Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking

Judging by my email inbox this week people seem determined to have a laugh despite us all being flushed down the pandemic with swine fever, recession, bent politicians and age defeating injections paralysing our facial muscles. Was it Einstein, or was it Galileo, who said Botox = Skin - Time – Emotion?

Like you I tend to get inundated with jokes that do the rounds so much that I see the same gag seven or eight times and usually delete it unread, depending on who sent it. I’ve started a ratings system based on the jokes people send me and if they haven’t got at least a three or four star rating based on past performance then I bin them unopened.

However, I have never had so many jokes and cartoons appear in my in tray as this week, along with funny stories and pithy sayings, a sure sign that, at last, we are waking up to the fact that we have to be cheerful if we’re going to get through this gloomy time and financial Armageddon. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse may be riding across the sky but they’re wearing comic red noses and funny hats.

You would think that swine fever is no laughing matter – I almost said not to be sneezed at - until you see street loads of Mexicans with face masks looking like Michael Jackson, some even painting false noses and moustaches on their masks, while others just thank God for the chance to cover up their real noses and moustaches. I’m guessing that Mexican beauty salons are not doing a roaring trade just now in bleaching the top lip area.

But, awful as it is, this swine fever has led to the jokes appearing thick and fast. “I called the swine line for advice this week and all I could hear was crackling” being one of the first out of the blocks. Then it was “my family must have swine flu otherwise how do explain all these rashers on our skin?” I also received a drawing from the Winnie The Pooh stories with Piglet and Pooh walking side by side. Piglet is thinking “I’m glad I have such a good friend as Pooh” while the bear is thinking “one sneeze from him and I’ll kill him”.

Another pal decided to cheer me up by sending a list of gags used by the inimitable Tommy Cooper. There were pages of them including ‘I went to buy a watch, and the man in the shop said 'Analogue?' I said 'No, just a watch.' Then there was the cowboy who walked in to the car showroom and shouted “Audi”. Or what about the man who goes to Blockbuster and asks to borrow Batman Forever. He’s told “No. You bring it back tomorrow like everyone else.”

My favourite Tommy Cooper gag was about the bloke who bought a theatre. He told his mum of his purchase and she said “You’re having me on”. He replied “well, I’ll give you an audition but I’m not promising anything”.

Even The Sun newspaper gave over a page a day last week to comedians making light of the problems we’re all facing. So, amidst the gloom, we’re finding the first shoots of our sense of humour returning. In Washington, folk who are having their houses repossessed have started to copy Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone and have balanced paint pots on top of doors, wired their car batteries to door handles and put dog’s muck all over their door mats to have one last giggle as the mortgage company representatives enter their homes.

My favourite email joke that I received this week came from a long standing friend who works on the X Factor and, like me, is Scottish. I’ve told the joke to many English people this week and all have laughed, with no one taking offence, so don’t you be the first. Just enjoy.

A farmer in Scotland is walking across his land when he spots a man using his hand to scoop water from a stream that flows through his land. He shouts to the man, "Dinnae drink tha waater! It's fu' ae coo's shite an pish!" The man replies, "My Good fellow, I'm from England . Could you repeat that in the Queen’s English for me?" The farmer replies with a smile, "I said, use two hands - you'll spill less that way!!!"

And to round off a perfect week, I’ve discovered that Bono, the world saver, faith healer and miracle worker, has made me laugh too. It’s not often I can say that but the blind Irish singer (what do you mean he’s not blind?) has written a poem about Elvis Presley which goes, and I quote verbatim, “Elvis wore a gold suit and trained his lip to curl/ Elvis was macho but could sing like a girl”.

He then goes on “Elvis, white trash/ Elvis the Memphis flash/ Elvis didn’t smoke hash/ and would have been a sissy without Johnny Cash.”

You want more? How about “Elvis with God on his knees/ Elvis on three TVs/Elvis, here come the killer bees/ Head full of honey, potato chips and cheese.

And what makes this an especially funny poem is that Bono wrote it as a tribute to the King and is very proud of it. Which brings me back to my senses and an acceptance of how serious things are. I mean, how will they ever tell if Bono catches swine fever and starts talking nonsense?

