Showing posts with label humour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humour. Show all posts
Cruyff penalties
Cruffy's original penalty with Ajax.
A Danish club Brondby, successfully do the same thing. The players involved are Martin Ericsson and Marten Rasmussen.
Hahahha, Henry and Pires mess up the Cruyff penalty trick when playing Manchester City. And interview with Henry and Wenger about the incident is shown below. Thierry is being tres cute.
Winehouse on Buzzcocks
The now infamous episode of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, in which Amy Winehouse was a (drunken) guest.
Paxman vs Blair on Don't Watch
The above hybrid of University Challenge and a Newsnight interview with Tony Blair is courtesy of the BBC show, Don't Watch That, Watch This! which features overdubbed clips. I like this one.
Politicians being nobs
Jeremy Paxman's questioning of politicians being diversive and irritating as hell. Just be honest ffs! 1997.
Sleeveface II
Greatest Hits by Prince (upofix)
Hair by the original London cast, 1968, Polydor, (sophiekingo)
La La Peace Song by Al Wilson, 1974 (sophiekingo)
Quote Rafael Benitez
Rafa 'Balls in the air' Benitez, on whether Steven Gerrard is fit to play the 2008 Champion's League semi-final game:"I will come up and tap him on the left shoulder and if he turns to face me without any pain, we will know he can play."
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
Joshua Ferris by Kelly Campbell.I just finished And Then We Came to the End, the debut novel by Joshua Ferris. The book is set in a Chicago-based advertising firm, where the employees work in teams of two, copywriters paired with art directors all wracking their coffee-saturated brains for tags and slogans for water, charity fundraisers, ink cartridges etc.
The novel is easy to read and flowing, great sentence structure and some wonderful insights. I read it all in one sittings, because the characters, although not delved deeply into, were absorbing, but more than the individual characters themselves, the camaraderie, the group dynamic. Great observations are the stresses of the speed of C21 life and capitalism in big city America. People said that this book was really funny, I didn't find it laugh out loud hysterical, a la Catch 22, which this book clearly takes a lot of inspiration from in its repetitive humour, but it was very enjoyable and sad and amusing all at once. A great debut work of fiction. I have also read one of Joshua Ferris' short stories which was published as part of a Short Story special edition of the Guardian's Weekend magazine. That too, was good. Incidentally, Then We Came to the End was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2007.
The above cover, post-it note coverage and Sharpie rended title is a great design I think and totally in-keeping (ink-keeping?!) with the theme and situation of the novel. I read the silver and orange edition however, which is a pretty good design itself.
Also, I should mention that this novel tries to do that annoying author-within-novel thing that Martin Amis attempts in Money. (Oh, how I loathe the vacuousness of that book). However, it is more successful here. It is much overdone as a literary technique though, a mon avis.
Overall it is an easy, enjoyable read, with touches of poignancy and melancholy mixed with wonderful wit and humour, versimilitudinal insight and a surreality and perculiarity which keeps the pages turning.
Some reviews of And Then We Came to the End:
It is a brave author who embeds the rationale for writing his novel into the novel itself. But 70 pages into Joshua Ferris’s first novel, set in a white-collar office, we meet Hank Neary, an advertising copywriter writing his first novel, set in a white-collar office. Ferris has the good sense to make Neary’s earnest project seem slightly ridiculous. Neary describes his book as “small and angry.” His co-workers tactfully suggest more appealing topics. He rejects them. “The fact that we spend most of our lives at work, that interests me,” he says. “A small, angry book about work,” his colleagues think. “There was a fun read on the beach.”
Then We Came to the End, it turns out, is neither small nor angry, but expansive, great-hearted and acidly funny. It is set at the turn of the current century, when the implosion of the dot-com economy is claiming collateral victims down the fluorescent-paneled halls of a Chicago advertising firm. Clients are fleeing, projects are drying up and management is chucking human ballast from the listing corporate balloon. The layoffs come piecemeal, without warning and — in keeping with good, brutal, heinie-covering legal practice — with no rationale as to why any person was let go.
In the midst of this crisis, the agency receives a pro bono assignment from a mysterious client, a breast-cancer awareness group with no detectable presence on the Internet or elsewhere. The request is cruelly difficult: an ad that will make breast-cancer sufferers laugh about their disease. (The assignment becomes more fraught, and suspicious, when a rumor begins to circulate that Lynn Mason, the employees’ reserved, arch supervisor, has breast cancer herself.) The staff members bitch about the campaign and mock it — and above all, work on it desperately, in hope of being the one to knock it out of the park. “We all had the same prayer: please let it be me.”
