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Take me down to Welwyn Garden City, where the grass is brown and the girls have nice personalities and are not judged by their subjective attractiveness. Also they have a John Lewis.
I was milling around the shops on my own, wasting a precious afternoon, but I am on a break and afternoons are made to be wasted. As I approached John Lewis I was a few metres away from a middle-aged lady, also on her way into the middle-class emporium. It’s the shop for people in the middle. Or who imagine they are.
The lady then tripped over nothing at all, stumbled, but managed to keep her footing. It was an impressive piece of slapstick as there was literally nothing in her way, not even a mildly raised paving slab, but she properly stumbled - no doubt distracted by thoughts of what items she could purchase to try and give her empty life more meaning, if only for a few seconds (I am projecting).
All the laws of slapstick dictate that someone falling over and hurting themselves (though not in any serious way) is the funniest thing in the world. I myself have posited that the funniest thing on earth is a fat woman falling out a hammock (based on myself as a fat man once getting into a hammock that I had tied up myself, only to discover my knots were not up to the job and splatting on to concrete - my fatness made it funnier as there was a sound of moist flabby flesh against the stone, but it would have been funnier too had I been the kind of respectable woman who frequents John Lewis - it’s about status rather than sex, I think). Ultimately I decided that an 98 year old woman with Alzheimers, in a wheelchair, being shot in the face with a confetti cannon was funnier. I suppose it’s funnier when you know you’re not meant to laugh. As long as no one is harmed. And sometimes something is awful enough not to be too serious, but also awful enough to be hilarious.
I fully expect this blog to be used in the future to prove that I hate the obese, the disabled and women. And it’s right that it should be as I secretly hate two of those groups and am sexually aroused by the third.
Anyway, this woman did not fall over, and I don’t think it would have been funny if she had. She had tripped too hard and the ground was made of concrete. She would have been injured and torn her nice clothes and only a monster could enjoy that as comedy. But the fact that she regained her footing and then carried on walking was much funnier than an actual disaster. Partly because she did the very human thing (although my cat does this too) of trying to carry on as if nothing had happened, but partly because those who witnessed it had properly had the shock of near disaster and the relief and release of unlikely salvation. Her smashed up nose would have been horrible, but her temporarily dented pride, covered with the extra pride of trying to pretend it hadn’t happened, was brilliantly funny. I smiled at some people coming in the other direction, but they just looked at me like I was a monster. Some people have no sense of humour.
I bet that lady bought herself a nice ornamental metal dish to make herself feel better.
We were all winners.
