I'm a Joke and So Are You: Reflections on Humour and Humanity

by Robin Ince

Ricky believes that offence usually comes when people confuse the target of the joke with the subject of the joke.

Once people have decided they are offended, it is difficult to shift their position. Mark Twain wrote, ‘It is easier to fool people than convince them that they have been fooled.’ Equally, once someone has found their viewpoint from a position of high moral outrage, it is hard to talk them down. Perpetual dismissal of the offended gets us nowhere.

Sometimes the only way of approaching the great traumas and losses is by concentrating on the trivial and day-to-day, something that is almost certainly part of the avoidance process;

The nihilistic philosopher E. M. Cioran wrote, ‘The man who has never imagined his own annihilation, who has not anticipated recourse to the rope, the bullet, poison or the sea, is a degraded galley slave or a worm crawling on the cosmic carrion.’

we can create a sense of meaning in our lives, a sense of permanence, a sense that we have meant something or created something, then accepting the inevitable end becomes far more achievable.

If life is absurd, then so is death. To know there will one day be a world without you is a strange trait to have evolved. We can spend our whole life worrying so much about death that we forget to live while we’re here. Be preposterous, know you are absurd, be a joke that lives on for a while – be a punchline that people want to remember.

Sometimes it may not be easy, but whose life is a walk in the park, apart from park-keepers? And even they have to pick up dog shit and used condoms some days, so even a walk in the park is no walk in the park, if you turn professional.