About that “we”: Ferris writes the novel in the first-person plural — the snarky, gossipy, anxious employees of the agency compose the collective narrator. This exotic trick play of a device often made the narrative of Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Virgin Suicides” feel anesthetized and distanced.
But the collective voice is fitting for corporate employees, trained to work in teams, their groupthink honed in a million meetings, and the effect is chilling when the layoffs begin and the collective narrator is literally diminished.
Ferris also sneaks in a fair amount of first-person singular. The novel is largely told through watercooler tales — Ferris’s ad-people are big talkers, from nerves, boredom and professional training — and through them, “we” gradually refracts into individual voices. There is Karen Woo, senior art director, office gossip and font of specious intelligence, who, working on a campaign for a cookie for the health-conscious, inserts the boast that it has no “lastive acid,” a dangerous substance that does not actually exist. (“I was trying to think out of the box,” she explains.) There is Chris Yop, a desperate middle-aged copywriter who sneaks into the office to work on the breast-cancer project even after being fired. There is Joe Pope, Lynn Mason’s lieutenant, resented by “us” for his antisocial distance. There is the single, pregnant, devoutly Catholic basket case; her married lover, praying she’ll have an abortion, who regards her like a pinless grenade; and the grieving mother, taunted daily by a “Missing” ad for her daughter that the billboard owner has not gotten around to taking down months after the little girl was found murdered.
Ferris, who once worked at a Chicago ad agency, is fluent in the language of white-collar wordsmiths under siege. His characters even concoct their own vocabulary for the layoff process. Being fired becomes “walking Spanish down the hall,” a phrase with origins in pirate days borrowed from a Tom Waits song about an execution.
Above all, Ferris has a sixth sense for paranoia. Information professionals crave information, and when it is denied them — who is going next, how many and why — they spin superstitious theories and adopt curious totems. The employees discover that the office coordinator keeps tabs on which furniture belongs in which offices, and they fear that their chairs — scavenged from laid-off peers with better furniture, in a round-robin so complex no one remembers whose Aeron was originally whose — will get them fired. The chair becomes a symbol for all that is hated and lusted-after about work. It is a prison and a status symbol, a reminder that “their” offices are not really their own, a means of exercising minor tyranny, a reward, a throne, a life preserver.
The major story lines of Then We Came to the End hold few surprises. Like a make-work project, they are an excuse to get through the real joys of the day, which come from Ferris’s small-bore observations. The Pavlovian magnetism of free bagels. The incredible sadness of a hard-boiled egg eaten at one’s desk. And the prophylactic amnesia that separates time on the clock from the set of waking hours we call “our lives”: “Half the time we couldn’t remember three hours ago. Our memory in that place was not unlike that of goldfish. Goldfish who took a trip every night in a small clear bag of water and then returned in the morning to their bowl.”
Like the paper-pushers of the British and American versions of “The Office,” Ferris’s admen amuse themselves with tiny, absurd rebellions. A garrulous sad sack named Benny Shassburger decides to spend a day speaking in nothing but quotes from “The Godfather,” on the theory that either no one will notice or they will be too polite to say so. When an associate asks for advice on a project, he replies, “This one time I’ll let you ask me about my affairs.” “Cool,” his co-worker answers.
Still, Ferris’s novel is not the satire you might expect. From “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” to “Dilbert,” the default position for American stories about business — especially as easy a target as advertising — has been derision. White-collar work is meant to be soul-killing and pernicious. It can be all those things, of course, and Ferris funnels that point of view through Tom Mota, a bitter, divorced desk jockey fond of guns, Emerson and e-mailing eloquent, profane and multiply cc’ed treatises on how sedentary office life goes against man’s nature. (Here again, Ferris is smart enough to put his most persuasive rants in the mouth of a character who may well be dangerously crazy.)
But work — even, or especially, useless work — can also offer purpose and meaning, as when Lynn Mason, dreading her impending surgery, drives to her office in the middle of the night and finds solace in the ridiculous pro bono assignment. “They have two weeks until presentation,” she thinks. “It’s insane to think she has even a moment to spare. She sits down at her desk. Here is a good place to be, right here, thinking.”
