KillJoy was Here
Where are you now, Jim Aldridge
Always with a ready loon for a fresh lawyer joke
Your belly laughter stripping the veneer from wigs and robes.
Where are you now, with a good goat doing that,
The perfect staging, set up, prestige punchline
Piercing our pomposity, pretentious self-regard.
Where are you now, with that twinkled eye comeback
A laugh pulled from your deep bank of comic insight
Of catfish, and bottom feeding scum suckers.
We never took much money off you,
But had a good time trying all the same;
Understood that truths revealed in jest enrich us all.
Where were you, Jim, when Jeremiah woked,
Launched a coup, stole humour away
To the dour pulpits of sour correctness, where
Laughter turned bilious, brittle; merriment dried, then died,
Withering wit has surrendered to insult, invective, while
Joyous display is displaced by virtue signals.
Nothing must be funny now, out here on the edge
Clinging fearfully on the precipice
Of our first world preciousness.
About this: Jim Aldridge QC, a sometime professional colleague, offered a Canadian dollar (a Loonie) to anyone who would tell him a lawyer joke he had not previously heard.
But now, in a reborn Puritanical age, jokes seem to be out of fashion, and what passes for humour, mostly isn’t.
Apparently, life is no longer amusing, has nothing to teach from a laugh. Humour is aborted for fear of triggering offence: new jokes are unborn, and old ones kept hidden away in the attic of our minds, like an embarrasing old uncle, whose values no longer pass our polite social smell test.
And we are all the poorer for it.