Battle of the Pedants

Warming Up

Nov 17, 2024

8012/20953

"OMG! Trump as appointed me to Secretary of Being The Funniest Man in the World! What an honour."

I tweeted (and blueskyed) that this morning and discovered that people on bluesky are just as bad at getting jokes as people on Twitter.

"Isn't that Stewart Lee?" a lot of people asked and I don't think all (or any) of them understood that what that meant in the context of the joke was that Stew would be the worst comedian in the world. Which is true, but not their intention. Stewart is a great comedian, but his fans are pretty thick. Or to mangle one of his own observations, they're not all thick, some of them are cunts.

Stewart would have ensured everyone got the joke by repeating it many times and explaining the premise of it. So whilst highly intelligent people do enjoy his work, correctly so, it also leaves the back door open for people who think they are clever, but are not.

There's no danger of that with my comedy. Clever people are put off by the puerility (the smelly idiots) and stupid people don't get it because it's actually much smarter than anyone is expecting. I unite the stupid and the smart and thus am maybe a man to save the world, but only by turning everyone against me,

Anyway you may have noticed a typo in the post. I spotted it almost straight away, but didn't think it was worth deleting the post and reposting, as it's clear that "as" should say "has".

But the worst thing about Twitter - and yes worse than all the racism and hate crime - is the fucking pedants who feel the need to correct every error made in this hastily typed, throw away medium. That's right, I think the grammar Nazis are worse than the actual Nazis. They are never the same people either. One of the nice things you can say about Nazis is that they're too busy hating everyone who isn't like them to worry about spellcheck recorrecting Hell to he'll, even when it follows the word fucking.

Correcting people's spelling, even when they've actually genuinely misspelled something, is a a dick move (one I am sure I've been guilty of), but it's especially annoying when it's an obvious typo. Does anyone think that professional writer Richard Herring has got this far in life thinking "has" is spelled "as". No, language is there to help us convey a meaning and there's no way of misconstruing this meaning. A child would know that the word is meant to be has.

Doesn't stop the pedants though

Tom tweeted me to say "*Has. And me as Pedantic Typo Spotter"

He thought that by pointing out that he was being pedantic would somehow sugar the pill of self-regarding superiority (masking obvious internal worthlessness), but he was wrong.

And I have been known to be slightly pedantic in my time. Just on occasion. And if you're going to get into a battle with me then you better come ready for a bloody fight.

Now within the logic of the joke, if Donald Trump was going to appoint a pedantic typo spotter he would have to choose the least pedantic person who is also terrible at spotting typos. So Tom, who had successfully spotted that I'd put as instead of has, was good (as far as it goes) at spotting typos and thus would never be appointed to that role. I replied "Nope it’d be you as most chilled out guy in the world. You may be able to spot typos but you need to understand jokes." Which I think is a fair point. It's easy to see mistakes, but it actually takes some thinking (sometimes) to understand humour.

Tom didn't like someone being pedantic back to him (they never do) or pointing out where he'd let himself down - the pedant only wants to laugh at the misfortune of others (not entirely true, my uber pedantic take down of men asking when international men's day is on March 8th employs many of the same tactics, but ultimately the joke is on me - a man trapped in the impossible Sisyphean task he has needlessly set himself) and not have their own inadequacies pointed out.

As usual the reply had all the butt-hurt feelings of a man who was trying to pretend he hadn't instigated this conversation.

"Calm down, dear. You're hardly Oliver," he wrote, with a picture of Oliver Hardy. Was there some attempt at a pun here with hardly and Hardy. I am not sure.

Now had I been in the mood to escalate things I could have gone in a number of directions. Firstly Oliver Hardy is not someone I would pick out as a comedian brilliant at "jokes". His stuff was much more character driven and for a good period of time entirely silent. He's in possibly the finest double act of all time, but unless you're really wedded to the poor internal half-pun in the tweet, it's the wrong choice of comedian.

Also me not being a great comedian is not only the point of the initial tweet, but means that Tom has even less of an excuse for failing to understand the structure of my "joke" (a joke that I considered to be a bit hack already, even at this early stage and I'd considered adding - "it was actually this tweet that made him decide to appoint me" which for the Stewart Lee fans is both self-aware and fun because of the logical paradox at the centre of it (I couldn't have tweeted that unless he appointed me already, but the tweet was responsible for the appointment).

Again it's a self-own from Tom, admitting he can't even follow the logic of a comedian who is average at best.

I replied "Oh don’t like it when you’re out pedanted? Don’t start something you can’t finish," (I hope you like the fact that ends with a comma instead of a full stop - again I prefer not to explain them, but some of you need that help).

To give him his due Tom replied "OK, Richar" which shows there is some hope for him on the nursery slopes of comedy.

By the way, any errrors in this blog have been put in on purpose as a meta joke.

I was back in the village as there were men coming round to fix a couple of leaks in the roof and I had a personal training session. I haven't been to training for almost a month (because one or other of us has been on holiday) so I thought Paulette might go easy on me. But that is not her style. The worst bit was when she told me to do a plank (pimpsy) but then put a 20kg bag on my back to see how long I could stay up. She told me anything up to a minute. It was pretty painful and my head got really hot and my knee went down at 45 seconds, though it felt like 3 years, proving Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

I was going to go home and then I remembered that I'd planned to do a stone clear. It was weird doing this without Wolfie and that really blew my cover (though lucky the Stone Stasi, lulled into a false sense of security, were not patrolling today). Without a dog, stone clearing feels a bit like a mentally disturbed man, walking round a field, trying and failing to clear all the stones off for no reason. I don't know if fans will accept this as canonical. I have to say the number of people who have emailed me to say how much they missed this podcast or to congratulate me on the achievement of 175 chapters and a fummertime fpecial might well surprise you. It is zero.