It is a ridiculous sentiment, counter to every carpe diem truism — who ever died wishing they had worked more hours? It is also perfectly understandable and beautifully expressed. Even after moving on and rebuilding their lives, the employees who exit Ferris’s unnamed firm come to miss it, the drudgery, the infuriations, the hours spent with “this person or that who rankled and bugged and offended angels in heaven.” And the reader will be able to empathize, coming to the end of this perceptive and darkly entertaining novel. “Then We Came to the End” would, it turns out, make a pretty good read on the beach. Particularly if you still have a job to vacation from.
by James Poniewozik, 18th March 2007
Set in a Chicago advertising agency, Ferris’s hugely enjoyable first novel delineates both the absurdities of office life, and the frustration, anger and despair simmering under the surface of his characters’ daily routines. Most of the workers appear to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and when the agency starts to struggle to attract clients and a series of layoffs begins, some of the staff are tipped over the edge. Ferris plays safe to start with: his description of the mundane activities of the working week (the meetings, the e-mails, the lunches) will be familiar (perhaps overly so) to anyone who has worked in an office. Yet his narrative soon veers off into a mix of the comic, the tragic and the surreal — a tricky combination that he pulls off superbly. Thus one character’s struggle with breast cancer sits side by side with another’s decision to spend a working day communicating only in quotations from the first two Godfather films. One character suffers divorce, another loses a child, while another inherits a totem pole. The book is only incidentally about advertising, although that industry does supply some of the book’s best jokes: when a relative of one of the staff discovers that copywriters and art directors call themselves “creatives”, he exclaims, “That’s the stupidest use of an English word I ever encountered.” Ferris has created a microcosm of modern capitalist society, and while much of his style and subject matter is a little too reminiscent of Douglas Coupland, this is an extremely impressive debut.Then We Came to the End, it turns out, is neither small nor angry, but expansive, great-hearted and acidly funny. It is set at the turn of the current century, when the implosion of the dot-com economy is claiming collateral victims down the fluorescent-paneled halls of a Chicago advertising firm. Clients are fleeing, projects are drying up and management is chucking human ballast from the listing corporate balloon. The layoffs come piecemeal, without warning and — in keeping with good, brutal, heinie-covering legal practice — with no rationale as to why any person was let go.
In the midst of this crisis, the agency receives a pro bono assignment from a mysterious client, a breast-cancer awareness group with no detectable presence on the Internet or elsewhere. The request is cruelly difficult: an ad that will make breast-cancer sufferers laugh about their disease. (The assignment becomes more fraught, and suspicious, when a rumor begins to circulate that Lynn Mason, the employees’ reserved, arch supervisor, has breast cancer herself.) The staff members bitch about the campaign and mock it — and above all, work on it desperately, in hope of being the one to knock it out of the park. “We all had the same prayer: please let it be me.”
About that “we”: Ferris writes the novel in the first-person plural — the snarky, gossipy, anxious employees of the agency compose the collective narrator. This exotic trick play of a device often made the narrative of Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Virgin Suicides” feel anesthetized and distanced.
But the collective voice is fitting for corporate employees, trained to work in teams, their groupthink honed in a million meetings, and the effect is chilling when the layoffs begin and the collective narrator is literally diminished.
Ferris also sneaks in a fair amount of first-person singular. The novel is largely told through watercooler tales — Ferris’s ad-people are big talkers, from nerves, boredom and professional training — and through them, “we” gradually refracts into individual voices. There is Karen Woo, senior art director, office gossip and font of specious intelligence, who, working on a campaign for a cookie for the health-conscious, inserts the boast that it has no “lastive acid,” a dangerous substance that does not actually exist. (“I was trying to think out of the box,” she explains.) There is Chris Yop, a desperate middle-aged copywriter who sneaks into the office to work on the breast-cancer project even after being fired. There is Joe Pope, Lynn Mason’s lieutenant, resented by “us” for his antisocial distance. There is the single, pregnant, devoutly Catholic basket case; her married lover, praying she’ll have an abortion, who regards her like a pinless grenade; and the grieving mother, taunted daily by a “Missing” ad for her daughter that the billboard owner has not gotten around to taking down months after the little girl was found murdered.
Ferris, who once worked at a Chicago ad agency, is fluent in the language of white-collar wordsmiths under siege. His characters even concoct their own vocabulary for the layoff process. Being fired becomes “walking Spanish down the hall,” a phrase with origins in pirate days borrowed from a Tom Waits song about an execution.
