Time to Stop Laughing.

As Frankie Boyle reviewed 2017 and ushered in 2018 in his own acidic fashion his audience laughed at every vividly painted dystopian vision. It was as if a clown had taken over the rational of the circus, the audience chuckling as the knife thrower splits his assistants skull, the trapeze artists fail to grasp each other while booing in boredom the jugglers skills. Are we to meet Armageddon with a smile? Have we built an imposition on the earth too big to unravel? Well I suppose that is a form of joke. I mean too big to fail is one thing but too big to stop is far more scary. Already our million horsepower leviathan express, much like the Big Red Coca Cola illuminated juggernaut, is circumventing the world so fast it’s leaving many millions to struggle and starve beside its tracks. And of all the committees in its cab not one has a steering wheel. It’s not that we don’t know, top to bottom we know, it’s just, well all the pretty lights and it’s so red and handsome. So we stand, gawp and laugh like the Christmas crowds in wonder probably singing, “Oh we’re going to Dystopia”. I mean if one person had stood up in Frankie Boyle’s audience and shouted, “Well I’m not fucking laughing!” he’d probably have got stoned (as in stones) for ruining everybody’s evening. Maybe it’s fight or flight. Maybe an antelope with two sets of claws in its rump attached to a lion is, counter to our expectations, laughing at the thought of it and shouting to his friends in the herd, “Big bugger, this one. Anyone got a selfie stick?” and getting in response, “Nice on Steve. You keep larfing mate. Sorry can’t help, Gordon’s scratching his arse and I’m doing the Misses.” So here we are surrounded by a pride of misfortunes of, it has to be said, our own making and jolly well making the best of it. Well not exactly making the best of it, we’d have to stop laughing to do that.