My girlfriend was amused enough by my bedhead this morning to take a photo of me. Admittedly it was quite an impressive contravention of the laws of physics, where a large wisp of hair was sticking upwards in the air as if I was in the film "Something About Mary", but (as far as I know) no one had jizzed on me in the night and the days when I could manage to get my own jizz on top of my own head are long gone - even if I can get the whole machinery running enough to jizz at all (now is the point where you hold up your hand and say "Too much information" in an American voice and I hold up my hand and say "I was exaggerating for comic effect").
The death of another Golden Girl in a new year (they have now gone one a year for the last three years) prompted some people on Twitter to speculate that Betty White will be shitting herself in 2011, but I think they have missed the true point. Due to this mathematical progression Betty White may know she will die next year, but this means that she can actually be certain that she won't die this year. She has almost seven months where she is indestructible. She can rescue babies from burning buildings, fly planes into cliffs and grind herself up in industrial machinery and just walk away unscathed. Unless of course she is cursed by this supposed invulnerability and can be horrifically injured but just not die, so even if Betty White is just a bucket of ground up flesh, she will still have consciousness and be in pain until January 1st 2011 (though if the fates really want to teach her a lesson they will let her live until the end of the year and she will die at 11.59 and 59 seconds on the 31st December).
I was prompted to make my usual joke about the situation where a cast member of a TV series which featured principally elderly people dies. I tweeted about the curse of the Golden Girls having struck again (I do it for Dad's Army and Last of the Summer Wine - I am funny). I was quite astonished by how many people tweeted back to say something along the lines of "Curse? Or were all the actors just really old?" Twitter does not always lend itself to humour and sometimes it's hard to pick up the wink or irony behind a glib comment, but really. I just wonder if there are some people who are born without a sense of humour (and I am not saying you have to find my weak often repeated gag funny, but I would have thought most people would recognise it as an attempt at levity). Could they really think I was that stupid that I hadn't worked that out? Maybe they just have a low estimation of me. Or perhaps it is part of a subtle and sophisticated counter joke in which these people are mocking me and it is me who is too humourless to understand it.
I came up with what I thought was a nice riff about the cast members of Dad's Army having set up
a tontine, which Ian Lavender thought he was sure to win, without realising that Clive Dunn was only pretending to be old. But if they did it's apparently between them, Bill Pertwee (the warden), Frank Williams (the vicar) and Pamela Cundell (Mrs Fox). Though writers Croft and Perry both survive too in their late 80s, showing as so often with these sit com situations that being a writer is a safer profession than being an actor (The awesome David Nobbs still writing and joking on Twitter and Galton and Simpson still going strong 42 years after the demise of Hancock).
Talking of Dad's Army I went to see "Four Lions" this evening, which I had been very much looking forward to, but was slightly disappointed by, but only really, I suppose, judged by Chris Morris' high standards. Unlike his other more controversial works (the paedophilia Brass Eye for example) I don't think this was funny enough or illuminating enough to make up for the seriousness of the subject. The terrorists were just a bit too stupid and yet then suddenly self-aware enough to understand the inconsistencies in their position, though I know Morris researched it thoroughly and perhaps you have to be this dim to blow yourself up. It was dark and unsettling and at least showed the futility of suicide bombing. And yes, better than the vast majority of comedy films and well worth seeing. But it either needed to be more revelatory or funnier for me. Yet funnily enough when I mentioned I was going to see it on Twitter, the reviews I got were all glowing. So maybe it is me who has the bad sense of humour and Twitter that has the good one.
I do hope that Chris Morris will make loads more films though. We need him and Iannucci doing their stuff (though I also thought that "In The Loop" wasn't as funny as "The Thick of It") rather than the people churning out "Lesbian Vampire Killers".
Perhaps it was all down to my expectations. I haven't been out for ages and I needed to see a film that blew me away on this rare night off. It certainly got me thinking. But it didn't really make me laugh at loud. And reviewers had wrecked one of the big moments with a stupid spoiler that I won't reveal now.
