I Must Be Joking - Intro to ‘Jokes’
Aug 23rd, 2008 by David
I got a call from Tim Etchells of Forced Entertainment. The company had been
touring a show called ‘Marathon Lexicon’ for which pieces of writing had been
commissioned from a variety of writers and academics. The pieces had simple titles
and were assembled into an alphabetised collection. The show would run for several
hours, during which some but not all of the lexicon would be presented. The
audience could come and go throughout the presentation if the prospect of sitting
still for eight hours unsettled them.
Tim asked if I would write a piece on jokes. As I’m rather keen on jokes I was
pleased to take the commission.
I knew I had a couple of unused joke-related bits somewhere on my hard disk so I
dug them out. The text for the anecdote about Bobby Sands was adapted from the
outline to an as yet unwritten autobiography, as was some of the material on
humour and risk assessment. The rest of it was fresh.
I haven’t seen the show yet - I’ll have to wait until it comes to London again.