The cast of Cinderella, at Shanklin Theatre — one of the show’s lines did not amuse.
THE VIEW FROM HEREGEOFF Giles raised an interesting point in his letter published in last week’s CP. He had been to see Cinderella at Shanklin Theatre with his two grandsons and had been less than amused by the reply given by Buttons when Cinders told him she loved him like a brother.
"It IS the IW," he said.
"Nobody laughed," writes Mr Giles, who considered the one-liner very inappropriate. "Does anyone have any thoughts?"
The first thought that occurs to me is nobody laughed, not necessarily because the line was inappropriate, but because it wasn’t in the least funny.
There are very few things one should never joke about and incest isn’t one of them. Tom Lehrer’s song Oedipus Rex is a masterpiece of wit about the mother-fixated Greek, summed up in the line, "He sure knew who a boy’s best friend is."
Stella Gibbons wrote the brilliant comic novel, Cold Comfort Farm, in which incest plays quite a part in the lives of the dysfunctional Starkadder family.
And perhaps the most famous quote on the subject is that of composer Sir Arnold Bax.
"You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing."
Now, that’s funny. But Shanklin Theatre’s attempt at incest-related humour was pathetic. And even if it had been amusing, this wasn’t the place for it.
Mr Giles rightly deemed the line "very inappropriate for a kids’ performance". Not that (one hopes) they would have understood it, so with not even the grown-ups laughing, it was a flop all round.
If you’re going to joke about incest, please be funny and make sure you’re doing it for the right audience. And if you’re Shanklin Theatre, just stick to custard pies.
But there is wider point in all this. There’s a curious dichotomy nowadays about both our own and other people’s feelings and not just when they apply to humour.
On one hand, we are in many ways a kinder society. We respond to the needs of disabled people, we are careful about the words we use, we support charitable initiatives by being immensely generous with both our time and our money.
We shriek with outrage when poor David Cameron makes an ill-judged but pretty innocent joke (and it was certainly funnier than Shanklin Theatre’s take on incest) about Tourette’s syndrome.
We can also be nauseatingly soppy and emotionally unstable.
I can’t imagine why we mocked the orchestrated weeping at Kim Jong-il’s death. Remember the mass hysteria over Princess Di?
Lachrymose pandemics are not confined to North Korea.
But we are also capable of extreme viciousness. The proliferation of stand-up comedy has persuaded every wannabee performer to strut around being hideously offensive, not remotely amusing, and making the whole thing even less funny by using the F-word every few seconds.
Tweeting, twittering and message boards are all fodder for those who have no wit, low intelligence but get their kicks out of their stream of semi-literate invective.
Whatever you think of the Island’s politicians, they do not deserve the sheer venom and unsubstantiated accusations levelled against them in certain online forums.
Our emotions are in a tangle, see-sawing between throw-up tweeness ("Aaaw! That’s soooo sweet!" about some unspeakable bit of triteness on Facebook) and vile hatred ("Hope the leeder burns in hell, id dance on his graive")
We need to distinguish between wit and charmlessness, true emotion and babbling sentimentality and justified criticism and cretinous spite. In short, we need a good dose of sense and sensibility.
I Christen you, US President
The new year is the time for lists of the most popular babies’ names. On the Island, it’s Jack for a boy and Olivia for a girl, while nationally it’s Oliver and Olivia.
Delightful names, of course, but possibly lacking in imagination.
Even the CP’s table of unusual names isn’t properly zany. Flossie, Ada, and Alfie? Not a patch on the way they do things in New Zealand, where parents have come up with some corkers in order to test the country’s strict registration laws.
A list of names banned in New Zealand over the past ten years has just been published. It includes Mafia No Fear, Chief Constable and Queen Victoria.
Parents have also tried to register "offensive names relating to body parts" and punctuation marks. I can see calling your child Colon would transgress both these categories but I think Apostrophe would be a sweet name.
Come on, IW parents, don’t let those fuddy-duddy New Zealand laws put you off. Queen Victoria would be the perfect name for your Island baby.
And why stop at Chief Constable? Dalai Lama, Lord Chamberlain, US President — all guaranteed to secure your child any top-class restaurant booking when it grows up.