Funny Stories (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

Here's a new genre. How do you present a new theory when you can't disclose the original creator but want to hint it's you even though it isn't? You use humour. The theory is Wiley's or Grant's or somesuch dumbchuck. Sing out, sing out, whoever you are.
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Have you heard this one? May 13, 2023

I came across a nice piece of historical revisionism in the pub. I had been reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy (not in the pub) and, my interest aroused, had embarked on the latest academic biography of Thomas Cromwell.

This made me an expert on the subject by pub standards (and my own) so I was waxing eloquently that the evidence for Cromwell being a blacksmith’s son from Putney was thin, and the account of his years in Italy didn’t hang together at all well.

Not a pint was touched as a contemplative silence reigned in the saloon bar. “Do go on,” said someone at last, so I did.

I pointed out, historiographically speaking, this was remarkable. “With him being the most powerful person in England save for Henry VIII himself, and all his rivals at court digging into his background for dirt, you’d expect a whole slew of ‘I knew Tommy Cromwell when he were nobbut a lad’ stories.”

“Aye, he’s got a point.”
“A reet good one, if you ask me.”
“Surviving Tudor records are certainly sufficiently comprehensive that one is fully entitled to expect it.”
“A mystery and a half, and no mistake.”
“So what is your explanation, Mr… I’m sorry, we didn’t catch your name.”
“Harper. M J Harper. I don’t have an explanation. I’m not somebody who goes round launching cockamamie theories on the general public.”

There was a collective sigh and normal pub discourse resumed. Until ‘Sid’, propping up the bar as usual, hoping someone would buy him a drink, tapped his current one with a half-crown and a hush descended once more. “I reckon he must have been…” We leaned forward to catch his always slightly slurred pronouncements.

“…Cardinal Wolsey’s illegitimate son.”

[Mick Harper]

The story got a response from a regular friend/opponent and a reply from me.

[Mick Harper]

It is always difficult to differentiate between a serious story that uses comic effects and a comic story that might be seriously unfunny. Here's one that is somewhere near that cusp. Reading through it now, it seems hopelessly lost up its own arsehole but never mind...
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Fun and Games in the Mother(s) of Parliaments Jun 12, 2023

First, I’ll have to bring you up to speed on rum carryings-on in Scotland. I’m English so ideally placed. Basically, after ruling Scotland for a generation, the Scottish National Party have been banjaxed by the Scottish police and independence has disappeared over the horizon for a generation.

The SNP had put out a crowd-funded appeal for enough money to run another referendum on independence, got three quarters of a million pounds, then decided against a referendum for the time being so spent the money on something else. It is unlikely anybody giving the money would have objected very strenuously and it was impractical to give it back.

Scottish Old Bill took a different view and mounted a dawn raid by vanloads of people in white smocks who started forensically digging up the garden of Mr and Mrs Scotland — the Chief Executive of the SNP and wifiekins, the Chief Minister of Scotland. They keep it in the family up there. But not the money which was in a bank. ‘Damn, why didn’t we think of that,’ said CSI Edinburgh, brushing the mud off their smocks.

But the TV footage! It was like when they discover a serial killer but without the serial killer. And, without evidence of any kind, hubbie had to be ‘released without charge’.

Not discouraged in any way, McPlod swooped on the ex-Treasurer of the SNP. Released without charge. Not discouraged in any way, the (now) ex-Chief Minister of Scotland was forced to undergo the traditional North Britain rite of the triple ordeal: arrested, questioned under caution, released without charge. Though they took away her mum’s mobile home. In Scotland that’s the ideal getaway vehicle. Well, if you had Nicola Sturgeon as a daughter… no, that’s unfair.

You can imagine what all this was doing to the SNP’s polling figures. Would you want to be governed by people who were being charged by the police morning, noon and night? (I mean, other than Donald Trump.) Scotland’s entire future had been decided by gendarmes rather than by accountants and, if they had uncovered truly foul deeds, a fifty pound fine in the sheriff’s court. It has come to be called ‘coup by desk sergeant’ and has now spread to England.

Scotland Yard (no relation) takes a robust view about who is and who isn’t above the law and it certainly doesn’t extend to people elected by the people to be above the police. They spotted an excellent opportunity to mount a coup-by-desk sergeant on their own account.

During the Covid pandemic, regulations of fiendish complexity were constantly being passed, breaches of which were punishable by a fifty pound fine in the magistrate’s court. A few soppy souls got their collars felt but the rest of us battled through using a combination of guile, common sense and resignation. However…

It was ‘drawn to the police’s attention’ i.e. splashed across the tabloids, that prime ministers old and new (Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak) might have committed technical infractions of the regulations. It must be difficult knowing what is your ‘place of work’ and what is your ‘dwelling house within the meaning of the act’, when you live at Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street. “Would you like a drink, darling, you’ve been working awfully hard?” “Right-oh, darling, I’ll join you on the staircase.”

