What the Butler Saw

"The whole trouble with Western society

Today," you said, "is the lack of anything worth Concealing."* Ah, Joe, how wrong you were!

A few weeks later, your “longtime companion” Ken beat your brains out with a hammer while You slept, nine blows "struck in a frenzy."

(Or might it have been a deliberate count?)

Washing down two dozen Nembutals

With grapefruit juice, he left a note to say:

“If you read his diary all will be explained.”

Now there was something worth concealing!

What the Butler Saw still has me in stitches.**

(Your comic masterpiece—you'd just finished Writing it—didn’t premiere till two years later.)

What we really lack aren’t secrets worth Revealing, but listeners who’ll accept them:

"Something sensational to read on the plane"

And somewhere worth going while you read.

I once revealed a thing or two myself—

But that was in a different frame of brain.

*Joe Orton, June 24, 1967, in The Orton Diaries, edited by John Lahr (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 11.

**Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw, https://youtube.com/watch?v=a5Q8btlQLfE

Wednesday, June 3, 2026