‘Oops, sorry Vicar!’
Funniest three consecutive words in the English language, closely followed by the four-parter ‘Oh, that’s my wife.’
Humour, they say, is the spice of life… Or is that danger? Whatever the case, those people who we consider to without a sense of humour are often thought of as rum chaps (or dolls), fit only for placing in the corner of a room when the potplant Aunt Edith bought you died.
Which is why it amazes me just how many humourless people exist, or just how boring conversations can be. What happened to the comedy?
We at the Neo-Catholic Church, if we believe in anything, believe in the power of narrative, the force that creates stories. Now you can argue all day long, if you so desire, as to whether narrative is an objective force, one that forces us into roles and creates situatons for us to react to, or whether narrative is subjective and thus is the result of humans placing a pattern upon the world… You know, I believe I once wrote a treatise on that kind of material. Selectivity… I’m sure it was really good stuff, but bugger if I can remember what the point of it was.
Believing, as we do in a thing called ‘Narrative’ we also believe that it is our divine, sometimes devilish, always corrupting, place to make the narrative as funny as possible.
Funny narratives don’t make the world entirely supercilious; you can have humour in tragedy and the fun can be introduced into romance (and no, not just by the eight-and-an-half amusing positions of the human sexing).
It (this task of humourising narrative) does, however, mean that taking the events of the world seriously is a fairly unusual task.
Take, for example, the middle-class. No, please, take the middle-class and launch it into the sun or something. But if we must keep those creatures then let us realise that far too often they look upon the world with a narrative of absolute seriousness, which they think to be, weirdly enough, the objective standard of narrative.
Seriousness is a terrible disease and I hope to fund a cure, using some of the monies Brother Morthos ‘obtained’ from the Reserve Bank last Wednesday (for those asking awkward questions I was on the Nile, supping with a Queen called Harold, at the time). It is broadly rigid and has not the flexiblility even a good pun has. It requires you to think it fairly straight lines and never experience the excitement of a sudden twist or a non-sequiter.
It, above all things, requires you to adopt a fairly straight forward account of terms and frames of reference, and once you adopt these they tend to force you to keep with them ad nauseam, forcing you further and further down the hole that is the serious pit of despair, anger and, finally, the joining of a right-wing political party and the anger that the young are wasting your tax dollar on ‘their shallow entertainments.’ Yes, ‘Procul Harum’ were a great act, but that does not mean that the young shouldn’t enjoy their ‘Boomkat.’
Of course, the best recurrent line of use is the rejoinder ‘And don’t they have it in the Navy,’ freely modified to suit the conversation.
Oh well, that’s me done, officier. Anything else you want to ask?