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I took the boy to the supermarket this lunchtime, while the females of the house went to see Wicked for the second time. Waitrose car park looked pretty full, but there is a multi-storey car park right next door (the entrance is the same slip road as the supermarket so you get a chance to make a last minute call) and I decided I'd pay £1.16 rather than drive around looking for a space. Which I guess makes me even more Waitrose than the other Waitrose customers. I will pay a premium to park easily. Things are going pretty well for little Richy Herring.
As we exited the car park on foot, the door to the lift had a sticker on it, saying "Remember Social Distancing" and it was as if the door had decided to attempt a career as a stand up doing observational nostalgia material. I did remember it, so the door was on to something. But with that kind of excellent humour, the trick is not to select something that everyone actively remembers. You need to select a thing that people haven't thought about for a little while, like Spangles or the theme tune to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air and then just mentioning them is very funny. We all remember social distancing. The door's material seemed to be rubbing in our faces that lost couple of years. No one is going to laugh at that.
I can't criticise the door too much. My problem with clever nostalgia comedy is that I remember things that people have actually forgotten or are too young to know about in the first place, like the New Schmoo or ex foreign secretary Peter Carrington. Peter Kay deserves the big bucks for remembering things that people think they've forgotten but haven't forgotten and then just saying what they are. No one wants to be reminded of things that they don't even remember. It will make them feel stupid and like they're not in the gang that remembers obvious things. But not too obvious. If the thing they are remembering is too obvious then laughing at that would make them stupid too. They'd pity the people who laughed when asked to remember Covid or the Gavin and Stacey finale.
And what the door hadn't realised was that you don't want to remind people of terrible things, like 9/11 or social distancing. Only a very skilled comedian could get a laugh from remembering either of those things. I have done both of course. You can make people who think they are cleverer than other people, feel even cleverer by breaking the comedy rules. Are those people really cleverer? Maybe. Are they happier than the people who enjoy Peter Kay unironically? Definitely not. How do we measure intelligence? Is living a miserable, supposedly superior life cleverer than just enjoying stuff? It's not for me to say.
Maybe the door saw me subverting the joke and thought it could do it too. That's the mistake a lot of new comics make. They think they can go straight in with the more complex stuff, but you need to earn your stripes.
Anyway the door either wrongly thought it was Peter Kay or wrongly thought it was Stewart Lee (the sign would have to take up the whole door and describe social distancing many times using the same words), but it didn't work. People either remembered social distancing and didn't want to be reminded and didn't find it funny or didn't know the door well enough to realise it was employing irony and it looked like the door's comedy career was washed up before it had begun.
It was only when I was taking the photo of the sign that I realised that the door had attempted to adapt the joke at some later date. It had added an "un" to the word social. It was now asking people who went through it if they remembered social distancing and adding an extra layer by suggesting that the distancing we'd all gone through wasn't social at all. In fact quite the opposite.
I hated to see it. Although the door's original joke had been misjudged, I felt that if it stuck with comedy then maybe it would develop its own style and come up with something that might work - it had taken the decision to at least have a go and that's the important step. But the door had become disillusioned with the door comedy circuit and doubtless felt that there was a door clique where only doors that had been attached to rooms at Oxbridge University could get gigs. Either that or box-ticking doors that catered to the disabled or who originated in other cultures. Or the kind of doors that led to toilets that anyone could use. Or the kind of doors that hadn't been accused of deliberately closing too quickly and deliberately touching people's bottoms.
Whatever the case, there had to be some kind of conspiracy going on as it was clear (to the door) that it was funny, so the only explanation was that its material was just too edgy for today's audience. It was saying the unsayable. So the remaining option was to double down on edginess and do even edgier stuff in the hope of getting on GB News or selling amulets on the internet or doing a podcast. The distancing was unsocial after all. If you looked at it another way. Typical of the double think that the wokeys had brought in 2020. You know Boris Johnson and that lot.
I hope it works out for the door. It would be a shame to sell out and still not make it.
I sympathise. There's been a huge conspiracy in the entertainment industry to keep me out of the big time. The conspiracy involves giving me enough work so that I can keep going and shop in Waitrose, but never achieve mainstream success. It's much more complex than most conspiracies and takes an awful lot of work for everyone in the entertainment industry to get the balance exactly right, but it's the only explanation.
You only have to read this blog to see exactly how amusing I am.
