The Spinal Column: Stupidity’s Bright Future
Sports Relief may as well kick off today with a warning from safety campaigners that ’stupidity is contagious’. You only have to look at the whooping crowds enjoying every moment of this third-rate entertainment to see what I mean. But you have to also ask yourself: is this real stupidity?
First of all, there has to be a distinction made between this fraudulent stupidity and that genuine stupidity which, on rare instances, reaches an almost existential realm. The difference is palpable. There are office parties where you’re encouraged to be crazy by the very people who don’t understand the meaning of true stupidity. They buy in the novelty party hats, drink some booze, and then organise a conga line around the open plan before they do a bad Elvis act with the hat stand. They all appear to be stupid, but these are people who have been shown how to act crazy in order to accomplish a ‘good time’. It’s far from the real thing and, somewhat like that character at the beginning of the Twlight Zone movie, I usually feel like turning to them to ask if they want to see something ‘really crazy’, before I rip my face away to show them my true Dionysian self.
And that’s how I feel about Sports Relief. This whole charade possesses as much genuine craziness as it contains deeply thought out politics. I mean: do I really want to run a half-a-mile for famine relief? Do I really want to wear a red nose, dress like a chicken, and ‘run for the cause’? Will I be a good sport if I do both? Will I? Will I? Oh, please let me be a good sport… Or not.
Spike Milligan always made for uncomfortable viewing whenever a researcher was foolish enough to invite him onto daytime TV. The medium wasn’t made for his genuine hold on insanity. It is unsuited to teaching anyone how to crazy in the same way that it can’t teach us how to think. Not that it comes close to doing either. Sport Relief takes the issue of judgement out of our hands. This is politics by proxy. Just as we are all supppsed to be having ’some crazy fun’, so too, we are all apparently ‘doing the right thing’. The decision about whether I should run half-a-mile for famine relief is no longer mine to make. That’s a judgement best left to Big Brother ‘winner’, Chantelle Houghton. As for my own slight understanding of the ‘world situation’, it is nothing compared with the certainty of the screaming crowds and that of Jade Goody, surely the ogre from the tale the Brother’s Grimm thought too dark to write down.
Jackie Mason was recently interviewed by Adam Boulton on Sky News. Talking about Hollywood celebrities and their political agenda, he asked: ‘How do they become experts on how we should be in Iraq or not. I just said to you that I don’t know because I’m not equipped to know and I study these things day and night. They haven’t even read a paper and they become an expert […] Ask any one of these actors where’s Iraq [and] I guarantee they can’t find it on the map. They’d point to Pittsburgh.’
This is an expression of genuine enlightened stupidity, like the honest stupidity of the true great practitioners of the ‘idiotic’: Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Buster Keaton, Grouch Marx, and the great fool himself: W.C. Fields. They had such elegant stupidity, and, in expressing such stupidity, they touched real truths about our existence. Theirs is a stupidity raised to religion, while modern stupidity is like TV evangelism: a barely felt sensation, mundanely expressed, wrapped up in the fraudulent chicanery of the whipped-up crowd.
Perhaps great minds are inherently stupid, as in that famous picture of Einstein sticking out his tongue. Chantelle Houghton’s stupidity tells us nothing because she hasn’t travelled through knowledge to reach that ultimate dead end of basic human ignorance. Like a case of poison ivy, her stupidity – like her celebrity – is the unlucky conjunction of time and place. Which is why I need to turn Sports Relief off before it does me any more harm. If you associate with fools, don’t be surprised when people think you one of them. As for me: I want to retain a real sense of my own stupidity.
