There’s a new application you can get for your iPhone called Baby Shaker, where a baby cries and cries until eventually you get so sick of it you shake your mobile so that large red Xs appear over the baby’s eyes and the crying stops for good. Or rather there isn’t, because someone took offence and complained to Apple and now, annoyingly, it has been withdrawn.
Would I have acquired a copy myself? Well the graphics looked pretty rubbish but I still think it was probably worth the 99 cents, just on the off chance one might have found someone to offend. Sicko, child-related jokes are very useful in this respect, I find. One of my favourites when I was about 14 was:
Q. What’s the difference between a truckload of babies and a truckload of marbles?
A. You can’t unload marbles with a pitchfork.
More recently, when my kids were about six and eight, I tried enlivening dull supermarket trips by training them to pipe up as we passed down the wine and spirits aisle: ‘Oh please don’t buy these drinks, Daddy. You know how it makes you angry and you hit us and we don’t like it, Daddy, we don’t!’ Problem was, it was too long a speech for them to learn and they could never get the intonation right. Could have been fab if we’d pulled it off, though, eh, readers?
I mention this by way of a preamble towards the beginnings of a thesis I’ve been working on, viz. why left-liberals have no sense of humour. Tough one, I know, for of course it provokes the obvious response: ‘What about Polly Toynbee? Yasmin Alibhai-Brown? Naomi Klein? George Monbiot? You saying, what, that they’re not funny?’ Yes, all right.
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