An apparently disgruntled reader took some umbrage at my take on Grumblin’ Greta, describing, au contraire, yours truly as the ‘humourless’ one, and ‘knowing nothing about large families’. Hmm. If readers do find me lacking in a certain joie de vivre and jocularity, please do sound off, whether in a humorous and humourless way.
Then again, it ain’t easy doing shtick when the world is always one step ahead of you, morphing into what would have been a dark, dystopic comedy a scant decade or so back: Greta the Grim-Face is a case in point; her speech, replete with snarl – of which she may not even be conscious, and, given her condition and background, may not be her fault – would have been a Saturday Night Live skit in the mid-nineties, but, now, her threats don’t seem so funny…
And we have the O.P.P – that is, our own Ontario Provincial Police for our American readers – who have now decided in the interests of sensitivity and non-discrimination never to refer to perpetrators or victims by their ‘gender’, or, more properly, their sex. After all, what if they ‘misidentify’ and get sued, or the perp gets off on such a technicality? Instead of the robust and definitive copula ‘is’, they will use the more vague and non-committal appears to be a ‘male’ or ‘female’. That seems more like something out of Monty Python. But even that bizarre comedy troupe likely could not have imagined that there would now be over a hundred genders, according to some, so who’s what, when, and to whom?
No, Officer, I only appear to be drunk.
When the executive branch of our government can no longer refer to the obvious, it is, to paraphrase Thomas More, a short road to chaos.
And when our own minds unhinge from reality, we can’t really have humour, for humour is based on truth, and true humour on charity. Which is why the Devil never laughs; only cackles.