono anglosassone:
«Astronomicamente posso osservare milioni di galassie e potenzialmente bilioni di pianeti. Astrologicamente osservo che Saturno è in Leone. Temporalmente deduco che sono circa le tre ed un quarto. Teologicamente posso osservare la potenza di Dio e riconoscermi piccolo ed insignificante. Metereologicamente stabilisco che domani sarà una giornata serena. Cosa significa per lei?»
Holmes rimane in silenzio per un po’, poi dice: «Watson, sei il solito superficiale! Qualcuno ci ha rubato la tenda!».

Happy Collecting!!