Whatever it is, I Don't Like it by Howard Jacobson Read Free Book Online Page A

a floppy throat pouch to carry around. A flamingo approaching us on the bridge would also have had us reaching for our cameras. But she would not have inspired the affection the pelican did. Too graceful. Too naturally the thing she is.
    It’s for the same reason that the fast bowler Darren Gough won this year’s Christmas Day Strictly Come Dancing champion of champions dance-off, easily beating the beauteous Alesha Dixon who had triumphed in the competition proper only the week before. When Darren Gough dances he defies probability. Dancing is not a skill we feel can be, or should be, locked away inside a man of such lumbering machismo. And when he releases lightness from his giant frame it is as though he is refusing the limits placed on flesh itself. For a moment, anything is possible for anyone. This, after all, is why we surrender to the programme despite all that nice to see you to see you nice drivel – not to applaud someone born airy like Alesha merely being herself, but to watch great albatrosses of men and women find elegance in their earthbound ungainliness.
    There was a way in which this was true of Alesha also. She did not, of course, have physical bulk or an inappropriately comic personality to transcend, but she did have a clumsy assumption about herself to overcome: the assumption that as a thoroughly modern girl – a pop singer with a round red mouth and a lean hot body – she would do best when her dresses were brief and she was free to jive or salsa. In fact, she most moved the judges and the voting public when she waltzed. Bounce we knew she had; the surprise was to discover she could do old-fashioned grace.
    There is a fancy abroad that we are all in pursuit of ourselves. It is a commonplace of the self-improvement business that once we learn to act in accord with who we really are we will be happy. In X Factor dross-speak, we have a dream we must make true. Bad advice, all of it. It’s who we are that keeps us miserable. Rather than find ourselves we need to find someone who isn’t us at all. Release the person you didn’t know was there, I say. Learn from the pelican. Be who you’re not. Don’t fly when flying is expected of you – walk. Don’t be beautiful, be strange.

Best Gig in Edinburgh
    Just back from trundling my wares in Edinburgh, where, among other trials, I had consented to be thrown, as sacrificial pompous pundit, to a bunch of carnivorous comedians. A radio thing, which was why I couldn’t say no. Now that television is wall-to-wall children’s programming with the word sex (or the promise of the word sex) thrown in – Dating in the Kindergarten , Sex and the Hobbit , A History of Sex and Homework – you can’t ever say no to radio. But I was more than usually tense on the morning of the event, to take my mind off which I spent many hours in a cemetery close to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. As a rule I prefer graveyards to gigs at festivals: at least there they know they’re dead.
    Next to God and my country I revere comedians and in the main get on with them. But ever since I wrote Seriously Funny: An Argument for Comedy they have been inclined to treat me as a sort of composite Rosencrantz and Guildenstern figure, a false friend who has dared to pluck the heart out of comedy’s mystery. So I knew in my bones what was going to happen. The comedians would make gags about academic jargon and other Start the Week ery and I would accuse them of philistinism. Stirred by the unevenness of the contest – for laughter always has the beating of learning in a crowded place – I would liken their reluctance to discuss what they do, or have others discuss what they do, to a doctor’s refusing to examine hearts on the grounds that he would thereby interfere with the mystery of vitality. I would argue that to think about joking was not to usurp the joke itself and install pedantry in its place, but