No Sensayuma

I must be losing my sense of humour as I get older. Either that or the world is becoming less funny, or at least it’s becoming more funny but in a wicked, dry and decidedly ironic way.

Let me explain. The other day, a friend recommended the new book by David Sedaris, who is an American “humorist” I had never heard of. The book is called “When You are Engulfed in Flames” and has a black cover with a picture of a human skeleton smoking a cigarette.

When you examine this book, you are engulfed, not in flames, but in an armada of critic’s comments all screaming how “hilarious” the book is or how it “made me laugh out loud” or some other verbal attempt at telling the potential reader Just How Damn Funny this book is.

So I read it, fired up by the promise of dark wicked ironic humour from the striking front cover and all that painfully obvious symbolism connoted by the image of a skeleton with a cancer stick poking out of its mouth.

And...

Well, I have to say I was decidedly underwhelmed. OK, it starts off well, with a tale of the author’s sister and her typically American neuroses about touching the handles of supermarket trolleys and what have you, and indeed it moves on to a series of somewhat long tales from the author’s rather patchy childhood, his mysteriously unsuccessful academic life and his struggles with drugs and smoking and learning foreign languages etc but for some reason, I could not find it in my heart to laugh out loud.

There were a couple of moments which did raise the ghost of a titter to shake my gut into life, especially the description of an excruciating taxi ride with a driver who wouldn’t stop telling his passenger about his sexual activities. Oh yes and the time the hero hitched a ride in a limo where he was offered sex with the driver’s wife and finally realised he was homosexual!

I will give it that. But honestly, I expected to be unable to get up for laughing, and instead found the book an interesting and brilliantly written series of reminiscences, light-hearted yes, but gutbustingly hilarious definitely no.

Oh dear oh dear. So what do I find funny these days then, I hear you scream?

I find humour in everyday, silly and ironic occurrences. Like the other day when I was driving home from work. I was approaching a bend in the road and I noticed an advance party of small traffic cones ahead of me. I thought for a split second that maybe the local authorities had finally got round to fixing the road surface on this most bumpy and badly patched up piece of road this side of Afghanistan.

Instead, they were painting white lines down the centre of the road. I mean, come on, I’ve been driving on this same bloody road almost every day for the last nine years and nearly broken my suspension on the potholes and uneven road surface more times that I’ve eaten roti canai. I’ve never needed WHITE LINES down the middle of the road before, so why do I need them now? But there they were, in all their freshly painted whiteness, eagerly ready to remind me where the centre of the road is.

Another source of hilarity for me is when people’s problems and difficulties can be completely removed in one stroke by one small change in their behaviour or environment, but they just cannot see it.

I see this every day when I drive into my place of work and attempt to park my car. It’s like this – to get to my parking area I have to make a right turn into a very narrow road. Almost every day there are at least four cars parked on the corner of this road, meaning that if someone is coming the other way, I can’t get through, and have to reverse to let them pass. And why is this necessary? Because the bloody cars parked on the corner are there because their owners are inside the nearby staff room clocking in!

Aaaand the situation is made worse because now we all have to clock in using a decidedly mendacious post-911 thumbprint reading system which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t – resulting in colleagues forming a queue in the staffroom while the machine beeps and says “please try again” and everyone is anxious and impatient because their cars are parked illegally outside on the corner and they’re feeling guilty.

So as a result of all this silliness, I can’t get through to my parking place. Despite being overweight and unfit, I don’t have a problem to park my car, walk to my office, unload my bag, walk to the staff room and put my finger on the little green rectangle and wait for the machine to say “thank you!” in its camp little voice.

And the thing is that all this hassle could be removed in one fell swoop if people could just find the time to park their cars before clocking in! You just have to laugh at the silliness of it all!

But I’m sure that some of you probably don’t find this funny. Well, if you fall into that category, I suggest you go to MPH and pick up a copy of David Sedaris’ book. Only don’t come back and blame me if you don’t laugh out loud either!