Send In The Clowns

www.paulcoia.com

As a proud native of Glasgow, one time city of culture and now the Woolworths of riverside real estate, I’ve long enjoyed the fun to be had in a Scottish sport which is enjoyed by everyone. It is not tossing the caber, but hurling the insult.

Alan McGee, former manager of the band Oasis and pal of Tony Blair, used his Glasgow upbringing this week when asked what he thought of the Prime Minister. “Gordon Brown”, he said “has had a charisma bypass. His party are cretins and retards.” Contrast this with London’s, very English, mayor Boris Johnson who said that Gordon Brown is “like some sherry crazed old dowager who has lost the family silver”. More polite, for sure, but less of a direct hit than McGee’s barbs.

Scottish humour is based on cruelty but also applauding when you get bigger and better thrown back. We’re not sophisticated, and a poster advertising a play about Glasgow summed it up as the city where “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some are still throwing spears at buses.”

Meeting some gas bag, who simply opens their mouth to boast, might lead English people like Stephen Fry to say a clever and enduringly whimsical remark such as “You have the patter of tiny feats” but in Glasgow it’s more likely that Stevie Fryup would say “That’s clever, the way your lips move but your bum does the talking”. It then becomes a contest with the reply being something like “At least I’m not wearing mine on my shoulders”.

We don’t do subtlety in Glasgow, preferring to hit the bullseye first time, and when I visited the city recently and was recognised in the street, a woman said “I used to look forward to seeing your face on my telly every day.” Then with a sly smile she added, “As soon as you came on I knew it was time to turn over for Countdown”.

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re no repecters of celebrity. When Bono played Glasgow with his band U2 and movingly snapped his fingers every three seconds saying that a child was dying in Africa on every click, an audience member shouted “well stop clicking then”.

So are we Scots just simply rude? I hope it’s more than that. Sir Alex Ferguson, now manager of Manchester United, tells the story of his playing days with Glasgow Rangers and going in to see the then manager Scott Symon to ask why he had been playing in the second team for three weeks. Mr Symon replied with the perfect put down, “because we don’t have a third team”. Ferguson, the target of the comment, just laughed.

Scottish football has a sense of humour deadlier than a teenager’s socks, where hopeless goalkeepers are known as Michael Jackson - because they wear gloves for no apparent reason - useless players are said to be “the biggest waste of money since Paris Hilton bought pyjamas”, and I remember when Scotland lost to Denmark in the Mexican World Cup our supporters summoned up their vast knowledge of world events and current affairs, aligned with their powers of creative writing and word play, and chanted, “you can stick your streaky bacon up you’re a*se”. Now that’s class.

So why am I going on about being Scottish? Well I guess it’s because my kids keep telling me that the longer I live in London the less Scottish I’m becoming by the day and, this week, they said I’m turning English. Apparently I said the word ‘filthy’ rather than my usual ‘manky’. Unless you’ve had acid injected into your veins whilst coating your eyeballs with chilli powder, or you have bought Des O’Connor’s new Christmas album, you cannot appreciate the level of pain I feel when I hear that. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being English, indeed some of my best wives have been English, but rather that there’s everything wrong with forgetting where you come from.

I know it’s not my accent that’s changed as an internet chat board currently has a comment saying they hate my Scottish voice on radio and always switch over – I wonder if it’s that Countdown fan from Glasgow again – and when I went to see England play Australia at Twickenham two weeks ago I sang the Australian anthem to deflate the auld enemy. It seems to me my Scottish bloody mindedness is still intact.

I wonder, though, if it all matters anyway. It seems that wherever we live we’re all starting to blend more and more in to one homeless waif as quick communications and ease of travel mean we spend more time picking up other cultures and accents, and my kids seem to now talk an American street language that is part “Yo girlfriend” and part indecipherable.

In the quiet road of eleven houses where I live we have three German families, one French and two Far Eastern. There is also a Danish family who are renting, though what they do with streaky bacon must remain a mystery as I’ve yet to meet them. But I’m sure we’d all get along famously as nationality seems to me to be less an issue than ever before.

So forget common currencies, Central Banks, European Unions, Nato and cultural exchange trips. Togetherness in daily life is us all just getting along despite where we come from, and laughing at ourselves. When we get to the stage of Glasgow humour being used commonly, without anyone taking offence, I think we’ll have truly arrived.