Being Funny

This is quite hard. One of the most exciting days I've had recently is when I got three new Twitter followers in one afternoon! On closer inspection it turned out that two of these were trying to sell me face-cream and the other one was a Tory. What am I doing wrong? I try to avoid posting complete inanities about the filling of my sandwich (peanut butter, onion and cucumber) or the state of the weather (crack-chaffingly warm). I try to avoid telling people exactly where I am because I'm paranoid about somebody with a grudge (probably a jealous boyfriend… y'know… I can't help my rugged good looks and raw animal magnetism) coming round and stealing my collection of rare Jackie Chan films - new services like 4square that perform this kind of location based thing are really tedious for anyone not actually meeting up with whoever is now “the mayor of pointless-ville, Woking”. Here’s a thought. If you are meeting up with someone then text, message or call them directly. The rest of us really don’t care if you are in the pub, sandwich bar or local massage parlour. Unless we’re a burglar. Which we’re not. Apart from Shifty Dave who likes to do a bit of robin’ from time to time.

Anyway, getting sidetracked… I think I was rambling on about being funny and interesting. You’d never believe it but I actually spend a bit of time trying to make these blogs funny, useful or interesting. I try to post stuff that has a nice turn of phrase and isn't just an excuse to have a dig at somebody or promote my latest release (The Stick EP - available now from all good download stores).

If you are the sort of person who enjoys having a dig at people then there are plenty of places for you to vent your spleen but it’s not really my bag of tea - apart from the above thinly veiled attack on the couple of mates I have that use the execrable 4skin. Of course some people deserve to be pooped on from a great height (Max Clifford, for example, although I can’t think of a height high enough) but even if you do this kind of thing, you can still do it in a way that's funny. Some people think being funny is posting a really long swear word in capitals. Some people think being funny is posting a faked photo onto the Facebook group of a recently deceased child - seriously what is wrong with these people? Some people think being funny is what the people are in Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. I don't think any of these things are funny. But then I don't find practical jokes or being pointlessly callous funny either. I get bored very quickly when I'm in a group of people (men, usually) who find it hilarious to endlessly take the piss out of each other. We all know this is just a way of covering up the fact that you want to get frisky with each others willy and bum parts, you repressed man fiddler, you. I like stuff that has been well written, observed, thought through. I like people who can have a conversation without resorting to name-calling - a much lower form of wit than sarcasm.

This was why I got so angry recently when I was forced to watch Angels & Demons, the recent Dan Brown waste-of-a-tree turned into a film thereby squandering some more of our Earth’s precious resources on pointless brain killing time wasting clap-trap. Y'know, like Accessorize or Clinton's Cards. Anyway, the whole plot seemed to rest on them wandering around various churches because every hour or so a new murder would be committed and at the end of it all the Vatican would be blown up. At no point did anyone think about skipping, say, the second priest and just going straight for the third chap - thereby standing a better chance of preventing the potential massacre and saving us all at least three quarters of an hour of Tom Hanks being an action hero with about the same effectiveness as a hamster learning origami in a wind tunnel. Although it does have to be said that I would personally enjoy seeing the Vatican destroyed by anti-matter - it would greatly improve the prospects of the human race.

The point is, before I get arrested by the FBI for threatening to destroy a building with a device that doesn’t exist and made to wear orange overalls and have my genitals humiliated by a marine (some people pay for that, right?), that the story only worked if you didn't think more than five minutes ahead. When I'm watching a film I don't really want to think five minutes ahead - I assume that the author or scriptwriter has done that for me and when I arrive five minutes later on that the bloody story will make sense and not have more holes in it than an argument by BP PR’s head of Swiss Cheese.

It's the same with anything really - doesn't matter if it's music or art or a book or a film or a mildly amusing e-rant. I want the person who has created it to have at least spent some time thinking about what he or she is doing. I don't think Facebook or Twitter, or any of these other new fangled ways of having your personal information abused, are really helping us much in this regard. Most of my friends are clever, erudite, sexy people who tend to post funny, useful or interesting stuff. Some of the people who I've tried following on Twitter or who have become my incredibly real and very precious Facebook “friends” are clearly half-wits. Not even that. Quarter-wits. Who cares if you've just seen the best expensive watch or handbag in the world ever and felt it necessary to take a picture of yourself grinning up at the camera-phone whilst displaying said watch/handbag in a style that one assumes you think is meant to make you look fun, sexy and interesting. You actually look like your head is way too big for your body and the only useful thing you can do for society is probably to carry on doing this kind of shallow, pointless thing so that the rest of us know what you look like and can avoid you in the street.

When an artist paints a picture or a musician writes a song, they spend time going over it again and again, refining it. An author will rewrite his story several times before submitting it to an editor who will then help the author weed out any remaining issues. I’m excluding Dan Brown’s editor in this - I suspect his books are edited by a dead stick with a little bit of dried poo on one end. For the most part they put some real effort in to make the end result satisfying and complete. Tweak it. Massage it. Leave it for a bit and then go back to it to make sure you made the right decisions. It’s the equivalent of thinking before you open your mouth…

Also, for lunch today I had some left-over squid and I've just seen a great advert for a hair product that claims to make me irresistible to people of either sex. Me - 1, the evolution of the human race - 0. Yeah!