Goveller’s Travels
September 2nd 1727
Ambassadors arrive from the emperor of Blefuscu and sue for peace.
The Egg War was concluded upon conditions advantageous, prohibiting the Blefuscans from watching comedy or breaking the larger end of their eggs. Their interpreters
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September 2nd 1727
Ambassadors arrive from the emperor of Blefuscu and sue for peace.
The Egg War was concluded upon conditions advantageous, prohibiting the Blefuscans from watching comedy or breaking the larger end of their eggs. Their interpreters
1/6
spoke to me and asked if it was upon a recent convention that the Lilliputians had become such hysterical porkflakes, abandoning the democracy and humour for which they were renowned with such glee? I could not answer fully, but observed that satire, a “sort of glass, wherein
beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own” was either funny or it was not; and that the gift of self-awareness, distilled with acuity by the best wits, was markedly absent among the incumbent regime and it’s pliant media. Admittedly at six inches, it was
problematic for the Lilliputians to physically belittle each other, but that never stopped them whining loudly that they weren’t allowed to say anything any more, whilst saying it anyway; an irony lost on these diminutives who could not grasp that on occasion, comedy was funny.
Sadly, the recent ‘Right to lie’ scheme, a celebration of mediocrity, mendacity and ambition, had permeated their society. For three decades the citizens had been encouraged not to disparage the disadvantaged or vulnerable, but it had become apparent during Lilliprexit,
that they hadn’t understood why; and prompted in part by vagrant provocateurs in tax-havens, political incorrectness had now gone mad, detonated in a huge repressed ireball of incoherent invective, as if Andrew Neill had lit one of his rancid, sulphurous Trumps. Myself, having
crouched to hear Deputy-Emperor’s Questions where the one-liners were of such a calcifying timbre the mother of parliaments was suffering electorectal prolapse, or the best efforts of the natives, ‘I identify as an attack helicopter’, I saw the quest for jokers with the
Brex-factor would be long. But I reassured the Blefusucan diplomats they need not live off the fat of the bland, for the Govester was something of a wit too, and I attempted a pretty wordplay thus: "you know they say a joke is a joke? Well in Lilliput, where wars are conducted
over eggs, you might say: a yolk is a yolk!" You could have heard a pun drop. That mortifying silence, reminiscent of my wedding night, will stay with me till my death bed, also reminiscent of my wedding night; And for the first time in my life, I felt sympathy with Jim Davidson
