No Laughing Matter?

Like an annoying mosquito in a darkened room the first thing you notice is the annoying, persistent whine. You swat it away, but it comes back, an irritant with no other purpose than to pester. Eventually it goes away but not before it’s inflicted at least a modicum of self-satisfied corrective commentary. Twitter’s good like that.

My current annoying insect has been buzzing around, telling me off for daring to deploy sardonic humour against the pernicious evils of our world – socialism, the bloated welfare state, multiculturalism, islam (with a lower case ‘i’) “Why you so mean?” he say, “Why you no likey?” I made him Chinese... because it's funnier and easier to parody in a brutish, racist manner... because I am such a despicable person.

“Would you make fun of The Queen?” he asked, “Would you make fun of your Christian neighbours?” Of course, I replied (but not before I wondered how he knew my neighbours). I’m assuming he’s quite young – the national socialist experiment of the last few decades has mounted a concerted assault against one of the planks of our national character – but he could easily be one of the beardy-weirdy, lentil-knitting, bean-munching fart machines that started it all. “Go back to Russia!” we’d have said in the nineteen sixties, but he’s quite likely to be an entirely home-grown humourless malcontent; the product of the concerted battle against Albion.

The legendary British sense of humour has got us through all manner of strife and disaster and in the playgrounds of old (before they were sold off) you quickly learned that to be rattled was just asking for it. Sticks and stones, we learned and then learned that to say it out loud would attract more scorn. But the rules are all very easy. Nothing, but nothing, is off-limits, so long as you are first prepared to laugh at yourself. So, I’m a fat, balding, greying unreconstructed product of patriotism and toil – the sort of lumpen, working class stock that trots off to die in wars to protect people I will never know. I don’t expect the world to stay the same, but if we can’t deploy one of our most potent non-lethal weapons without recrimination then what was the point?

A typically despicable assault on islam.

Yet still funny - courtesy Daily Mail

 So yes, I reserve my right to take the piss, take the rise, make fun of, jeer at, heckle, name-call, mimic, goad, barrack and generally mock anything I bloody well like. And if it is too much for your delicate, politically correct, indoctrinated, mollycoddled sensibilities you can either grow a pair or fuck the fuck off. Or, you can sit there with your knees drawn up to your chest, rocking away and humming and wishing the whole nasty world would go away.