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50 PLUS MAGAZINE
TWITTERING ON
BY ANGELA KELLY
And so many were crazily accurate. “Set in retrospect, in 2015, not a single person got the answer right to ‘Where do you see yourself five years from now?’” We even found our own occasional desperation worth a smile. “Where is far far away and how do I get there?” was a post offering a bitter tinge. Then there was: “I’m looking for a moisturiser that hides the fact that I’ve been tired since 2010” which hit home. Then there were the clever ones: “I told my suitcases that there will be no vacation this year. Now I’m dealing with emotional baggage.” LOCKDOWN HUMOUR – TRADEMARK OF STOIC BRITS IT may be a particularly British trait but when it comes to ongoing disaster and major concern we tend to turn to humour. I’m sure it was the same in wartime and in other countries. When something enduringly scary threatens, we discover the funny side of it and use it as a form of defence against the awfulness. That has certainly been true of the pandemic. While it’s too difficult and too raw to actually laugh at Covid-19 itself, we have been turning instead to the sideeffects and restriction of lockdown to cheer ourselves up. In fact, I think we are at our most inventive here. Humour surfaced early in the first lockdown and mainly online. One of the first things that made me laugh – a surprise, really, given the seriousness and overwhelming worry of the threat then – was a short video of a good-looking shirtless man in a hat dancing. The before lockdown and after lockdown footage showed the tight torso changing to a wobbly belly. We laughed at the change, soon learning the irony as many of us munched our way through the months ahead.
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We’ve laughed at the possible results of lockdown. One of my favourite Facebook postings was: “Do you ever get up in the morning, look in the mirror and think ‘that can’t be accurate!’” We’ve become happy to laugh at ourselves. We smiled at jokes about over-zealous hand-washing, mask-wearing and taking precautions. “Pretty wild how we used to eat cake after someone had blown on it. Good times ….” went one popular post.
Add those to the many cartoons, videos, memes and observational humour and you discover a funny underside to what is plainly an international disaster that could scarcely have been predicted. Personally, I feel it says something fine and stoic about our individual make-up that allows us to react to very dark times by sometimes laughing out loud. Little has been innately funny about this global pandemic and its terrible effects on people. But, our ability to find the humour in it, to share that with others and to laugh together has proved to be a brilliant way
