When my maternal grandfather died and I was cleaning up his stuff, I found a notebook full of bad jokes and one liners — and I thought what is this?! A few years earlier I’d written a paper about a letter in which St. Jerome defended himself against charges of impiety after someone found a similar notebook in his quarters — so I was, like, ¯\(ツ)/¯ la plus ça change… But I soon learned that these notebooks were common among a certain generation: it was fodder for when they’d have to speak at a roast. Now that everyone’s a standup comic, it’s like UM YEAH DUH COMICS KEEP NOTEBOOKS HAVEN’T YOU WATCHED MRS MAISEL; but back in olden tymes when you could just ride a bike without gearing up in several hundred bucks’ worth of costumery, you could also just be funny without becoming a Standup Comic. So, anyway, this Frankie Boyle essay about the election… If brevity was the soul of wit this would be like one of those subatomic particles, but it isn’t. It goes on and on, like a savage gang beating but with big inflatable rubber mallets. There are some pretty good lines, like about Cameron: “It says a lot about how badly the last couple of years have gone, that there’s a guy who destroyed Libya, presided over needless austerity and f*cked a pig, and we wish that he’d just used his own judgment.” Or Johnson: “booed by nurses, people who can remove a dressing, examine a festering wound, and still look up at you with a smile.” But it’s so dense with attempts at humor, as I was reading it I wondered: What if we had something like JPEG compression but for writing? 💡And then I realized, wait, this is that, and all the jokes are jaggies. And now I feel like I’m a thousand years old.
(Guardian)