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Authors: David Mitchell
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have been if they’d been born in the 1910s instead of the 1940s but, since my grandmother didn’t trouble to give birth to my father until 1946, I think that was more her fault than his.
I don’t want to give an exaggerated impression of how difficult she was: she wasn’t horrible all the time and she could be very kind. But she was tricky and inconsistent, and kept tricky and inconsistent dogs as pets.
My grandfather on that side was a remarkable man who died in 2011, three days after his 100th birthday. He was intelligent, witty, successful, quite rich and as financially generous as he was emotionally miserly. He loved fishing and shared many of the temperamental attributes of his prey.
This was not a man you hugged. I don’t know how I knew this – maybe I’d been told or maybe I just felt it. But I only ever shook hands with him, as did my dad. He would kiss my mother on the cheek perfunctorily, like a chat show host with a difficult actress.
Icy judgement emanated from him. He abhorred being kept waiting and, if we were going out for lunch (something which happened when he was around because he was rich), we’d have to get to the restaurant early when it was deserted, cryptlike. If we didn’t, his displeasure would manifest itself in my dad’s rising stress levels. Grandad hardly needed to say anything himself; some unseen power would make my father squirm, like when Darth Vader uses the force to strangle someone.
He had a snooker table and I remember once, when very small, wandering into the snooker room where he and my dad were having a game. I was too young to know what snooker was but, seeing a red shiny ball on a table at about my eye level, I picked it up. The reaction was like an east wind as my dad quickly took the ball from me and replaced it. My grandfather showed no surprise, only quiet displeasure. My behaviour had merely been typically disappointing.
He loved comedy though and, while we were never close, I think he was proud that I became a comedian, even if Peep Show was probably never to his taste. He was more of a fan of Peter Sellers and I can’t fault him there. I remember him wheezing and crying with laughter at the various Pink Panther films and I think such abandoned enjoyment of comedy from someone who was so controlled and controlling made me respect comedy even more. I concluded that everyone loved and admired comedy, however stern or important they might seem.
I was wrong about that. Lots of people don’t particularly like comedy. Some really have no sense of humour at all – they genuinely don’t find things funny. Consequently they often laugh a lot in the hope that they won’t be found out – that, by the law of averages, they’ll be laughing when a joke happens. I find that sort of person extremely unsettling.
And then there are people – and these don’t unsettle but enrage me – who think comedy is trivial. They believe that serious, intelligent people should focus on worthy, momentous things and that jokes, levity, piss-taking, subverting and satirising are the pastimes of the second-rate. Words cannot express how second-rate I consider such people. In my experience the properly intelligent, whether they’re astrophysicists, politicians, poets, lawyers, entrepreneurs, comedians, taxi drivers, plumbers or doctors, however serious or trivial their career aims, all adore jokes. And they have that in common with a lot of idiots.
For as long as I can remember, I have always thought that being funny is the cleverest thing you can do, that taking the piss out of something – parodying it, puncturing it – is at least as clever as making that thing in the first place. This view, which, I’m happy to say, will be most offensive to the people I want most to offend, was probably formed watching my cold grandfather, with all his financial acumen and preference for fish over humans, cry with laughter at a van being repeatedly driven into a swimming pool.
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Death
I don’t want to give an exaggerated impression of how difficult she was: she wasn’t horrible all the time and she could be very kind. But she was tricky and inconsistent, and kept tricky and inconsistent dogs as pets.
My grandfather on that side was a remarkable man who died in 2011, three days after his 100th birthday. He was intelligent, witty, successful, quite rich and as financially generous as he was emotionally miserly. He loved fishing and shared many of the temperamental attributes of his prey.
This was not a man you hugged. I don’t know how I knew this – maybe I’d been told or maybe I just felt it. But I only ever shook hands with him, as did my dad. He would kiss my mother on the cheek perfunctorily, like a chat show host with a difficult actress.
Icy judgement emanated from him. He abhorred being kept waiting and, if we were going out for lunch (something which happened when he was around because he was rich), we’d have to get to the restaurant early when it was deserted, cryptlike. If we didn’t, his displeasure would manifest itself in my dad’s rising stress levels. Grandad hardly needed to say anything himself; some unseen power would make my father squirm, like when Darth Vader uses the force to strangle someone.
He had a snooker table and I remember once, when very small, wandering into the snooker room where he and my dad were having a game. I was too young to know what snooker was but, seeing a red shiny ball on a table at about my eye level, I picked it up. The reaction was like an east wind as my dad quickly took the ball from me and replaced it. My grandfather showed no surprise, only quiet displeasure. My behaviour had merely been typically disappointing.
He loved comedy though and, while we were never close, I think he was proud that I became a comedian, even if Peep Show was probably never to his taste. He was more of a fan of Peter Sellers and I can’t fault him there. I remember him wheezing and crying with laughter at the various Pink Panther films and I think such abandoned enjoyment of comedy from someone who was so controlled and controlling made me respect comedy even more. I concluded that everyone loved and admired comedy, however stern or important they might seem.
I was wrong about that. Lots of people don’t particularly like comedy. Some really have no sense of humour at all – they genuinely don’t find things funny. Consequently they often laugh a lot in the hope that they won’t be found out – that, by the law of averages, they’ll be laughing when a joke happens. I find that sort of person extremely unsettling.
And then there are people – and these don’t unsettle but enrage me – who think comedy is trivial. They believe that serious, intelligent people should focus on worthy, momentous things and that jokes, levity, piss-taking, subverting and satirising are the pastimes of the second-rate. Words cannot express how second-rate I consider such people. In my experience the properly intelligent, whether they’re astrophysicists, politicians, poets, lawyers, entrepreneurs, comedians, taxi drivers, plumbers or doctors, however serious or trivial their career aims, all adore jokes. And they have that in common with a lot of idiots.
For as long as I can remember, I have always thought that being funny is the cleverest thing you can do, that taking the piss out of something – parodying it, puncturing it – is at least as clever as making that thing in the first place. This view, which, I’m happy to say, will be most offensive to the people I want most to offend, was probably formed watching my cold grandfather, with all his financial acumen and preference for fish over humans, cry with laughter at a van being repeatedly driven into a swimming pool.
- 6 -
Death
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