The trouble with jokes



Apologies to anyone waiting on tenterhooks for my account of Portland. Christmas intervened when I was still only half-way through Sometimes a Great Notion. But don't despair! My new year's resolution is to have it finished before its centennial in 2064.

Meanwhile I've been seeing some Christmas presents behind its back. Charlie Brooker's Dawn of the Dumb was a present from Mrs Tomsk, and is just the thing for the festive period when Great Novels don't really appeal. It's a collection of Brooker's Guardian columns: a mix of his 'Screen Burn' TV reviews and his writing on other weighty matters.

Brooker's columns are both puerile and misanthropic, and all the better for it. Above all they're very funny. I'm not a fan of tasteless humour in general but he has elevated it to an art form. If you're not familiar with his work, pause now and contemplate his 2006 end of year TV review. If you laughed at his summing up of Torchwood, you'll enjoy the rest of the book. If you blanched, perhaps best to stay away.

Dawn of the Dumb covers roughly the period from the start of The Apprentice to the point mid-way in 2007 when everybody in the world joined Facebook. This coincides with the first half of our stay in Germany, so it was fascinating to find out what I had missed on British TV. Thanks mainly to the joy of DVD box sets, the answer is not much: several series of Big Brother and The X-Factor, the return of Noel Edmunds and an advert for Apple Macs were apparently the big tickets. I'd trade that lot in for a stick of spargel any day.

Reality TV is the dominant subject of Screen Burn. Brooker professes hatred for the genre, which is all the funnier as he is clearly obsessed with it. My interest started to wane after the umpteenth discussion of a Big Brother series I had never seen, but for the most part it's entertaining even if you haven't watched any of the TV discussed (I only wish I could achieve the same with these book reviews). I can't say it's encouraged me to look out for repeats of any of the TV discussed though, except maybe Paul Merton's Silent Clowns (The Goat!)

The non-TV columns are just as good, if not better, and refreshingly eclectic, like a sorbet between chapters. Brooker also has a habit of being absolutely right on virtually every topic he turns to, whether it be the absurd length of the King Kong remake, the worrying love of torture in 24, or - speaking as someone currently suffering from a sore throat - his proof of the non-existence of God.

By now you'll have noticed that all of his columns are available online. So is it worth getting the book? Well, quite apart from avoiding the acute frustration of trying to navigate the Guardian's archives, reading them in dollops does work. It's a bit like those DVD box sets - you get a more concentrated hit. I wouldn't advise reading the whole thing in one sitting, but a couple of chapters a day won't overstretch your laughter muscles. Also, the index is almost as funny as the rest of the book.

The one concession to value-addedness is a section about his column on the Bush vs Kerry debates of 2004. This is not available online, because a reckless joke in it resulted in hundreds of outraged emails from rabid American neo-cons. A salutary lesson to all who write on the internet: hordes of lunatics are never more than a click away.

Brooker complains about how the protest was stoked by partisan websites, which is somewhat hypocritical given how he has since tried to do exactly the same to Jan Moir, no matter how much she deserved the opprobrium. The difference is that Brooker was joking - but in an audience of everyone, can any joke be guaranteed to avoid offence? Maybe it's best to confine yourself, Twitter-style, to what you had for breakfast. Just watch out for militant vegans.


Dawn of the Dumb by Charlie Brooker
First published 2007
Brooker's columns are available on the Guardian website.

Comments

  1. I got a copy of Armando Iannucci's book 'The Audacity of Hype' which is also a collection of newspaper articles and also very funny. Recommended.

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