This cuts no mustard with the Metropolitan Police, who are answerable to the tabloids, so summonses went out and we had to undergo our own triple ordeal, three governments in as many months. Including one led by a Covid innocent, the Right Honourable Liz Truss MP PM, who proved too innocent in the ways of international finance and was led away to a grim fate on the back benches.

Me, I like the excitement, but it can’t be the best way to run either of our two great nations. Keeps them on their toes though, I will admit that.

[Mick Harper]

Scrolling down the list of my Medium stories looking for the next funny one, I pass what I consider my funniest title: 'Poetry? Rhymes with bollocks'. I look forward to that one, whatever it's about. I (I can rarely remember.) There's no correlation between title and genre in this game.

But what is the genre? Once you have a look at what you wrote you can't always decide what is a heavy subject treated lightly and what is a light subject only present because it is the basis of a funny story. Here's an example. [Going through it, it is clearly serious-treated-lightly, but I'll leave it here anyway.]
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You Are The Judge December 8, 2023

I invite a few people round to my place, we have a few drinks, conversation turns to minorities. The language soon gets quite deplorable as we all start trying to cap one another with outrageous racial slurs.
Have we committed a criminal offence?
As far as I know we haven’t.

I forgot to mention we’re all ex-policemen.
Have we brought the police service into disrepute?
I can’t see that we have.

Unbeknownst to us, someone has been taping our conversation. That person subsequently publishes our conversation.
Have we committed a criminal offence?
That I don’t know but certainly the police service has now been brought into disrepute.

But what of the eavesdropper and/or the publisher?
Have they committed any offences?
That I don’t know but they have certainly brought the police service into disrepute.

Next time we make sure we do it all in a private chatroom on the internet with elaborate safeguards but, would you adam-and-eve it, someone breaks through all the the safeguards, gets access to our conversations and publishes them. They are widely disseminated, there is a public uproar, questions in Parliament, the (current) police get involved and everything is sent to the Crown Prosecution Service.

We all end up in court.
Have we committed a criminal offence and have we brought the police service into disrepute?
That I don’t know but we were found guilty on all counts.

OK, it wasn’t me but interestingly — and I thought, surprisingly — they were all given non-custodial sentences. The eavesdropper and the publisher were given plaudits.

What do I think? I’m a bit conflicted. Race relations legislation in Britain draws a distinction between what is uttered in public and what is said in private. It all goes back to Elizabeth the First and her resolve ‘not to open windows into men’s souls’. Amen to that. But that doesn’t give you licence to broadcast your views willy-nilly to all-and-sundry. It does allow you to think whatever the hell you like when you’re not out and about.

I don’t know whether inviting people to your own home counts as public or private. Nor do I know whether private internet chat rooms have an expectation of privacy. Nor, even if they do, whether this constitutes privacy within the meaning of the Act.

Sure, I have a generalised preference for people not going in for outrageous racial slurs so I don’t much mind this crew getting a bit of a comeuppance. A suspended sentence, I reckon, sent just the right message. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? We all do nowadays it seems. So, as Dixon of Dock Green used to say, “Mind how you go.”

[Mick Harper]

When you're scratching around each day having to come up with one, two, three different topics to wax lyrical about, slice-of-life is inevitable. When you don't have a life, your past life has to stand in. The next two are companion pieces
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Let’s talk darts! No, let’s not. December 18, 2023
Because it’s played by men with beer bellies
and watched by women with peroxided hair

But why not the other way round? It’s the one sport where gender lends no advantage. Untrue! According to the latest research, women have an aversion to scaled down weapons of war, a poor grasp of spatial geometry vide parking a car, and cannot subtract from 301.

Be that as it may, it is incumbent on those of us here at Medium, responsible for the smooth running of the world, to take cognisance of this report from our house journal, the Guardian

[Boreades]

As mentioned by the BBC

[Mick Harper]

Heard to say on the flightdeck black box recorder, you mean? There were no survivors.

[Mick Harper]

I made that up. One of the things you had to be careful about when writing funny stuff on Medium is that the readership is mainly (a) po-faced liberal and (b) American.

[Mick Harper]

This piece proved to be quite enduring since I was able to send people to it regularly when any of the luminaries mentioned here turned up. Ends with an enduring AE principle.
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Birth of the Blues December 22, 2023
The Leatherhead Delta

I have no talent for music and little interest in it either, but I’m of the requisite age, I’m from South London and I’m an applied epistemologist. So let me tell you How It Was.

Or at any rate quote the words of Those That Did It, taken verbatim from a telly program. I don’t stint on research.

