Sick and Twisted?

Sometimes you find yourself doing or saying something that reveals you as having a sense of humour regarded as 'sick' or 'twisted' by your friends and acquaintances. An example: the other week I was in the pub when someone asked whether anyone knew what those things you get in Christmas crackers that you blow and the curled up end straightens out, are called, (they're apparently called party blowouts). His eight year old niece had asked him over Christmas and he didn't know. I suggested that he told her it was called a 'tallywhacker'. He called me a sick bastard, but I was too busy laughing at the mental images flashing through my head to care. I could just imagine an eight year old telling her friends in the school playground how, over Christmas, she'd blown a tallywhacker - "I just put my lips around the end and gave it a good blow and it went long and rigid."

The consequences of this imagined conversation were - to me - even more hilarious. I had visions of shocked teachers frantically calling social services and hordes of social workers and police descending on the poor child's house. I could just see her unsuspecting and uncomprehending parents being dragged into the street in handcuffs, as their gathered neighbours shouted "You sick bastards", or "Filthy perverts like you need stringing up". OK, I know that getting someone falsely accused of paedophilia shouldn't be the cause of such mirth - I was holding my sides, I was laughing so much at my private comedic fantasy - but I just can't help it. If it happened for real it certainly wouldn't be funny. But that's the point - it didn't happen. It was just a comic construct, a humourous fantasy trip, and it's surely OK to laugh at a hypothetical situation in such a context. Indeed, it is the way in which some of us can deal with the unthinkable - by making fun of it. Then again, maybe I'm just a sick bastard.