Witzig, witzig

On rare occasions, there's a German post on this blog. This is one of those rare occasions, because the post's object is a German language talk that I attended. Sorry about that.

Vor ein paar Tagen habe ich im Rahmen einer Flying Science Reihe einen ausgezeichneten Vortrag von Jochen Hörisch mit dem Titel Witzig, witzig - was ist lustig? gehört. Meine Aufnahme des Vortrags ist - mit Placet des Referenten - hier verfügbar. Die Kernthese des Vortrags hat mich schockiert: Das einzige, worüber man heute nicht lachen dürfe, sei die Religion. Begründet wurde diese Feststellung mit den möglichen Folgen solcher Witze - dänische Karikaturen usw lassen grüssen.

Meiner Meinung nach ist diese These falsch auf so vielen Ebenen, dass ich ohne umfangreiche Abhandlung nicht darauf eingehen kann. Nur soviel: allein die Fixierung auf die Religion ist viel zu allgemein, da sich nur monotheistische Religionen so ernst nehmen, dass sie Humor nicht zulassen. Den Göttern sei Dank kann ich mir eine detaillierte Kritik aber ersparen, weil der Referent selbst seine These in derart vielfältiger Weise köstlich gebrochen hat, dass er sie offensichtlich selbst nicht Ernst nimmt. Ein wahres Lehrstück der Selbstironie und echtes Vergnügen also - nur schade, dass nach dem (kurzen) Referat keine Diskussion zugelassen worden ist.

Banksy's Pet Store ...

You know you're in for a treat when Banksy opens a pet store cum grill ... enjoy!

Football craze

The Basle indigenous will hopefully be forgiven for thinking their home town to be the centre of the universe for the next couple of weeks. Not only is the high and mighty Art world currently assembled here, but even some football tournament is being kicked off as we type ... but don't expect to read anything more about it here. 

April revisited

This one is perfectly worthy to be listed with its predecessor. Don't you just love the penguins taking off? This may also signal the beginning of a humouristic examination of global warming, which is awfully scarce.

Screw Yoga

This is excellent stuff!

Bored of the dance

Surely, some fellow travellers on my train trip to Zurich yesterday must have thought me nuts as I was smiling and sniggering to myself while I was listening to Stephen Fry's latest podgram edition on the iPhone. I'm so perfectly with him on his innate aversion to dancing that it's uncanny! Why don't you subscribe to it yourself - he's utterly dry and funny.

Essential watching

This is essential watching for every Anglophone who stares blankly at continental Europeans quipping about the same procedure as last year. The video is a 1963 Swiss-German co-production that is traditionally aired on virtually every TV station on the last day of the year.

Sir Peter's taste for swan

Speaking of Scotland: I came across a reference to Udal law and feudal tenure in Scotland in an article in the University of Edinburgh Journal. This led me to this rather amusing article about Sir Peter's alleged felony to partake of the remains of a deceased swan (Monty Python, anyone?). I guess I'll never know whether Sir Peter actually did time in the Tower, but it certainly was enlightening to read about it. 

Smart

There are not many smart commercials of which you will remember what they actually advertise. This is one of them - enjoy!

Leviathan

Looking for a suitable folder to hold my corporate accounts 2007 (yes, I know ...), I stumbled across a huge batch of comics that I carefully tore out of the Independent on Sunday back when I was living in Scotland in the early nineties. Considering whether I should scan them or throw them out (which I probably won't anyway), I looked for the stuff online and - bingo! Enjoy Peter Blegvad's Leviathan, an immensely dark humoured, weird & witty set starring a toddler who despairs of the world. Wonderful!

Committology

Looking for Committology, I found this great collection of pretty serious committee work related laws - or not. Just don't ask why I was looking for committology ...

Fix this!

Check out this week's installment of the BBC's StoryFix, a weekly videocast. The bit about Imagine, a world where there is no news is fabulous!

Bunnies rule!

Tiki Bar TV gives us just enough time until Easter to study the intricate set of rules that is the drinking game of Bunnies. For a flawless, yet necessarily superficial documentary of the game's enactment, see the reel referred to above. But beware, some of the bunny related action is rather rude - watch only if of legal age! That disclaimer is provided for the benefit of our transpondal clientèle, which the Royal League of Bunnies (RLB) also refers to, somewhat disrespectfully - surely the same will apply to all non-English lookers-on:

"A competent game of bunnies should be played at such a pace that the casual observer is rendered mesmerised by the velocity of the action. Most commonly, American observers will be overheard expressing bemusement and disbelief at what they are seeing. As with cricket, the finer points of bunnies will forever remain mysterious to those from over the pond, due to their innate inability to comprehend such complex goings on."

April Fool

Here's to the 50th return of the BBC's classic april fool's contribution. Apparently it worked very well back in 1957 - not anymore, I hope. Enjoy, particularly the accent!

Sanity quants

"However far you may travel in this world,
you will still occupy the same volume of space.
Traditional Ur-Bororo saying."

It's been in the making for quite a long time, but I finally finished The Quantity Theory of Insanity by Will Self. It is a bizarre book with an underpinning of radically absurd wit. Imagine a combination of The Sixth Sense, Six feet under and The Flying Circus and you get the beginning of it - literally (I am talking about the first story)! The book's format is a collection of six apparently unrelated short stories: The North London Book of the Dead, Ward 9, Understanding the Ur-Bororo, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Mono-Cellular and finally Waiting. But on closer inspection, you'll notice that each story is cleverly linked with others by means of some peripheral character. For a good review & summary, check this - I personally just loved the Ur-Bororo story. Oh, and Waiting with the permanent suspension between immanence & imminence!

Which leads me to a quick parenthetical note: I do not want to boast my vocabulary, but it doesn't happen often in non-technical literature that I have to use the dictionary. Not so in this case! Maybe that has something to do with the fact that Self occasionally uses technical jargon, particularly when the subject matter is anthropology, or psychiatry, as in the namesake story where he actually develops said quantity theory, complete with footnotes and bibliography ("Hurst, P., 'Nailbiting in Bournemouth versus Bed-Wetting in Poole: Action and Amelioration', Journal of Psychology, March, 1976") And it comes across incredibly ... credibly! It's just too bad that the frequently quoted British Journal of Ephemera (BJE) does not appear to exist in this world - I'd be an avid reader!

The quantity theory itself is obviously true (please abstain from applying Popper to this one): There is only a limited amount of sanity in any given social grouping. Hence a decay in the mental health of one member actually increases other members' sanity. Read it to believe it - and have a swell time in the process!!

P.S. The uncharacteristically high density of exclamation marks in this post correlates closely with how much I like the book.