Above all, Ferris has a sixth sense for paranoia. Information professionals crave information, and when it is denied them — who is going next, how many and why — they spin superstitious theories and adopt curious totems. The employees discover that the office coordinator keeps tabs on which furniture belongs in which offices, and they fear that their chairs — scavenged from laid-off peers with better furniture, in a round-robin so complex no one remembers whose Aeron was originally whose — will get them fired. The chair becomes a symbol for all that is hated and lusted-after about work. It is a prison and a status symbol, a reminder that “their” offices are not really their own, a means of exercising minor tyranny, a reward, a throne, a life preserver.
The major story lines of Then We Came to the End hold few surprises. Like a make-work project, they are an excuse to get through the real joys of the day, which come from Ferris’s small-bore observations. The Pavlovian magnetism of free bagels. The incredible sadness of a hard-boiled egg eaten at one’s desk. And the prophylactic amnesia that separates time on the clock from the set of waking hours we call “our lives”: “Half the time we couldn’t remember three hours ago. Our memory in that place was not unlike that of goldfish. Goldfish who took a trip every night in a small clear bag of water and then returned in the morning to their bowl.”
Like the paper-pushers of the British and American versions of “The Office,” Ferris’s admen amuse themselves with tiny, absurd rebellions. A garrulous sad sack named Benny Shassburger decides to spend a day speaking in nothing but quotes from “The Godfather,” on the theory that either no one will notice or they will be too polite to say so. When an associate asks for advice on a project, he replies, “This one time I’ll let you ask me about my affairs.” “Cool,” his co-worker answers.
Still, Ferris’s novel is not the satire you might expect. From “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” to “Dilbert,” the default position for American stories about business — especially as easy a target as advertising — has been derision. White-collar work is meant to be soul-killing and pernicious. It can be all those things, of course, and Ferris funnels that point of view through Tom Mota, a bitter, divorced desk jockey fond of guns, Emerson and e-mailing eloquent, profane and multiply cc’ed treatises on how sedentary office life goes against man’s nature. (Here again, Ferris is smart enough to put his most persuasive rants in the mouth of a character who may well be dangerously crazy.)
But work — even, or especially, useless work — can also offer purpose and meaning, as when Lynn Mason, dreading her impending surgery, drives to her office in the middle of the night and finds solace in the ridiculous pro bono assignment. “They have two weeks until presentation,” she thinks. “It’s insane to think she has even a moment to spare. She sits down at her desk. Here is a good place to be, right here, thinking.”
It is a ridiculous sentiment, counter to every carpe diem truism — who ever died wishing they had worked more hours? It is also perfectly understandable and beautifully expressed. Even after moving on and rebuilding their lives, the employees who exit Ferris’s unnamed firm come to miss it, the drudgery, the infuriations, the hours spent with “this person or that who rankled and bugged and offended angels in heaven.” And the reader will be able to empathize, coming to the end of this perceptive and darkly entertaining novel. “Then We Came to the End” would, it turns out, make a pretty good read on the beach. Particularly if you still have a job to vacation from.
by James Poniewozik, 18th March 2007
by Ian Critchley, 27 January 2008
America, that country's favourite myth insists, was built by the individual: the 'calm, mature' man praised by de Tocqueville; Emerson's self-reliant 'true prince'. But in Joshua Ferris's debut novel of life and death in an ailing Chicago ad agency, times have changed. Rugged founding heroes give way to polo-shirted drones; horizons shrink to the fibreboard walls of an office cubicle; and, in an attention-grabbing display of virtuosity, the reassuring omniscient narrator is replaced by a stressed-out, first-person plural.
Ferris's 'we' is a fractious, hydra-headed array of copywriters and art directors, from upbeat networker Karen Woo to grizzled, reclusive Frank Brizzolera. Their days of extravagant anomie are shaped by a patchwork of kitchen gossip, emails and snippets that filter down from the office of their forbidding boss, Lynn Mason. 'We knew everything,' writes Ferris, and the collective provides a magisterial account of, for instance, doughy-faced Amber's pregnancy by a married associate. The comforting consensus is reinforced in endless, indistinguishable 'creative' meetings (three out of four of which, Ferris notes with dry precision, are redundant).
