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I guess it's technically a serious situation. Though no one who has contracted it in the U.S. has died, it is a potentially fatal illness. Still, even if it were fatal, there would still be something funny about monkey pox.

Late night comics are having a field day with monkey pox jokes and I've come to realize that the basic reason is that monkeys, particularly chimpanzees, are funny.

They are often used for comic effect in TV commercials and movies. You never see a monkey get a serious acting role anymore.

In the '60's after the success of the Beatles, many rock groups took animal names such a The Byrds, The Turtles and even one group that decided to cover all species, The Animals. When some Hollywood TV execs conceived the idea of a sit-com about a rock band, the name they chose was "The Monkees."

It would have made their theme song a little more interesting.

Here we come
Walkin' down the street
Hope we won't be infecting
Everyone we meet
Hey, hey we've got Monkee pox
And people say we're scratching a lot
But we're not too contagious
You won't catch what we've got

Thus I've concluded that all the frightening things in life can be made to seem less so by simply attaching the word "monkey" to it.

Really, would the Bubonic Plague seem as scary if it had been called the "Bubonic Monkey Plague?" The disease was so feared that it acquired the name the "Black Death" in Europe. If only someone then had the foresight to call it the "Black Monkey Death."

Much of the news would be more tolerable if they talked about monkey war, monkey famine and monkey death. Actually, they’ve already started in that direction when they decided that certain military actions were "guerilla warfare."

History lessons would be different if you were studying "Monkey World War I," "Monkey World War II" or the "Cold Monkey War."

The disease has been around in other continents for some time and it is believed to have arrived here when a Chicago pet store owner imported a Gambian giant rat for a customer. It's sad that someone in America feels that we have an insufficient supply or quality of rat here in the U.S. and that we have to import a Gambian giant one to fill the void.

I guess the reason we find monkeys so entertaining is that they remind us so much of ourselves. We share about 98 percent of the same DNA as chimps so it's no surprise that we're so similar.

Now that I'm done writing I can do some much needed shopping. The first stop is the produce section so I can pick up some bananas.