Some men say that women just aren’t funny. I vehemently disagree.
To reach a concensus, we need to qualify the statement. Women who think they are funny are not funny. Self-proclaimed female comedians are not funny.
Women who think we should definitely take them seriously are fucking hilarious. And I’m really struggling to think of anything funnier (and more dangerous) than the reaction from a serious woman when you laugh at her.
As Exhibit A, I give you Katie Glass. Katie is everything that TGOH says women are.
At first you conclude that she must be a character created out of some whimsical literary bent. But that would be false. Katie is a real person. And. She. Is. Fucking. Hilarious.
Katie makes Frank Spencer and Mr Bean look like Neil Armstrong and Chris Hadfield.
She appears completely incapable of making logical deductions relating cause to effect, even when she sees the two next to one another time after time. But she’s strong and independent. and the question of whether she don’t need no man is moot, because men seem to spend five minutes in her company before leaving in a hurry in case the next thing she touches launches a nuclear missile right into the room she’s sitting in.
Here’s her stunning and brave opening in today’s Telegraph:
Everyone warned me that a stone cottage in the countryside would be freezing, and everyone was right. Now it seems total madness that I came close to buying a farmhouse at Land’s End which had no heating, when even my current cottage feels like an ice-block. At least when my dog Stringerbelle was here I had a mobile hot water bottle, but now she is back with my ex, I am bitterly cold.
My Somerset cottage is too remote for gas. Instead it has two fires and central heating powered by a large green oil tank in the garden.
I call the oil company, hesitantly, when I move in to order an oil top-up. They ask me, quite reasonably, how much oil I want, but I have no idea. I’m not even sure how big my tank is. I only called this oil company because the people who sold me the house told me they had an account with them. But the oil company inform me they cannot share any of that information due to “confidentiality”. How incredibly helpful!
R comes over and together we search in the deep grass by the oil tank for a gauge which will show how much is left. We find it broken. My friend Jules, in rural Oxfordshire, shows me a clever device that works out how much oil is left in your tank using some kind of magnet, then shows you the result on a little monitor in the kitchen. But it turns out the oil company charges £200 to install it.
The woman at the oil company advises me that I can check the level of the oil by lowering a stick into the tank. In the garden I find a long, relatively dry branch, and feed it into the tank with unsure results. In the end I err on the side of caution and order the minimum amount of oil I can get, which still costs me nearly £300.
I constantly worry about running out of oil – and the cost of filling up again. But because the heating system is so ancient I’m also afraid that turning off any radiators may mean I can’t get them back on again. I compromise by putting the heating on a timer, so it only comes on for a few hours a day – though as soon as it goes off any warmth vanishes through the stone walls within minutes.
When friends come over all they can talk about is how cold the house is. F sits shivering under a duvet in the sitting room. Martin walks around with a coat on. Ophelia comes to stay and I find her sitting outside in her car. “I just came out to warm up a bit,” she explains.
“How can you live like this?” they all complain, begging me to put the heating back on, which I do, silently calculating how much it’s going to cost me.
I suppose it would be uncharitable of me to suggest that whale oil is a traditional and plentiful heating oil.
I’ll spare you the rest and fast forward to the end of the piece.
THIS WEEK I’VE BEEN OBSESSED WITH
Nio home-delivery cocktails, so you can drink whiskey sours in the bath while reading Joan Didion (which, let’s face it, is more fun than most bars)
The Eyes of Tammy Faye – a biopic about the wild rise and fall of 1970s televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker and her husband, Jim
The Sweet Bobby podcast, the story of a successful radio presenter duped into an emotionally manipulative relationship by a handsome cardiologist called Bobby, who she meets on Facebook
Nothing ever written by Spike Milligan, PG Wodehouse, Joseph Heller, Kingsley Amis, Chris Brookmyre, Douglas Adams, Robert Rankin, Terry Pratchett, P.J. O’Rourke, Jim Goad, Doug Stanhope, Kurt Vonnegut, Harry Harrison, Caimh McDonnell or Robert Kroese - all very funny writers - can hold a candle to this collection of cack-handed cock-ups, singlehandedly confected by this pitiful caricature of womanhood.
Lap it up, because this sort of hilarity comes along but once in a lifetime.
AJ
*** When I was looking for houses, I saw 6 in 2 weekends, put offers in on 2 of them. I’m sitting in one of them now and it’s fucking great.
She named her dog after a TV drug dealer?