Peter Cook on Intelligent Design

Ich blättere grade im wunderbaren Buch Tragically I Was An Only Twin, eine Anthologie von Texten und Sketchen des großartigen Peter Cook, und finde darin diesen Dialog mit seinem langjährigen Partner Dudley Moore:

PETE: A gecko, Dud, is a lizard what has sucking pads on its feet.
DUD: So it can hang on glass.
PETE: It can if it likes. It can hang on anything it fancies. It has a wonderful life, except, of course, it has to eat flies. Did you know that?
DUD: No, I didn’t.
PETE: Oh yes, it has to eat flies, ‚cause, as you know, God created it, like he did everything else in his almighty wisdom, and all the animals have to eat each other to keep the population down. And geckos got lumbered with flies. It’s all right when it’s born. Its mother gives it some flies, all mashed up, daintly garnished with a daisy on top of it, so it can’t tell what it’s eating. But as soon as it learns to speak, Dud, and communicate, it says to its mother, ‚Excuse me, what’s this I’m eating?‘ and she has to reply ‚Flies‘.
DUD: ‚Darling‘.
PETE: Of course. She says, ‚Flies, darling, and they’re very good for you‘. But that’s why the gecko doesn’t live very long, because he can’t bear eating the stuff.

Das ist aus dem Sketch At The Zoo von 1966. Bei einem anderen Dialog sagt schon der Titel, worum es geht: Religion, und die schwierige Frage, ob die Heiden in den Himmel kommen.

PETE: Well, I asked the Reverend Stephens this, and he said that if you haven’t been told about God, Dud, you’re laughing. You can do anything you bloody well like. There’s these people in New Guinea, for example. They wander about with nothing on and they commit adultery, steal, and covet their neighbour’s wife, which everyone wants to do. As there are no vicars about, to tell them everything, they can’t be got at, so they go up to heaven whatever they do. This means all these nig-nogs are getting up to heaven, and perfectly decent blokes like you and me, who have never even committed adultery, we can’t get up there – we’re being kept out by these Guineans.
DUD: You see in that case, Pete, it’d be a crime to tell people about God.
PETE: I’ve never told anyone about God.

Peter Cook war laut Stephen Fry „der lustigste Mensch, der jemals Atem schöpfte“. Da ist viel dran, und wer’s nicht glaubt, sollte sich die erwähnte Anthologie besorgen oder diese wunderbare
Website ausprobieren.