Singular life
No laughing matter
Petronella Wyatt
Twas the season to be funny. Only nobody ever is. They bear down on you, those vile bods at Christmas and New Year parties, eyes exhibiting what they believe to be a waggish twinkle and you know to be the type of ugly glaze you get only on a winter alcoholiday. They open their mouths despoiled by rows of putrid, foaming cavi- ties. It is then that the dreadful realisation comes upon one that they are about to tell a joke.
Personally, I find humour deeply dis- tressing. Particularly as it isn't funny any more. Like everything else jokes are finite and I suspect that just about every good one has by now been told. George Mered- ith, the 19th-century writer, once said that humour should appeal to the wits for laughter, not to what is coarse. But most people you meet these days seem to have lost their wits and found instead a sort of sly vulgarity made the more odious by its knowing air.
My television was switched off during Christmas because of the intolerably high incidence of comedians who appear at this time of the year. The worst of the lot are the stand-up comedians. Why anyone should be more amusing standing up in the middle of a television studio beats me black and blue. And what a dreadful way to approach laughter — issuing an imperative: you will find this funny.
The modern propensity for dividing our lives into sections as if we were oranges is partly to blame. Work is work; sex is sex; and laughter is laughter. Like drink, we are told, don't mix them. Thus the prime-time hours between six and eight in the evening is our time to giggle, split our sides and give in to that curious urge which is appar- ently one of the few things that distinguish- es the human race from the animals.
I hate laughter — it causes laughter lines. It contorts the face into a shape and consistency resembling that of a squashed potato. It ain't no laughing matter. Grin- ning too often ages people more surely and more swiftly than lying on tin foil under a Caribbean sun for eight months of the year.
The most attractive facial expressions, on the other hand, are repose and gravity, even sorrow. Nothing makes a woman or a man more winning — and worth the wear of winning — than a minor tragedy; that hint of melancholy Victoriana — you know: from sport to sport they hurry me to stifle my regret/and when they win a smile from me, they think that I forget.
Why, instead of stand-up comedians, can't we have stand up tragediennes? Heard the one about the man who married his own mother and killed his dad by mis- take? No, that doesn't make you cry? What about this one; a guy comes home from the pub and finds his baby chewed to death by his dog. He kills the dog and then finds out that it was only protecting the child from a a marauder whose body he discovers under the cot. Can I hear a sob or two in the audience? Come on, folks, let yourselves go.
Hello and good evening everyone, I'm Rory Bremner. I can impersonate single mothers dumped by their boyfriends, rape victims, asylum seekers and all sorts of really sad people. I've got stories that will make you double up with grief. Let's face it, there's nothing like a bit of misery on a cold Sunday night to get the week off to the right start — sorry, I mean the wrong start.
Banish the happy, inane smiley faces; life-long exile to the silly raised eyebrow the face that sunk a thousand quips down with the Eltons, Ben and John, for his eccentrically amusing behaviour, off with Dawn French and Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie and all those insupport- ably irritating people mad enough to think that laughing is the only fit and respectable occupation for a middle-class family with 2.1 children in a semi-detached house.
None of that, please. Let's have Maggie Smith standing up and reciting really wretched excerpts from Shakespeare and other peddlers of woe (even Shakespeare couldn't make his jokes funny). Let's have The Veneration Game and Absolutely Miser- able in which the contestants build temples to tragedy and the characters are workers in an about-to-go-bankrupt Cardiff tourist agency. Then we could have Dame Diana Rigg doing prime time Racine. Ready, Steady, Phedre. Of course, if that makes you laugh it's your problem, mate. At least we will have killed two birds with one moan.
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