From the first page, the illusion of community is under attack. The dotcom bubble has burst and days of pushing each other around 'really fast' in a swivel chair give way to a round of layoffs that chips away at the very substance of the narrator. 'We hated not knowing,' the workers complain, denied any potentially actionable rationale for which of them might be next to 'walk Spanish down the hall'. And uncertainty drives an appropriately slight plot: as a rumour circulates that Lynn Mason has breast cancer, a mysterious client demands the besieged team produce ads to 'make cancer patients laugh'.
Recent American accounts of corporate life - Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, Mike Judge's 1999 comedy Office Space, the Dilbert cartoon strip - tend to the mordant. Then We Came to the End is funny, too. It is stomach-turningly accurate on everything from the unsteady 'particleboard wrapped in a cheap orange or beige fiber' between cubicles to the irrational rage that prompts otherwise decentish people to snap 'crip', 'gimp' and 'wobbler' behind an injured colleague's back. But the deadpanning - 'one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were universally reviled' - is misleading: Then We Came to the End is more tragedy than satire.
The tragedy, though, comes in appropriately small packages. Ferris is brilliant on the pathos of the 'useless shit' that surrounds his workers. In an attenuated world of modular desks and coffee stations, 'our mugs, our mouse pads, our desk clocks, our daily calendars, the contents of our desk drawers' take on a life of their own, alternately hoarded and despised as reminders of hundreds of lost days.
Swaths of the novel are devoted to a baroque theft and exchange of office chairs. Then We Came to the End is preoccupied by the treacherous non-durability of consumer durables. Beyond the revolving security doors lies grander-scale private suffering. But the novel reserves its greatest compassion for the disregarded sadnesses of the office. Roland, the impoverished, superannuated security guard, sits all day long 'at his lonely lobby post' or goes 'back and forth around the building on his aching feet'.
The dead Frank Brizzolera is reduced to 'a Styrofoam coffee cup on the floor under the desk, a cigarette butt curled at the bottom like a dead tequila worm'. The large writ absurdly small is the novel's favourite device, and the tension between them drives its best setpieces. The would-be climactic office massacre - unhinged ex-employee Tom Mota arrives dressed in a clown suit, bellowing Emerson quotations and waving a gun - dissolves in bathos when his bullets turn out to be paint pellets.
'We', or the bits of it that are left, are desperate to escape this poverty of scale. 'There had to be a better story than this one,' they muse, and the escapes that Ferris, a former adman, posits are literary and imaginative. Tom Mota, like a chino-clad Emma Bovary, clings to his romantic heroes, Emerson and Whitman. Don Blattner is working on a screenplay about 'a disaffected and cynical copywriter suffering ennui in the office setting while dreaming of becoming a famous screenwriter'.
Mentioned in passing is quiet Hank Neary, who dresses 'like an Oxford professor' and is working on 'a short, angry book about work'. Characteristically, he turns out to be the novel's heart. Five years later, a reading from his novel duplicates Then We Came to the End's only third-person chapter, an account of inscrutable Lynn Mason's last lonely evening before a mastectomy. Such salvation as there is, Ferris hints, comes from imaginative sympathy with the individual.
It's a neat-handed twist, but its tricksiness is unnecessary. Ferris's descriptions of the ordinary are so good - his workers spend their time lost 'inside long silent pauses as we bent over our desks' - they need no elaboration.
by Rachael Aspden, Sunday April 1st 2007
In Mike Judge's 1999 film Office Space, the main character, Peter, is called in by management to account for his time and prove that he is an efficient, productive, unlayoffable team member. Afflicted by an inability to lie, for reasons too involved to go into here, he gives it to them straight. "Well, I generally come in at least 15 minutes late ... and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual, work."
Peter, bless him, is just one in the serried ranks of fictional office slackers who have voiced the frustration, boredom and occasional bouts of homicidal rage that afflict their real-life counterparts. Tim in The Office, with his jellied staplers, is just the latest; his ancestry stretches back through Douglas Coupland's beleaguered serfs and Bret Easton Ellis's Patrick Bateman to the mother of all office novels, Dorothy L Sayers's Murder Must Advertise, a sparkling gem of a book. Set in a post-slump advertising agency and drawn from Sayers's own experience, it reveals how little has changed in 70 years of office drudgery: "Nothing pleased him better than to be interrupted in his encomiums of Sopo ('makes Monday, Fun-day!') or the Whoosh vacuum cleaner ('one Whoosh and it's clean!') by a fellow member of the department, fed up with advertising and spoiling for a chat."
Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris's excellent debut, follows in this fine tradition by devoting the vast majority of its 385 pages to people who are fed up with advertising and spoiling for a chat. And chat they do. From the start we are inducted into the office workers' gang, and we stand around and bitch with the best of them. "We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise," Ferris begins, promisingly. In fact, these people's whole lives lack promise. Layoffs are imminent at their Chicago ad agency, and everyone is shivering under the shadow of the axe. Work is scarce, yet it's more important than ever that everyone look busy. Long, cruel, funny anecdotes about each other (mostly told by the office gossip, Benny) are the only bright spot in the day.
If that all sounds a bit grim, it's worth pointing out that Ferris has created a hilarious collection of office gargoyles, in the great tradition of Ricky Gervais, Being John Malkovich and Matt Beaumont's cult novel about the ad industry, E. My favourite is Don Blattner, the film buff, who refers to Robert De Niro as "Bobby" and studies the weekend box-office takings like a hawk, shaking his head ruefully over Variety and murmuring: "The boys at Miramax are going to be awfully disappointed about this." In the claustrophobic confines of this office, such a man quickly progresses from mildly exasperating loon to ravening ball of agonising irritation - and we feel this more strongly than usual, since we're in the story. We are nothing less than a modern Greek chorus, standing by the coffee machine, hand on hip, going: No! Did she actually say that? Who the hell does he think he is? And so on.
It's a good trick, because it stops us from despising these wage slaves as much as we might. We are complicit in their judgmentalism. And their problems are the problems of any modern worker, in that they consider the acquisition of consumer goods and services ("A long weekend in Vegas. A low-end BMW") to be an inalienable right, and yet the person signing the paycheques controls access to that right. These people are infantilised, powerless. They look up to their boss, Lynn, with a mixture of awe and fear; in her ability to fire them at will, she is superhuman in their eyes.
About halfway through the book, Ferris adds a thoughtful, less cynical twist when he takes us out of the office and home with Lynn, who is also struggling. Her problems are much more serious; typically, though, as soon as we're back inside and chained to our desks, they fade in the shock of Marcia Dwyer's new haircut and the totally weird way Janine Gorjanc's been acting lately. But Lynn, with her quiet confidence, embodies and articulates the fear of the axe in a way her terror-stricken employees can only fumble at.
It's hard to work out, in the end, whether Ferris's novel is funny or sad. It's certainly absurd, and very entertaining. And, like Sayers's neglected masterpiece, it hums with the suppressed emotions of colleagues forced to interact professionally in an unnatural, stressful environment - anger, lust, envy, boredom, contempt, sometimes even love. If you work in an office, it may make you look forward to getting off work - maybe even for that long weekend in Vegas.
by Carrie O'Grady, Saturday May 5th, the Guardian
There is an aspiring writer in Joshua Ferris's novel about a Chicago advertising agency during the late-1990s economic slump. In office hours, he slopes down to the 59th floor - empty since the redundancies began - to write a "small, angry book about work", in which the boss is depicted as a tyrant because "anyone who believed in the merits of capitalism, and soul-destroying corporations, and work work work - all that - naturally that person wasn't deserving of any sympathy".
If the boss is a tyrant, then work is exploitative; if the boss is an idiot (think of David Brent in The Office), then work is meaningless. But what if the boss is a paragon of virtue? This is the scenario in Then We Came to the End, a first novel from America as impressively confident as Donna Tartt's The Secret History and as technically dazzling as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.
Set among the cubicles, watercoolers and "break-out rooms" most of us give our lives to, this big, kind book about work depicts a vanished world in which time is idled away by flicking paperclips at the ceiling and wandering down corridors clutching random sheets of paper. Bravely, Ferris writes in the first-person plural - "We had a meeting and when the meeting was over, we said thank you to the meeting makers for having made the meeting" - and, amazingly, he pulls it off, giving his ad-agency creatives the semblance both of an unthinking, irresponsible herd and a united, loyal team.
There's Chris Yop, who has been laid off but still comes to the office; Karen Woo, who is "like Hitler without the anti-Semitism"; and Amber Ludwig, who dislikes profanity but only since she became pregnant by Larry Novotny, who wants her to have an abortion before his wife finds out.
These people come together when their boss gives them the impossible assignment of designing a campaign to make a breast cancer patient laugh at her illness - which, they decide, is the closest their stoical boss will come to telling them she has breast cancer herself. They also come together to work on the flyers for their colleague Janine Gorjanc's missing daughter - scanning her photograph, manipulating it to play up her fair hair and freckles, and fixing her slightly crooked smile.
