How about a couple jokes to get us started?
Do you know how copper wire was invented?
Two misers fighting over a penny.
A woman named her miserly husband T-Rex.
Because his arms are too short to reach his pockets1.
Misers are miserable
Sam Beckbessinger
This is factually inaccurate. Misers are superior, smug and self-satisfied. I should know, I am one, I grew up in a family of them. And, we have good reason to feel that way because misers are good with money. Rich people are misers; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say misers are rich. Why? Because misers do not let go of their money. Remember a few years ago that quote from Terry Pratchett made news because some economists named a theorem after it?
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet
Terry Pratchett – Men at Arms
A miser knows this. A miser resents having to buy boots in the first place. When a miser goes shoe shopping he will look at nothing but boots. He will go to five different stores to compare boots. And then buy the boots he saw in the first store.
This was literally what shopping trips with my father were like. My mother would land up spending twice as much as him on stuff she didn’t need, out of embarrassment.
This same woman, when shopping with her teenage daughter, would always respond to any request for a new top with ‘what will you wear it with?’. If I couldn’t name at least three other garments I wasn’t getting the damn top. To this day I can still hear her voice in my head when looking at a potential purchase.
Misers know the value of money. A relative, recently returned from a trip to the UK, related the unpleasant experience of trying out a nausea inducing experimental craft beer. When we asked why he finished the entire pint, his response was ‘It cost 7 pounds!’
This attitude can, oh course, go too far and that’s when you get your scrooges. My grandfather refused to let his wife put the gas heater on more than a single bar. She had the thing pulled so close to her chair the blanket on her lap was singed. The old coot wasn’t paying for the gas, the family was!
The best part of being a miser is very simple. Misers don’t take on debt. Which in a world where everybody is trying to sell you shit they know you can’t afford, is the most evolutionarily advantageous trait of all.
Misers are not miserable. But their dependants are.
- Both these jokes were shared with me by Karin, hairdresser extraordinaire (thanks to you and the customers who shared them) ↩︎
