I got in trouble at college for being part of the gang who showed the film Life of Brian in the Common Room. You need to know that it was a theological college (vicar factory) and 1984 so it was, I guess, a bit edgy.
But my humour is edgy. I have to self-edit massively before blogging, tweeting and whatever ing you facebook. Honest, I do. You should see the stuff the delete key gets.
I just roared to hear Andy Zoltzman describe Jesus as a 'first century magician and raconteur'. Isn't enjoying the joke so much better than bombing his relatives?
Stewart Lee is harder work but I see what he's doing. As he said in a weekend interview, if Clarkson can call Gordon Brown a one-eyed Scottish idiot why isn't it funny when Lee hopes Clarkson's children go blind. Or wished Richard Hammond had died in agony in that car accident? It's funny. It's odd.
Do you have to have a humour chip? The ability to recognise that you can learn and laugh? Have serious fun?
I don't like Lower Sixth humour. If I did this blog would be called The Lonely Lentil or In Search of Custard or somomething, which is like something only typed wrong.
I'm writing this as the Christmas newsletter prepares to go to press. I speak as if it had a mind of its own which, to some extent, it does. It is an unstoppable force in a bland world and will be hitting the www soon (and the letter-boxes of the old and cautious) as soon as Mrs Mustard has told me what I absolutely have to ditch.
Be very ware.
3 comments:
Oh, my goodness! I'm going to say something serious. Please don't tell anybody about this as I have a bad reputation to protect.
Here goes:
I'm not certain that anybody who prays or recites the Psalms should wish anybody anything that they don't mean. So, saying that you wish the pope would wake up one morning to find he has grown a pair of huge bazookas overnight would be okay, but wishing that he contracts AIDS would not be okay in the slightest.
Also, I don't see any equivalence between wishing something upon someone and saying that a person has a face like a squished tomato. The first is a curse, the second is an insult. Of course, both may be unchristian - but that would be a separate and different subject for discussion.
Absolutely. But when someone makes a joke at my expense it is funny because I know they don't actually wish it on me, or because they like me despite the nose, hair style, skininess yet still poke at those things a little.
And Lee's point is that those who use insults as humour have to be prepared to accept some back and he deliberately sees where the line is by going further than most people would.
I think you miss my point. I would agree with you fully in a completely secular context. But what I am saying is that perhaps, when it comes to wishing someone ill in a joke, people who believe in the power of prayer should be more careful than those who don't. Otherwise you are either risking the joke becoming a reality or belittling prayer, depending upon the way you view prayer.
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