Wednesday, April 01, 2015
Dry wititudes
The English actress Gemma Arterton says she will never live in the USA because Americans can’t tell when she’s joking:
“I always struggle when I'm over there because people don't get my sense of humour and they think I'm being serious all the time,” she explained.
I know how she feels. The African jungle is full of animals that don’t know when gorillas are joking. I’ll never forget the time I called a hippopotamus a fat cunt for blocking my path to the mangrove swamp. It opened it jaws so wide you could have put a microwave oven in its mouth. I had to climb up a tree and whistle through my teeth to convince it my remark was meant in jest.
The English sense of humour has been misunderstood by more truculent creatures than hippopotami, of course. Tom Jones has bittersweet memories of his first encounter with John Lennon, which occurred when the Beatles were rehearsing for a TV show. As Lennon walked on stage, he noticed Tom sitting in the studio and felt obliged to pay his respects:
“How are you doing, you Welsh poof!” he cried.
Tom responded to this affable greeting by calling John “a Scouse bastard” and inviting him to continue his enquiries at close quarters. It’s a good thing that Tom’s agent was on hand to explain that the Scouse bastard was trying to be funny rather than casting aspersions or questioning preferences.
The big advantage that Americans have over the English is that no one mistakes their earnest remarks for frivolous ones. A team of American scientists recently proposed that gold worth millions of dollars could be extracted from human dung. Had English scientists advanced the same theory, no one would have taken them seriously – the tabloid press would have mercilessly mocked them and their idea would have been roundly pooh-poohed. This explains why wacky inventions are far more common in the USA than Britain. The nose-hair trimmer and the nipple clamp are both of American origin.
Now, the American scientists are not suggesting that anyone can shit out a goldmine. The amount of gold a single human could produce in an entire lifetime of defecation would not be sufficient to fill a tooth cavity. However, sifting the sewers on an industrial scale could theoretically generate a bar of bullion every week, which would repay the US national debt in 100,000 years. That doesn’t come close to the gold rush of 1849, but it’s nothing to be sniffed at.
Perhaps Gemma Arterton has been hanging out with the wrong kind of American. I recently had a look at the amazingly silly tweets of Shia Lebeouf, and it’s difficult to imagine him taking anything seriously. His Wikipedia biography also reveals that he dated an English actress called Carey Mulligan for over a year, so perhaps he has a taste for haughty and sarcastic women. I don’t make a habit of playing the pander, but in this case it looks like a match made in heaven.
Labels: English humour, Gemma Arterton, hippopotamus, poo-poo gold, Shia Lebeouf
