Sketch 1

TOILET CLEANER

The character is a toilet cleaner, a 30-something black man, with a matric certificate. The style of the piece is, on the one hand, to talk to his ‘clients’ and to alternate this with speaking to the audience. He has the tools of his trade: a cloth and water bottle with a spray top. He is light, charming and funny, with everything told with a broad smile.

CLEANER [to audience]: My father always told me to finish my matric so I could get a good job. He only had primary school education … so he worked as a labourer in the building trade. Till he passed on to that big mansion in the sky. I got my matric. And a job at the OR Tambo airport departures terminal. I wonder how my father would feel about his son being an engineer? A ‘sanitary engineer’ …

[Sniggers.] Big name for a toilet cleaner.

[To a ‘client’.] Hello, sir, welcome to my boardroom. You can use cubicle number two … let me just wipe your throne [as if wiping the toilet seat] before you sit down. Enjoy it, sir. [To another.] Hello, boss. Allow me to turn on the tap. You can dry your hands here, chief.

[Putting out his hand to a third to accept a tip.] Oh, thank you, sir. God bless.

[To audience.] You probably think this is going to be full of toilet humour.

[Reassuringly.] Relax. It's not a Leon Schuster movie. But there are some funny things that happen here. [Acting out some of the scenes.] Like the guys who come in, bursting to use the loo, but it's a full house! Then you see them doing these strange things [imitating people trying to keep in their poo] to make sure they don't mess in their pants. I call it ‘the number two shuffle’! [Does it again, exaggeratedly.]

But there was this one guy who actually did wet his pants. Too much coffee, he explained later. His breath did smell like coffee, with a lot of Irish! I helped him by washing his pants in the basin and then drying it under the hand-dryer while he waited in a cubicle in his yellow underpants.