There seems to be a little vortex of comedy on the same spot on the road outside my gym.
it's where I laughed along with the dancing Banghra girls and today there was a new thing to enjoy in practically the exact location.
As I walked towards the gym just before midday today I saw four men walking towards me. They were all dressed in respectable middle of the road business suits and three of them were grey haired and sober looking, but the man on the end (on the right as I looked at them and thus in the perfect comedic order) was a little younger and as well as a suit was wearing a gigantic comedy St Patrick's Day hat depicting a pint of Guinness sitting on a shamrock (or something like that) It wasn't just the juxtaposition of sensible businessmen and whacky friend that made this an amusing visual treat (though that was probably most of it - it was irrestistably amusing), but also the mental process that it forced you to go through. This younger man had thought - "hey it's St Patrick's Day, I'll be a bit whacky today and wear this comedy hat to work" but when he'd turned up no-one else had entered into the spirit of things. He hadn't thought "Oh I'll just wear this for a few minutes then and then take it off so I don't look like a dick", no, instead he'd thought, "I don't care what the other old fellas think. They're too square. I'm going to wear the hat all day and through all meetings and occasions, no matter how stupid this makes me look. I don't care about the juxtaposition. I really love Ireland and St Patrick and this giant novelty hat advertising some party based web site and Guinness will demonstrate my love."
I am not sure he was right about this. Wearing a giant totem to alcohol seems inappropriate at 11.30am on a working day.
There was another almost funnier possibility, that the man had just been given the hat in the street. Some PR person might have been handing these out to passersby and when given the offer the younger man had keenly taking it up thinking "Yeah, a free oversized hat, this is brilliant. All four of us will stop looking like square businessmen and other people will look at us and see we are a right laugh." He grabbed the hat and put it on and then to his dismay his more sober and sensible workmates all declined the offer. But to take the hat off now would be to admit that he had made a terrible error and so he was forced to brazenly continue wearing it, even though no-one else was joining in the spirit. They in turn were forced to continue walking and talking with him as if nothing was awry. And I guess this was what was particularly funny about the spectacle, that apart from the hat the four men were behaving exactly as one might expect, chatting away seriously, not one of them (even the man in the hat) giving any smile or indication that there was anything out of the ordinary going on. Apart from his hat the St Patrick's loving man was doing nothing at all that would suggest he wasn't just like the others.
Again you looked at this and you couldn't help laughing out loud.
As I passed them I heard the hat wearing man utter one sentence. He had a slightly boring monotone cockney accent (he wasn't even Irish which would have perhaps explained his chapeau based decision - but no he was one of the many English people jumping on the bandwagon who don't see any irony in celebrating another country's saint when they don't celebrate their own (this isn't a Gary Bushell call to start celebrating St George's Day. Quite the opposite I don't think the patriotic celebration of any country's saint day is equally stupid and offensive. But celebrating another country's saint day and not your own is the weirdest thing of all - still nice to have an excuse to get drunk whilst wearing an over-sized hat). The hat man was saying, "So, I finally managed to sort out my pass...." which was such a dull conversational gambit that it made his flamboyant headware seem all the more ludicrous. Unless the hat was his new pass, in which case I felt sorry for the guy. He was probably the victim of a cruel practical joke.