You see, these people are professionals. They are busy but they are also human, and they care. When Janine's daughter is found strangled in an empty parking lot, and her mother starts spending her lunch hours submerged in the ball pit at McDonald's, they notice, and they worry. But they also gossip about it by email, talk about it over coffee and go to gawp at her from a safe distance.
So these people can be bitchy and juvenile, too, which is great as it's very funny on the page. They play practical jokes, nick swivel chairs and spread daft rumours (the office coordinator, who has a "considerable mole" on her cheek, is said - for no obvious reason - to be able to carry several times her body weight, like an ant).
But the greatest joker of all is Tom Mota, resident non-conformist and all-round office crazy guy, the kind who wears three shirts on top of each other just to show them what an anarchist he is. When Tom is laid off, he returns to the office dressed as a clown and starts shooting everyone with, it turns out, paintballs - the most exciting and life-affirming thing to happen to these people since the first season of The Sopranos.
By the time Ferris comes to the end of this exceptional novel, the idea of work has completed a sophisticated journey: from adolescence (work as a source of infinite boredom) via adulthood (work as a necessary evil, what we do to pay the bills) to maturity (work as a satisfying and agreeable way to live). "The funny thing about work," writes Ferris, "is that it was so bearable." The funny thing about this book is that it seems so radical.
by Elena Seymenliyska, 12th April 2007
Quote Isabella Rossellini
"It reminds me: I go to yoga classes in a church and one day there was a poster asking 'What do you want from the church?' I wrote down: 'More yoga lessons.' Then I found my reading glasses and went back to see what other people had written and I saw things like 'Redemption'."
- Isabella Rossellini, a Telegraph interview, 18th April 2008.
Alan Carr, Live at the Apollo
An Observer interview with the comic:
Mr. Nice guy
Alan Carr would like to make it clear that he is not, and never has been, remotely cutting edge. 'Oh no,' he says, sipping on a dainty cup of green tea and lifting the saucer politely as he does so. 'What's the point?'
It is true that Carr, 31, one of the UK's most promising young comedians, does not exactly fit the mould of a foul-mouthed stand-up, the kind who out-heckles the audience and swaggers about on stage knocking back cans of lager in a haze of spittle and sweat. Carr, with his neatly buttoned shirt and non-skinny jeans, his sensible glasses and toothy smile, looks more like a kindly nephew in his first year of an accountancy course.
We are sitting in one of London's most exclusive nightspots, a place so painfully fashionable that the lavatories have no signage on the door, presumably because everyone who is anyone will know where they are simply by word of mouth. Carr is perched on a golden leather banquette in a curious breast-shaped dome. He gazes around with a mystified expression, appearing slightly out of his element.
'I don't really like being a celebrity,' he admits. 'It's like, you get invited to a party and say of course I'll come and then you get the invite, and it says Hello! or OK! magazine will be hosting it and you're just like, well I can't get as pissed as I want to get now because I'll be photographed with Jodie Marsh or Dean Gaffney.'
As a comedian, Carr prefers to mine the rich seam of the mundane. He made his name on the circuit with acutely observed anecdotes that poked fun at his own hapless interactions with everyday life (on the theft of his Tesco Clubcard: 'Half of me was fuming, half of me was thinking, "What about the points?"'). On television, he has crafted a popular persona that manages to be simultaneously waspish and endearing, like a particularly camp version of Dot Cotton holding forth in a neighbourly way over a glass of sherry. He won the BBC new comedy award for stand-up in 2001 and since then has become comfortably ensconced in the mainstream as the host of two of Channel 4's big-ticket entertainment programmes - Alan Carr's Celebrity Ding Dong and The Friday Night Project, with Justin Lee Collins. The DVD of his 2007 stand-up show, Tooth Fairy Live, was a Christmas bestseller.
Openly gay, Carr insists he is perfectly at home in Middle England, despite his detractors pigeonholing him as the anachronistic lovechild of John Inman and Frankie Howerd. On stage or television, his demeanour is coy and mischievous. His voice - shrill, giggly, nasal - is so ubiquitous that when he called up Kwik-Fit a few weeks ago to get his tyre changed, the mechanic recognised him over the phone. 'He started going all camp on me, like Danny La Rue.' His act makes no overt reference to his sexuality, but his critics accuse him of being a throwback to the limp-wristed homosexual stereotypes of the 1970s.
