There Are Still a Few Reasons to Laugh, Despite the Coronavirus －コロナウイルスにもかかわらず、まだ笑う理由がいくつかある－

There is lots of terrible news about the coronavirus pandemic.  It is important to read enough about the subject in order to understand how to protect yourself and other people – Wash your hands with soap, stay away from groups, etc.  But I think it is important not to read too much about it.  After a while, there is no more useful information you can get, and all the awful stories will make you panic or feel depressed. 

So you must try to find a few stories you can laugh at too.  Here are three which made me laugh recently.


1 –Watch what people do, not what they say 

When people started panic-buying toilet paper and pasta in the U.K., I talked with my father on the phone.  “These people are crazy,” he said.  “From everyone’s ridiculous over-buying, you would think the end of the world was coming!  They really ought to know better.” 

Then when he passed the phone over to my mother, she told me that there was hardly any room to move in the house because of all the toilet paper and pasta that my father had been buying.


2 –Cynical citizens 

An acquaintance who is an office worker in a Japanese company overheard an interestingly cynical conversation. 

The Japanese CEO was talking about why Europe and America seemed (so far) to be suffering worse than Japan. 

“It is lucky that we Japanese are so well-behaved, conscious of health and cleanliness, and willing to follow the rules.  Even with an incompetent government and weak leadership, we can still survive better than many countries.”


3 – Pretty eyes 

My wife sat alongside one of her female colleagues for several hours at work.  Her colleague’s pretty eyes peeked out from above her mask, which she wore even indoors. 

Then, during a break, my wife got a surprise when her colleague took off her mask to sip some tea.  A bare and slightly red face appeared below the heavy eye-shadow and fake eye-lashes.  The woman had only bothered to put on the make-up which would be visible when wearing a mask. 

“It saves a lot of time” she explained, happily.



Vocabulary:

a pandemic–the spread of a disease over many countries or a very wide area

cynical – distrustful of human sincerity or good motives

to overhear something – to hear something by accident

incompetent – not having the skills to do something well

to peek out – to be slightly visible