Rabbi Shankar Sayings - On the comedy variety ROWAN AND MARTIN'S LAUGH-IN/NBC/1968-73 comic Arte Johnson created a number of continuing comic characters. One of them was called Rabbi Shankar, a Far East Indian philosopher in a Nehru jacket, pill box hat, gold chains and glasses who espoused mystical wisdom. Some examples:

• The snake that strikes at the feet of the hunter is naught but a pain in the grass.

• The pilgrim who drinks the water of the Ganges shall trot all the way to the mosque.

• If the laughing hyena laughs, what then of the horny toad?

On the 2/19/1983 segment of NBCs SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE comedian Tim Kazurinsky played a similar Eastern mystic known as The Guru who questioned life with such probing inquiries as:

• Why is the tidy bowl man so happy about living in a toilet?

• Exactly what are we saving daylight time for?

• Did you ever get a letter from a girl who draws pretty little hearts and flowers on the envelope? Why is it that this girl will undoubtedly be fat?

• Why if I kill a baby seal, am I a terrible man, but if I squash a baby cockroach I am a good man? But, you say, the seal is helpless animal in the wild, while the cockroach is a pest. Then I would say. 'How would you like to have a hundred baby seals living under your sink?' "