Introduction to Not being Funny..so what's it all about?

'Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.'

So said Jonathan Swift in the preface to his Battle of the Books, written in 1704.

Jonathan Swift claimed to have only laughed twice in his life. Alexander Pope couldn't remember ever having laughed at all, according to Craig Brown, a Twenty First Century satirist and poet.

Comedy, irony, pathos, schadenfreude and satire are the cream on a delectable trifle of human folly, hypocrisy, evil , injustice, moral failure and ignorance. The more insupportable, the more lurid the trifle, the more there is to satirise, the more custard pies there are to be thrown, the more there is to vindicate, the more hilarity is to be had.

Comedy lies next to tragedy and therefore it will not be too long before poetry claims it or entertains it. The excruciating is reminiscent of the hilarious.

There has always been a huge appetite for comedy and it sometimes seems to me nowhere more so than in the UK. Britain in the Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries has been particularly rich in comic writing which may have something to do with its more recent history, the half-hearted struggle for identity which it has all but given up, like integrity, intelligent discussion, and exercise.. and its strange and strained culture of tolerance, the place where people will queue for hours for the latest Iphone but for the most part can't be bothered to stand up to fight a cause unless its effects come lapping into their dining rooms like the Cumbrian floods.

The world of newspaper journalism, where all that goes on in the world is churned in a vat of speculation, comment, where spies are spied upon and commentators are commented on is a fertile breeding ground for comic writing . This year, the excesses of journalism finally broke through a dam. The engine room has been exposed, the business is in in turmoil as never before since the machinery that operates its scurrilous and scandalous practices has broken down, oozing spent oil.

Comedy is squashed up against tragedy, inhabiting the same screamingly awful place. The edge of a comic sword is dipped in tragedy. At its most daring, it's intoxicating. We laugh with its subjects rather than at them as we recognise our own failings. The laugh is a nervous laugh, the roar is a guilty roar, the tears of laughter are shed from the eye of conscience. Comedy is a kind of inverted tragedy. It is everywhere in our daily lives, from the grinding together of circumstances to the inflections of speech and behaviour. Some would say that it reaches its finest expression in the written and spoken word, in drama, verse, in dialogue, in poetry, in stand-up, whether in the ridiculous or the deadly serious, whether in the work of Horace, Juvenal, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Edward Lear or Craig Brown. Whether in the work of The Fast Show, Barry Humphries, Alistair McGowan, Rory Bremner or Tommy Cooper, in the gentle cuffing of Roger McGough and the trenchant wit of Bill Geenwell or else in the dark and searing ad-libs of Peter Cook or Bill Hicks, engaging comedy is daring. It is intoxicating.


So this is my small contribution...