I am getting some down time this week, due to having got most of my most pressing work finished (still not started on my unnamed book, but that's not due til June). My body isn't giving me much choice in the matter. I was powerfully tired and incapable of doing anything too strenuous.
So I read two books today - not as impressive as it sounds as both were very short. I'd ordered a load of stuff from Amazon last week and it all arrived this morning and I tucked straight into
Jonathan Ames' latest
The Alcoholic, a very enjoyable and touching (yet typically bleak and disgusting) graphic novel illustrated by Dean Haspiel. It's a lovely book, which got me thinking about the stupidity and the self-harm of drinking, plus the self-indulgence of broken love. Like Ames (or at least the character in the book called Jonathan A, who I take to be exactly him, even though he has written different books) I obsessed for years over a girl I had loved and lost in my late twenties (though in my case the failure of the relationship was much more my fault, whilst in this book it is the girl who is the flaky one). Ames eloquently describes the pain he (and I) went thorough as well as the ultimate realisation that the obsession becomes no longer about love and just about wanting to possess her. In fact I know I found it quite scary when it looked like she might be coming back round to me after all that time. I had wanted the personal tragedy of my own making and had enjoyed the drama. She remains though a very good friend and it was an important if heart-rending relationship for me to have. But as with all his books, this one comes highly recommended. There's an honesty and fragility to Ames and he's also extremely funny. And he's a bigger screw up than me and probably you, which helps you realise that we're all fuck ups, all in need of redemption, but possibly all too concerned that we're the only one fucking up. Everyone's a mess on some level. It's good when someone is honest enough to admit it and hopeful enough to think they might be able to change. Anyway buy his stuff, but make sure you keep some money back for my Warming Up book and 40 DVD which are getting dangerously close to being available and contain many of the same themes!
Having thought about the meaning of love and life with the first book, I then moved on to the philosophy of my own job with
Jim Holt's short but entertaining "Stop Me If You've Heard This Before". It's a lightening fast tour through the history of jokes and an attempt to ascertain why we make them. There are lots of different reasons, but one I think he misses is that humour is a way of coping with the artifice of civilisation and the way that conflicts with our natural impulses. So though it is good for society and thus ultimately for ourselves if we don't bash each other's heads in, or kill each other or rail against our superiors, there is a part of us that instinctively wants to do so. Similarly the family and to an extent monogamous relationships are an artificial construct which is not always in sync with our natural desires. Similarly all political and religious systems are imperfect inventions which usually help us to live our lives more effectively or safely and yet there are massive injustices involved in them all. By stepping outside of these constructs and poking fun at them and allowing us to laugh at the elements within all these things that cause us displeasure or discomfort we are somehow more able to step back into the artificial world once the joking is over. So there's an element of venting the pressure and frustration, but by being able to laugh at our boss or our husband or the stupidity of the world in general it somehow becomes easier to carry on. And there is a part of us that knows, however frustrating things might be on occasion that most of these things are actually better for us in the long run.
Sometimes humour might affect a change in the status quo and by no means all jokes operate on this level (as not all of them do on the other philosophies that Holt outlines), but that is one of the functions of the joke I think. By facing something unpalatable or even horrific and then laughing in the face of the truth or of paranoid fear, we actually find out day to day lives easier to cope with. Laughter can be the best medicine.
And the value of taking time out to read and think can not be over emphasised. It's good to think. It's good to think about what other people think.
Oh and incidentally that gag about hanging the victims of abuse is indeed something that I have accidentally purloined from the brilliant Simon Munnery (if you're going to steal, then steal from the best). I am pretty sure I must have heard him do it, but as with a couple of his gags I think it was something that I had been thinking about at the time. But my internal theft monitor was bleeping and I think I knew that I'd heard it before. Occasionally though one has that feeling about something that you actually did originate - maybe because it's an obvious thought or maybe because it's so good that you can't believe it's yours (I believe Paul McCartney had such worries over the song "Yesterday", partly though because it came to him in a dream)
Accidental appropriation is the kind of thing will happen occasionally, and sometimes two people will come up with the same notion independently (and if Jim Holt's book shows us anything it is that it's pretty hard to come up with a joke that hasn't been cracked before - he has examples of jokes we do now being cracked by the ancient Greeks), but I think in this case the joke is Mr Munnery's and now I have realised that I will not do the joke again and I want to make sure he gets the credit and if that's why you slapped me in the face Nottingham Cinema lady, then will you please take back the affront and punch Munnery the next time he is in town.
As to the rest of you then the least I can do for purloining the idea is to point you towards Mr Munnery's excellent DVD
produced by the Go Faster Stripe team and ask you to buy that to, if you've got any money left after buying everything by me and Jonathan Ames.
