Losing one's heritage

Many years ago I laughed with a friend over the comic genius of Shakespeare, because it was not. To have a semblance of understanding of rhyming couplet comic genius was to stand up as both old and wrong. We pupils knew Shakespeare did not cut edges. Shakespeare was a punishment that was akin to to writing lines - a "legal academic low", if you like. It was read as a chore whose rhyming couplet was bore. A Shakesperean play that was so full of so-called humour it required an explanation that doubled the book by half with a series of footnotes. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, Need I say more.

Shakespeare was read as a requirement borne from necessity of an O-level English literature grade, it was a price to pay. Shakespeare was ultimately a joined-up handwritten end-of-term lie that we wrote on examination papers because we wrote the words the English teacher said as if it was an history paper- we said it was funny because that got marks. And an English teacher were categorised as not going down the pub material, if you wanted a laugh.


A phone call home, a long-distance connection, a connection to the past, an affirmation of the present, that we are still friends. Our humour, our joint shared link that certain things are funny, hilarious to us. My friend makes a recommendation - "You will love it"....."Youtube, just write...."

Later I am taken up by the internet challenge to laugh as much as my mate has laughed at. A brief tapping of digits as dextrous as an old-school typing-pool typist - the computer awakes.

I am connected to a wider world, from my foreign home, that shares my mother tongue too. "Youtube" brings all stars-for-fifteen-minutes into my life and I am shown the bright new crop of top, on-the-edge, left-of-centre stand-up comics that barely registers a who? Whilst Great Britain has rocked in mirth over recent years, I have politely smiled at the jokes of my foreign friends that I do not understand but I may or may not have been the butt of. Now these new Brit generation of comedians famous to my friend, but I am not tuned into the character, the subtlety of the irony, the metaphor of comic revelation that makes something topical and comical. References are made, apparently genuinely laughed at and I am only bemused in a state of should I be laughing. I am not understanding a world that I once knew and took for granted. It is a world away. My friend's world. A lost World. A recommended world. A world I do not understand. And I am losing it. A smiling politely straw to break the camel's back.

These modern Youtube clips are not funny, not rubbing the Pryce funny bone. I have crossed the line and I am adrift, not just lost in translation of a common language. I am losing the slang, the cross references to local heroes that have not crossed the Channel, the oceans; just like Shakespeare was lost on me so many years ago - a joke is not funny if it needs an explanation.

And I did not notice that with each passing year the distance was not only physical but human. Skype can only meet the sense of sight and sound, smell and touch has gone and even sight and sound is pixelled and sound bytes. The Modern world globalised and the umbilical cord to home was strained - not localised.

I am out of sync with the homeland, becoming detached, knowledgeable of a different locality. Its the pryce one pays. Now I am the english teacher lost in the comic genius of the past, that no-one would go down the pub with.

I play piano of sorts on the laptop keyboard to a different beat and age. Forgotten characters, vintage comedy is revisited on Youtube.

A skype connection is made. Another phone-call, a shared recollection, a remembered character and how we laughed, a common point, a moment in the past, a time when our lines not only crossed they inter-twined and I wish now a simple wish. A simple wish for lives to cross once more.

Knowing for now, conversations with home-based friends are trapped in a time warp of shared recollected laugh at former times. But it is a laugh, a common honest laugh. A side-splitting thread to hold onto.

I know to break the chains of salaried wealth, mortgaged debt, medical insurance poverty and a family to feed will not be broken yet. Time to dream upon a fifteen minute star.