Yesterday I read a shocking thing in the latest issue of O magazine (dedicated to ‘Happiness’): “A child laughs, experts say, about 400 times a day; adults, only 15 times”. That’s terrible! Terrible! I’m pretty sure – I hope – I laugh more than 15 times a day. If you don’t then you need to get in some guaranteed-laugh DVDs: Black Books, Spaced, I’m Alan Partridge (first series), The Paul & Pauline Calf Video Diaries. Failing any of these, then Friends, Will & Grace, my new favourite (about which, more later) Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Read The Onion and read Mil Millington’s Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About (the funniest book I’ve ever read).
And … I don’t know if you’re familiar with Richard Herring. David introduced me to his and Stuart Lee’s TV show This Morning With Richard Not Judy a few years ago (you may have heard of Lee & Herring’s Fist of Fun?). TMWRNJ (as we fans call it!) gave me probably my only proper student moment. When you go to University aged 27, married and working full-time, you tend to miss out on all the usual student behaviours of getting drunk, missing lectures, sitting in pubs boring everyone stupid reciting Monty Python sketches. But one evening I was sitting in the Moon Under Water on Deansgate, drinking £1 a pint Carlsberg with some fellow mature students, when someone said ‘Ah …’ and I said, ‘No, not ah …’ and James and I spent the next half hour boring everyone else reciting bits of TMWRNJ – ‘They’re all Howler monkeys when I’ve finished with them’, ‘Saying it in a high-pitched voice doesn’t make it any more true’. Etc. Ah, happy days …
The other reason I mention him is that last night I dreamt about him. You know when you have a nice dream about someone and you think about them all day? Well in my dream we were going out together and he sort of worshipped me. I like this in a man. Particularly since my husband’s current pet name for me is ‘Big Unit’. And, in my dream, he (Richard Herring) was very funny, he made me laugh a lot (as does my husband, otherwise he couldn’t get away with calling me what he calls me). And, twice, I laughed myself awake. Now I think this is definitely a very good thing. If the average adult only laughs 15 times per day, laughing yourself awake twice in one night is good going.
And … he has a weblog. And it makes me laugh every day. (In fact if I read 15 of the archived ones, any further laughs would be a bonus!)
TMWRNJ! Happy days indeed. Have you heard any of Herring’s podcasts? Often v v v funny but, argh, such a boys’ club feeling.
I am now not at all going to Youtube to look up stupid jokes about the Man Corr.
(Big Unit? Really???)
Yes, used to listen to the podcasts, but they started to irritate me so I stopped.
As for ‘Big Unit’ – I was bigly pregnant at the time.
I don’t think that makes it better!