Humour, Online Madness, Shyness as Social Phobia, Jobs in Short Supply
Giles Brandreth has just published his history of jokes. Here are a selection of them.
An airline pilot is speaking to his passengers: "Our cruising altitude today is 35,000 ft, the weather is set fair, with just the possibility of light turbulence, so do keep an eye on the fasten seatbelts sign, and enjoy the flight. In accordance with government guidelines, I'm working from home."
Shakespeare used variations of one joke at least eight times in different plays.
"Is this your daughter?" one character asks. "So her mother told me," the other replies.
Some favourite jokes.
I have kleptomania. But when it gets bad I take something for it.
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| A Capital Joke unknown artist Photo Credit: Preston Park Museum and Grounds [CC BY-NC-ND] |
There was an elderly couple who noticed they were getting more and more forgetful, so they decided to visit their doctor. The doctor told them that they should start writing things down so they wouldn't forget them. They went home and the old lady told her husband to get her a bowl of ice cream. "You might want to write it down," she said. The husband said, "No, I can remember that you want a bowl of ice cream. She then told her husband she wanted a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream. "Write it down," she told him, and again he said: "No, no, I can remember: you want a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream." Then the old lady said she wanted a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream and a cherry on top. "Write it down," she told her husband and again he said: "No, I've got it. You want a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream and a cherry on top." So he goes to get the ice cream and spends an unusually long time in the kitchen. Eventually he comes out to his wife and hands her a plate of bacon and eggs. The old lady stares at the plate for a moment, then looks at her husband and asks; "Where's the toast?"
A parrot's in a cage by a window, and a woman walks past, and the parrot says. "You're a fat cow." She is outraged and complains to the parrot's owner. He chastises the parrot saying: "Behave or I'll sellotape your beak up." The parrot is silenced. Two hours later the same woman passes the window and the parrot says: "You know what I'm thinking."
Knock! Knock!
Who's there?
Hike.
Hike who?
I didn't know you liked Japanese poetry.
A couple from the comedian Ken Dodd.
"I told the Inland Revenue I don't owe them a penny. I live by the seaside.
Do I believe in safe sex? Of course I do. I have a handrail around the bed.
You know, I used to think I was a marvellous lover - until I discovered all my girlfriends suffered from asthma.
One from the black comedian Charlie Williams, from the 1980s who, according to Brandreth, always included this line in his act.
"If you don't laugh, lady, I'm going to move into the house next door."
(Gyles Brandreth, The Times, 2020)
*... Stanford University academics say that in the corporate world laughter is "under-leveraged". They run an MBA course on "enhancing influence and status through office humour: it earns as many credits as their managerial accounting module. People in short, must laugh with colleagues not from companionable joie de vivre but to earn more money and "leverage".
... Humour, whether satirical or surreal depends on perceiving absurdity in people or situations. At 23, you fear for your job if you dare point out that absurdity. Forty years later you don't give a damn: if your employer, company policy, board member or cabinet colleague deserves an ill-concealed snort of amusement, you let rip.
Moreover, the modern workplace is a hostile environment for humour. Earnest business advisors agonise over office banter, with lists as proscriptive as that 1948 BBC ban on references to "lodgers, effeminacy in men, chambermaids [and] ladies' underwear".
One training website warns not only against illegal "hate" references and mocking your line manager or product, but joking about "dress sense, generational differences, family size, social activities, hobbies, [or] sport team support". Is it any wonder laughter flickers and dies?..
(Libby Purves, The Times, 2020)
Never fear Libby, there will always be those who will undermine, through humour, some of the humbug and tosh that emanates from the higher echelons.
Online Madness
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| A Barber-Surgeon Extracting Stones from a Woman's Head Symbolising the Expulsion of Folly (Insanity) Jacob Catts (1741-1799) Photo credit: The Wellcome Collection [Public Domain] |
The sites are filled with a sort of pandemic-inflected(?) spiritual slurry, dreamt up by people with too much time and money on their hands, who then inflict it on people who have none.
Social media also replaces true feelings with the sort of ersatz sentimentality and mediocre groupthink that people like Paltrow and Obama try to tap into to get a sense of validation, push politics or sell products. The phrase "conscious uncoupling" didn't create a "separation revolution" or "permeate the break-up culture", it was just a hilarious marketing ploy that gave her brand the hippie woo-woo edge.
(Camilla Long, The Sunday Times, 2020)
A bit long winded but I think I get your point. I forgot, you get paid by the word, don't you?
Shyness
In 1917, The American Psychiatric Association (APA) recognised 59 psychiatric disorders. With the introduction of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), often called the psychiatrist's bible, in 1952 this rose to 128 disorders. By 1968 it was 159, 227 in 1980 and 253 in 1987. Currently DSM-1V has 347 categories and it would be a brave person who would anticipate anything other than a further increase in the next edition.
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| Patients Waiting to See the Doctor, with Figures Representing Their Fears Rosemary Carson (b. 1962) Photo Credit: The Wellcome Collection [Public Domain] |
All psychiatrists are familiar with those whose crippling phobias and panic attacks prevent them from engaging in any form of social interaction, whilst major depression remains a worldwide scourge. Lane accepts this, but what concerns him is how one draws the line between the normal and abnormal. In a previous generation, says Lane, shy people were seen as introverted but not mentally ill. Now embarrassment at eating alone in restaurants, or concern about interacting with figures in authority is part of the definition of social anxiety disorder. How then have we redefined the shy individuals of his parents' generation into a new army of people with mental health problems?
... Lane and other critics, such as David Healey, accuse the drug companies of medicalising problems like shyness and unhappiness. The drug industry develops compounds such as diazepam, fluoxetine or paroxetine, and then promotes the creation of disorders for which these new drugs are the apparent answer.
... The psychiatric profession has had a key role in hyping vaguely defined ailments without much scientific research or credibility. This is partly the result of the reimbursement system that governs American psychiatry. Treat someone for shyness and the insurance companies will laugh at you. Treat someone with social phobia, with its DSM seal of approval, as disorder 300.23 and the bill will be paid...
(Simon Wessley, The Lancet, 2008)
The crucial question for me is: How does one draw the line between the normal and the abnormal? That is a question to be answered by the professionals but unfortunately some drug companies and some psychiatrists seem to have blurred the answer.
Jobs in Short Supply
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| The Pork Butcher Camille Pissarro ( 1830-1903) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] |
A shortage of butchers, bricklayers and welders in the UK has been branded "extraordinary" by a chief government adviser.
... The SOL (Shortage Occupation List) "assesses which occupations are in shortage, ie where employers find it problematic to secure adequate numbers of workers with the required skills to fill their vacancies and where we judge that migration is a sensible response to that shortage".
When asked by reporters for his thoughts on the findings, committee chairman Professor Brian Bell (of the Migration Advisory Committee) said:
"It does seem extraordinary, I agree... I don't think we've done a very good job of linking where we see shortages with a training and education programme that actually thinks about addressing these shortages.
"As far as we are aware, we are the only advisers to government that actually produce essentially a list of where we think there are shortages in particular occupations. Perhaps other parts of government do but I'm not aware of it.
"Of course what we're doing it for is the immigration system.
"We're not doing it to advise the Department for Education about what sort of training programmes might be needed in the future.
"And there is a gap there - I think that other countries do better at linking this kind of forward-looking aspect of where are the shortages, what should we be doing about it."
So where are these training programmes for butchers, bricklayers and welders? Surely there are some national centres or apprenticeships for these jobs? Perhaps, also, these jobs are seen as hard work that fewer people want to do anymore. However, some other countries seem to be more organised with dealing with job shortages than here in the UK.
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