Fun, Funny and Repressed.

I never understood the frolicsome sort of fun. You know what I mean, the sort where people chase each around flicking, throwing or squirting water while the ‘victims’ squeal with delight. What’s that all about? My idea of fun was always things like underage drinking, getting a tattoo because I was told it wasn’t allowed, going deep into the dark woods at midnight on Hallowe’en to see whether anything would happen, crawling through holes in abandoned buildings just to see what an abandoned building looked like from the inside. The squealy, squirty stuff left me cold.

Same with humour. Man A throws custard pie and hits man B in the face. Man B reciprocates. Man A throws another, but Man B ducks and the pie hits Man or Woman C. I never found that sort of thing funny even as a young child. I always knew that slapstick was only funny if it was unexpected. And then there are those ‘hilarious’ outtake shows on the TV, which treat the viewer to ten minutes of ordinary people falling over. Why is that funny? To me, the sight of Clouseau in his salty seadog disguise looking panic stricken because his blow-up parrot is deflating is funny. The white-horse-in-a-bar joke is funny. ‘Do you know they named a whisky after you?’ ‘What? Kevin?’

I suspect this all indicates that I suffer from a genetically induced repressive tendency. Close physical proximity to all but children, animals and the odd rare and special person (the rarest of all animals, now probably extinct) was always a problem.

Or maybe I’ve just got taste.