I would go a long way for a laugh. From where I sit now, I would probably be willing to walk, ooh, four miles if you promised me a mild chuckle at the end of it. I would endure the discomfort of bad acting, sexism, racism, homophobia, any prejudice you like, as long as there is a great punchline. Laughter is not the meaning of life, but life has no meaning without it.
Unfortunately, most so-called comedy is bereft of wit. I don’t know if it’s because the comedy formulae become stale so quickly or because the people performing lack that ineffable comic touch, but hardly anything on telly makes me laugh. So, to fill this hole in my life, I download podcasts and rent out films.
Last night, for instance, I enjoyed Le Dîner de Cons, a brilliantly funny film about a man who gets lumbered with an idiot one evening. It was the fifth time I’ve seen it, yet it hadn’t lost anything of its sublime comic genius.
This morning, as I ambled to the library I listened to my favourite podcast, The Collings and Herrin Podcast. Unscripted, unedited, recorded using a Macbook’s inbuilt microphone, it consists of two immature men talking about stuff. I like it because the humour is completely unexpected, they can never build up to a gag because they don’t know the gag is coming. They often ruin the punchline of their jokes by laughing, surprised by their own neuronal connections. Just as with Herring’s blog, the material is raw but a sensitive mind can reimagine it being used in some future fictional stand-up show or sitcom.
If you want to them but don’t know where to start, I particularly recommend episode 13.
“I would endure the discomfort of bad acting, sexism, racism, homophobia, any prejudice you like, as long as there is a great punchline.”
Oh, man, do I relate to this. I can swallow up my natural leftwing reaction to racist jokes because the wrongness of them is built in to the funny. It cannot be helped. But only two days ago I almost got into a fist fight with a guy after he told me a Pakistani joke followed by a Jewish joke. True story.
But what angered me in this case was that the joke wasn’t a good one: it was simply hateful and with no decent punchline. And I also happen to be getting it on with a Jewish person at the moment (well, not at THIS moment. Or am I??) and I rather like her. So I saw red. It was a great reaction and I find it really funny now. I guess even I can be offended sometimes.
My own podcast is coming out soon but has been delayed thanks to a computer booboo at the producer’s end. It’ll be an edited effort though so deliberately different to Collings and Herrin one (there is a chance it will be hosted by the same people, you see).