Jeff Beck: After I heard Art Tatum I gave up on piano lessons and turned to the guitar. My sister said there was a boy at her school that played so we got the bus round to his place.

Jimmy Page: We clicked immediately. We’d listen to US imports — not the songs, just the guitar breaks — and try to reproduce them on our home-made ones.

Jeff Beck: We were all at Wimbledon art college but one gig a week was all you needed. When it got to two a week I left art college.

Eric Clapton: The Yardbirds weren’t having any hits so I went to see Jeff in The Tridents and after listening to him I felt like retiring. Anyway, we drafted him into the Yardbirds and next thing I was asked to leave the Yardbirds.

Ronnie Wood: I said to Jeff, if we’re ever not in the set-ups we’re in now, we’ll work together one day.

Jimmy Page: We were on a sixty cities in sixty days tour of America with Sam the Sham and Brian Hyland, but always playing to teeny boppers, so Jeff split after two cities.

Jeff Beck: I was in the Cromwellian drinking on my own and there was only one other person there.

Rod Stewart: He came over and said he’d left the Yardbirds and was forming a new band. I was out of work and I said Woodie was too.

Mick Harper: None of us ever heard of the Jeff Beck Band until we started watching Sky Arts retrospectives fifty years later. A true giant.

I offer you this to illustrate how everything is happenstance when great things are stirring. Nobody knows great things are stirring, they just get on and do it. But if great things are not stirring and you just get on and do it, nothing will happen. The moral of the story: assume the zeitgeist is on your side and do it anyway, you’ll have a great time.

Next time: The story of me, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the Dartford Loop Line. Only they got off at Sidcup Art College and I got on at Hither Green. I was that close.

[Mick Harper]

This combined my two favourite butts, women and Newcastle United. A few jokes but not very funny.
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What are women for? December 23, 2023
To make money out of, of course

You’ve probably never heard of the R & A, but it stands for Royal & Ancient and is the governing body of British golf. You’re probably too young to remember but the R & A was among the last institutions in Britain to allow women in, at their HQ, St Andrews in Scotland — where golf was invented and later given to the world.

[Mick Harper]

Everyone has a funny Christmas tale to tell
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Christmas is a time for giving December 27, 2023
so make sure you’re first in the queue.

As a recluse I only get two opportunities each year to comingle with live human beings: a week’s holiday with the family in the summer and three days with friends at Christmas. I don’t count the pleasantries at the Tesco cash-out every Saturday.

You’ll all know the pitfalls of holidays with your nearest-and-dearest, I can’t help you there. But turning to Christmas, when you repeat the dose, albeit with a different family assortment, I can guide your steps should you too decide to have a ‘Friends Christmas’ rather than a family one. First off:

[Mick Harper]

I amortised the thirty-five chapters of An Unreliable History of the Second World War and posted each up as a story on Medium. This is the only one that seems to fit here.
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The Funniest Joke of World War Two January 2, 2024
It shines out like a beacon

Leslie Hore-Belisha, the minister in charge of the British army when the Second World War broke out, has a permanent place in the lexicon because earlier in his career he gave us Belisha beacons, placed at each end of zebra crossings. He has another claim to fame, as the subject of the best royal joke of the war.

It is autumn 1939 and the Prime Minister is having his weekly audience with the King:

Neville Chamberlain: We’re sending Hore-Belisha over for talks with the French.
George VI: Surely a case of coals to Newcastle.
Neville Chamberlain: I don’t follow you, Sir.
George VI: Sending a Hore to Paris.

The ‘Phoney War’ (or the ‘Bore War’ as the fun-loving Brits called it) lasted from the fall of Poland in September 1939 until the invasion of Norway in April 1940. It is not dealt with in detail by historians for the understandable reason that not much fighting was going on and the diplomatic wranglings were soon rendered moot.

This may be why a significant episode in British domestic politics has received less attention than perhaps it ought. Though it is more likely because historians get easily distracted when there’s a war on.

In January 1940 Hore-Belisha suddenly resigned. He was offered a couple of other cabinet posts but opted to return to the backbenches. His resignation was at the behest of Prime Minister Chamberlain but the reasons for it are decidedly murky.

In Winston Churchill’s official biography it is implied, but not explicitly stated, that Hore-Belisha’s removal was demanded by Lord Gort, C-in-C of the British army in France, supported by his two corps commanders. Either he went or they went.

With a German attack expected at any time, it was unrealistic to accept the resignation of all three field commanders, so it was Hore-Belisha that had to go. A cabinet reshuffle had been engineered by the British Army, the nearest thing to a military coup in recent British history.

