The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey

A man and his son were taking their donkey to market when they passed a countryman. “You fools! Why have a donkey if you don’t ride upon him?” The father and his son conceded that the countryman had a point, but they beat him up anyway (and stole his walking stick) because he was smaller and older than them.

            The father put his son on the donkey, but they soon encountered a group of men, one of whom said, “See that lazy boy; he lets his father walk while he rides.” The father thought this was a good point, and swapped places with his son, but not before using the countryman’s walking stick to beat the man to death for his impertinence.

            They hadn’t walked far when they passed two women, one of whom said to the other, “What a disgrace for a father to allow his son to walk while he lazily sits on a donkey.” Both the father and the son were unreconstructed males and therefore didn’t believe in equality, so they didn’t beat up the woman but instead smashed the windows of her house when they passed it a few minutes later; they then put a Molotov cocktail through her letterbox.

            The son, having agreed with the woman, then joined his father on the donkey, by which time they had entered the town to much pointing and jeering. “But why do you jeer?” asked the father.

            “You should be ashamed of yourself overloading that poor donkey!” scoffed a man, who received a broken jaw and ruptured spleen for his pains.

            Father and son, having jointly administered this beating, then looked around for their donkey, but found to their dismay that it had been run over by an Eddie Stobart lorry.

And the moral of the story is:

If you go around beating people up all the time, you might lose your donkey.