Humour: centrally about wit, play and humanity.

Wit, which has the same origin as wise, simply means understanding what is happening and what it might mean; in other words, intelligence – seeing beyond the surface of things.

It comes, like all learning and understanding, from childhood play.  Beyond a certain point we're playing not just with physical space, and the objects that happen to be there, but with ideas.

Humour deals with the unexpected and the incongruous. 

It's a major part of the intelligence that has enabled us to adapt to changing conditions over millions of years, form societies, build civilisations, and transform our environment.

Put simply, it's about being surprised by stuff, reacting to it, learning from it, and moving on to bigger and, in some ways, better things (the history of our species in the last two and a half million years, give or take).

With humour you can be frivolous-playful or serious-playful.  You can even deal with grim topics and still be funny - not laughing at people as victims but making points about the idiotic, greedy, cruel things that we all do from time to time, and that rich and powerful people can often get away with. 

So, it's intrinsically humane: it can question all these things and encourage us to think critically and reflect.

Terry Buchan

"Humour's like an anaesthetic - you can use it to cut deep without people realising just how far you've gone." 

 

A poet, a sculptor, a musician, a portrait painter, a mixed media artist, a playwright, an abstract painter, a cultural commentator and a 'humorist' walk into a bar.

 - Christ, who put that frackin' bar there, said the poet.

 - It wasn't there before, said the sculptor, or I'd have noticed it, me bein' into three dimensional space an' everyfink.

 - This situation does remind me of a song, said the musician.

 - I envy you, said the portrait painter, I could depict it with lines and colours but not with musical intervals.

 - You're a ponce, said the mixed media artist.

 - I'm just jotting some of this down, I hope you don't mind, said the playwright.

 - Sorry to disappoint you, said the abstract painter, since words elude me momentarily, but I can throw this tin of heterogeneous paints all over your notes if you like.

 - I'm sure she'd like that, said the cultural commentator, it would mesh beautifully with the themes of her last play.

They turned and looked expectantly at the humorist, who shrugged and walked off. 

The 'art' of humour is in knowing when to remain silent, he thought to himself.

 

When I had a job, and got paid for being somewhere at set times, I had to talk to some people from HR.  I had managed to avoid this encounter for several months because I thought they were a medical team out to get me, and possibly have me certified – I'd been watching a lot of ER, and had the idea that the H in HR stood for heart or head or something.  Obviously, I hadn't thought it through. 
Or even approached it in a tentative, faun-like way, with a wisp of an idea in my mind. 

Anyway, HR finally cornered me, and as a result I took one of their aptitude tests.  To see if I could do the job I was doing. 

It turned out I couldn't, but I could have told them that if they'd just asked, and we'd all have been spared the unpleasantness of the Employment Tribunal ... and the expense of the European Court of Justice.

I digress (this is deliberate, you know – I do it for effect – it's not all made-up on the spot – though it's both kind and unkind of you to think so). 

So, the aptitude test assessed my hard skills – banging nails into wood, unloading timber from a lorry – and soft skills – getting the best out of my team.  I scored three out of ten for the nails, seven for the timber, and zero for the team management.

This got me to thinking – why stop at Soft Skills?  So for my next job I developed my own set of Subtle Skills – my working definition of these was ones that were hard for my line manager to detect – and then progressed to Invisible Skills – ones that were not apparent to anyone watching me doing what I claimed to be 'my job' – and finally to Indiscernible Skills – the ones that can't be detected by any human sense or faculty, or measured by any instrument yet invented.

I wouldn't say that this completes my Life's Mission.  Unless you egged me on.  Oh, all right, if you insist, this completes my Life's Mission.

As long as I can also finish the Time Machine and go back to sabotage Thatcher's 1979 election win.