Not very near to be sure, and something similar had occurred in the Great War, but even so one would think the incident worthy of a book, maybe a chapter in a book, more anyway than the customary paragraph given to it. God knows how many tomes have been written devoted to incidents in the war whose actual importance scarcely rates a footnote.

But there was a back story. Two back stories:

(1) Hore-Belisha had been appointed War Minister in 1937 and had energetically set about the much needed modernising of the army, to the loud complaints of the army. Nevertheless civilian authority had prevailed and the soldiers were shoved kicking and squealing into the nineteen-twenties.

(2) Hore-Belisha was a Jew, an archetypal ‘pushy’ Jew, and there was anti-Semitic talk. This was probably not all that significant, anti-Semitic talk being quite open among the higher rungs of British society at the time, but it was certainly there in the background. Sometimes the foreground.

Churchill had an equivocal role in the sacking. In a letter to Hore-Belisha he claimed to know nothing of his dismissal but did hint that he approved of the move. Churchill’s own position was equivocal. As First Lord of the Admiralty he was technically at the same cabinet rank as Hore-Belisha himself, which was not very high. Being the administrative head of an armed service is not a top job in the British system, even in wartime.

Yet Churchill was unashamedly acting as a kind of prime minister-in-waiting, not only dominating cabinet discussions (nobody could shut him up) but constantly launching himself on ‘fact-finding tours’ to northern France where there were no ships but there was the frontline strength of the British army. Nobody expected Hore-Belisha to turn up at Scapa Flow to review the fleet.

Churchill was certainly in deepest cahoots with Gort and his relationship with the two dissident corps commanders was also close. One of them, Alanbrooke, became Churchill’s right-hand man when he became Prime Minister; the other, Pownall, was his right-hand man afterwards, helping out with the epic Second World War which earned Churchill a Nobel Prize. For Literature! I suppose the Peace Prize would have been inappropriate.

After his departure from office Hore-Belisha had, in the popular phrase of the time, ‘an interesting war’. When Churchill constructed his Grand Coalition in May 1940 there was no official opposition but the House of Commons abhors a vacuum and gradually an anti-government grouping emerged, consisting of

* the far left (especially after the Soviet Union entered the war)
* the far right (unreconciled Chamberlainites)
* the resentful centre (Liberals awaiting the second coming)
* Manny Shinwell (insulted at not being given a suitably important job)
* Nye Bevan (folk memories of Churchill at Tonypandy)
* Hore-Belisha himself, who gradually took on the mantle of de facto Leader of the Opposition.

Collectively they were hopeless, whether as parliamentary tacticians or as tribunes of the people. But they were of enormous help to Churchill and the coalition government because they made excellent lightning rods for public impatience with the seemingly unending military failures. They could articulate popular discontent without being able to do anything about it.

It is the British way and serves us well. Or serves us right.

[Boreades]

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum

Version Information

[Mick Harper]

You'd be surprised if I told you how expensive, how troublesome and how doubtfully efficacious up-to-dating is so I won't. But The Management thanks you for taking an interest. And a tip o' the hat for the amusingly ingenious title. Shows real promise.

[Mick Harper]

Royalty is a natural subject for levity--the word comes from levée, stand-up comedy sessions at eighteenth century European courts complete with dwarves, jesters, queens etc. So here's another one.
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Tips for Revolutionaries Jan 15, 2024
Look after the kiddies!

When you’re overthrowing a monarchy it’s generally a plus point if you off the king (and, what the hell, the queen). But what about the heir to the throne? He’ll have to go but even the most calloused sans-culotte might blanche at executing a four-year-old.

The Jacobins came up with the correct solution. You stick him in the dankest, darkest dungeon you can find, you deny him all human contact apart from a hand occasionally passing a bowl of slop through the bars, and you hope the little chap will do the decent thing before you yourself get swept away by the next lot of revolutionaries for being too soft.

But beware! Since everybody privy to these experiments in junior sensory deprivation has been swept away, the rumours are bound to start.

'Prince Louis Charles was smuggled out of prison in a laundry basket.'
'Everyone knows that.'
'The little fella who died got smuggled in the same way.'
'Stands to reason.'
'The Bourbons live!'

Only not in France. The years pass and feelings of nostalgia for the good old days are here again.

Who’s that over there?
It’s Louis XVII returned to claim his throne.
Not another one. What happened to the one last year?
Just a pretender after a quick buck.
Disgraceful. But what about him? He says he’s Louis XVII too.
No chance, he can’t speak a word of French.
Well, he wouldn’t, would he?
What, not even ‘Merci beaucoup pour les slops’?
And that one? He carries himself nicely.
Yes, I’d vote for him.

Look, can I stop you there. There were a hundred middle aged likely lads claiming to be Louis XVII at some time or another, you’ll just have to take pot luck.