No Jokes Jones

People don't want me to be funny. Or attempt to be funny, I should say, as you can never come out and say "I think I'm funny". That's an instant toe punt into the wrinkly danglers. It's my  belief humour should be sublime and poetic, felicitous sounds and ideas colliding, conjuring delicate new sports and new perspectives, strange empathies.  Or it could be a fat man falling over. That's also valid. That's a laugh. I can say that, too, as a fat man who has fallen over many, many times. My privilege is more regularly checked than my footing. 

Contrary to popular opinion, I don't love company

Never-the-less, I continue to try and write funny things. Actually funny things, things designed to make you laugh. Because I think there's a huge gap in the market for funny books. There's nothing there - its a vacuum, sucking the chuckles right out of people, like a prolapsing anus unspooling into a swimming pool filter. I have in the past, asked people to recommend books that are funny and they occasionally have, and more occasionally I buy the books and read them. And they're not funny. They might be amusing, possibly droll. But not really funny. I keep meaning to read Marion Keyes, as people claim she's hilarious but, well I expect I'll find out...she's a charity shop perennial, so it's low risk.  

They have a humour section in Waterstones, but it's either toilet books, Clarkson having comical opinions on whatever he's asked to have comical opinions on, or the never-ending QI brand explosion, still expanding into the universe, slowly getting colder and denser. 

The last book I read that actually made me laugh, like, make a noise out loud, involuntarily, was Jack Handey's "The Stench of Honolulu", which was published in 2013, a mirth-free decade ago. And I'm an easy laugh, a slutty snigger. I'm seriously up for it, like a dog on a chop. I'm just giving it away. Make me laugh, I'm begging you. I've never paid for it in my life, but I've sullied a few guest lists...

I used to temper my own work with humour, or what I called humour. It's a dynamic shift*: the dizzying high, married to the dismal low, making for a richer experience. What nobody says about grief, about pain, is how absurd it is. The ridiculous positions it puts you in, the strange formalities, the tension between how you feel and how you feel you should act and how you want to act. They are exactly the same mechanisms comedy uses: bristling against society, straitjacketed by convention. It's desperately funny. It's ridiculous. I wanted to write about the self-awareness I felt even in the depths of depression, the social awkwardness of kind people bouncing off you, their casual, well-meaning clumsiness, the ritual plumbing of the depths. For a moment you can step outside the situation and see it for what it is: funny. Odd, erratic human behavior, hopelessly out of its depth. Its also incredibly sad. It can be both. It has to be both. 

But not if you're writing about it. Then it's "tonally inconsistent". The jokes are silly, and muddy the waters of the writer's intent. The audience will be confused. If you're going to write drama, write drama, dammit. What's all this goofy dicking about? 

I dunno. I think audiences are smarter than that. I think people understand a lot more than they're allowed to by gatekeepers clutching copies of Aristotle's Poetics. We're all human beings, and we all suffer and we all laugh and we all die. A grave is an open mouth guffawing at our ambitions, after all. There's always a last laugh even if you don't get to hear it.  

But you can't fight city hall...

It'll be high octane turbo misery from me from now on. A yawning sluice of mordant horror, hand-wringing pathos and self-sabotaging hubris, all day, everyday, untempered by shit puns and whimsy, and unmitigated by a wink, a nudge and a soft shoe shuffle. That's me from now on. Each day will be Christmas day. In Walford. 

*as am I.