Many years ago my father used to respond to some of my wilder claims or flights of fancy by asking “if you’re so smart how come you’re not rich?”  This amused him but I didn’t find it very funny – and not just because it deflated my pretentions. I appreciate it more and more with age as I come to savour its assertion of crassness and good sense – particularly from the mouth of my father who was a true believer in the law of diminishing returns when it came to money. He thought it was very important up to the point where it became progressively less so and ultimately became of vanishing significance at about the level of money he had – which is to say a professor’s salary.

I also thought of Groucho’s comment that he wouldn’t belong to a club that would have him as a member as just a formulaic quip. The older I get the truer and funnier it seems.

And below the fold is a Monty Python sketch I’ve seen lots of times and always thought was amusing. But then I came upon it yesterday and just laughed and laughed. How much of life is simply the piling up of instances in which desperate seriousness is asserted alongside endless repetitions of utter absurdity?

Probably what keeps us from tearing each other apart limb by limb. But funny nonetheless.

Enjoy . . . Continue reading →

I ran into James O’Loghlin at the Innovation Awards in Brisbane last week. He MCed the awards and in introducing the evening with a 10-15 minute monologue that was sufficiently funny that I the dim dark recesses of my brain reminded me that he was a stand up comedian before he was and ABC announcer. He was very good.

In any event, in discussions after the show I asked him if he knew any good jokes – as in jokes one tells. He said he’d heard one lately that he liked.

A man is walking home one night and walking down the path to his front door. It’s night time and the ground is damp. He takes his foot and flicks a snail off the pathway into the garden.

 

 

Three years later there’s a knock on the door . . . Continue reading →