A Russian friend of mine once told me a joke: aliens have abducted a Russian, gave him two perfect steel balls, put him in a perfect empty room without doors or windows and told him to come up with a trick to entertain them once they return in a week. They threatened to disintegrate him if he fails to amuse them. Once they returned and asked him to perform the trick he invented he told them he's sorry but he has broke a ball and lost the other one.
I know a variant of this about a Romanian but the important thing is the reflexive: "One ball got lost and one got broken" or as a word for word translation: "One ball lost itself, the other one broke itself"
So the end was probably supposed to be "I'm sorry I can't show you anything because one ball broke in no time, and later another one simply disappeared."
Ezra Pound supposedly told Ford Madox Ford that he, Ford, could be placed naked in an empty room and within half an hour reduced it to complete disorder.
Given the wide circulation of quips of this form, there may be some ur-form millenia old.
[edit: corrected "of this source" to "of this form"]