Humour’s a funny thing, isn’t it? I’m not trying to be humorous here by the way – far from it. This is a serious point that I’m trying to make. This is a serious discussion. When a person has a serious point to make they’re hardly likely to joke about it, after all. My point is that we live in a world where humour is a tool of the corporations and nothing more. Can you imagine anything more frightening than that? Can you imagine anything more frightening than living in a world where humour is a tool of corporate interests? Something is telling me that you can’t. I can’t anyway. Everything in modern life is a tool of corporate interests I know, but there is something particularly sinister afoot when the jokes we tell and chortle over serve corporate interests. Wouldn’t you say? Wouldn’t you say? In my book that’s rather undignified, but what would I know. I need to give some sort of example here just to make things clearer. There is a particular type of humour, supposed humour at any rate, which seems very sharp and snappy and all of that until you think about it, at which point you realise that there is no humour there at all. It is merely wordplay, or pointless empty punning. So for example when I used to be driving back-and-forth to Tuam a lot there was this billboard advertising some discount furniture store and there is a picture of a sofa – presumably at a discount rate – and the caption read ‘sofa so good’. Pretty funny huh? That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. Well I don’t really want to dwell on that too much because I want to move on to the next point that I want to make. It’s leading into the next point that I want to make. The next point that I want to make has to do with all this stuff that everyone’s looking at on their social media feeds. That’s what people are doing after all. Myself included, of course. The thing that occurred to me is that there is this all this clever or interesting or cutting-edge info about this that or the other but really it isn’t interesting or clever at all. It’s actually two-dimensional. ‘Oh look at this interesting thing,’ they say, ‘you really want to know about this.’ But then when you do know about it then it’s like ‘so what?’ You now know about it but it’s totally hollow, totally empty, just like everything else in your social media feed is. It is just pure hunger really – we’re just trying to make that hunger go away by browsing but it never does go away. So just like that cheap, wise-cracking type of superficial humour that isn’t humour at all (but only something horrifically empty) so too all that cutting-edge super-interesting info that we are bombarded with every day isn’t ‘information’ at all – it’s just a vacuum. It’s simply a manifestation of what I like to call ‘the vacuum of modern life’. We’re walking through a desert only we don’t see it because all we see are these hallucinatory mirages that are thrown up by the system. We’ve got a nice little pastime going on for ourselves here letting these mirages tantalise us. Letting them tease us. Modern life is a tease you see, and that’s all there is to it. Maybe we would be better off saying that it’s a piss-take. That’s not too bad though, that’s not too bad. It’s bad of course but what’s really bad is the fact that we all think we’re so bloody clever. We’re brimming over with complacency and self-satisfaction – the feeling that we collectively have that we’re doing something clever is quite palpable. You could palpate it between your fingers. If you wanted to, that is. Whether you would actually want to do that or not is another matter. That’s another matter entirely.