'Gays hate me,' Carr says, affably. 'I just think gay people need to get over themselves. Just because you're gay and on the telly doesn't mean you're a role model. I'm just a comedian. That's all I am. If you find me funny, good. But they look at me like, "Oh, you're letting the side down."
'I've done the circuit, I've won competitions and awards and this wasn't just in some tired old drag act. I haven't just minced on to the stage and said, "Ooh I've got the willies up me." Please, give me a little bit of credit.
'What am I meant to do? Do I go down the Julian Clary route and talk about fisting and poppers? I don't talk about being gay and I think what better equality for gays than that?'
In fact, being accused of any kind of edginess makes Carr terribly defensive, as if he has just been wrongly issued with a parking ticket by an overzealous traffic warden. 'I go and see some comedians now and in the world of comedy, rape is the new black,' he says, putting down the teacup as it begins to clatter tremulously in his hand. 'Everyone's got a rape joke. So if that's cutting edge, joking about rape, then I'd rather be "Middle England" - that's just another way of saying popular, isn't it?
'I don't know what's up with people. Maybe I'm showing my age, but everyone's got a Madeleine McCann joke, a rape joke or a paedophile joke. You go to a comedy club now and it's like a barrage of people outdoing each other seeing how close to the bone they can get.'
His engaging humour and lack of pretension has, none the less, served him well: on the day that we meet, it is announced that Carr and Lee Collins have been shortlisted for best comedy performance at the British Academy Television Awards for The Friday Night Project. He's already dreading the thought of the red carpet. 'You kit yourself out in a nice suit from Alexander McQueen and then you get there and someone from Hollyoaks comes along with two Post-it notes over her nipples and that's it - you never get in the paper. It's not glamorous, it's awful.'
It is clear that the trappings of celebrity are not for him - on a recent holiday to the super exclusive Shore Club in Miami, the paparazzi snapped him poolside with a ballpoint in hand, filling out a word search.
'I just want to be trendy!' he screeches. 'With Heat and Closer magazine, people want to see the bad facelift and Botox gone wrong. I think familiarity breeds contempt. I mean, we'll never get another Greta Garbo will we? Someone would go in with a camera Sellotaped to the bottom of a tray trying to get film of her with no make-up on.'
Perhaps Carr is just too nice to be famous. When I ask him whether Elle Macpherson, the recent guest host of The Friday Night Project, is secretly hideously ugly in the flesh, he says he searched her for flaws ('I thought there's got to be something wrong with her; I even looked for a tache') but dispiritingly found there were none.
Unlike many performers, Carr shies away from unnecessary cruelty, instead relying on his own authenticity to win over his audience. His on-stage persona is simply an extension of his own and therein lies the source of both his charm and his talent. 'When I was starting doing stand-up, I'd get people saying, "So I'll just leave you 10 minutes so you can get into character" and I'd be, like, "Pardon?"'
At a recent gig in Runcorn, a woman came backstage, gave him a tearful hug and told him she'd just found a lump. 'It was a mixture of, "Oh I'm so flattered. It's lovely that you think you can tell me something as personal as that" but the problem was that my jokes are all right but they haven't got that sort of power. They're funny but they can't beat cancer.'
I suspect that part of what people like about Carr is his empathetic nature. As a child growing up in Northampton, he was chubby, bespectacled, gay and rubbish at sports, so he knows what it's like to be bullied. 'I get white van drivers shouting out "Faggot!" - I haven't been called that since I was at school, so actually I get all nostalgic,' he says, giggling. To make it even worse, Carr's father, Graham, is a real man's man: the manager of Northampton Town Football Club who is now a scout for Manchester City. Growing up, Carr recalls his father coaching him from the sidelines, stopwatch round his neck, shouting: 'Faster, you fat fairy!' Carr was never enamoured of the beautiful game.
Many of these formative experiences make their way into his stand-up. Tooth Fairy Live includes a sketch where Carr told his father he was going to do a performing arts degree at Middlesex University:
'Alan, why are you doing this to me?'
'I don't know, Dad, but I think I can show you through expressive dance...'
His father has never been to see him perform, but Carr insists this doesn't worry him. 'He's not interested in comedy or anything like that. He's the simplest man you could ever meet. He's football mad. There is nothing else that interests him in the world apart from football. My mum has come to see it and she loved it.
'Everyone's always asking, "What do they feel?" I was always coming through the door with a new idea; I wanted to be a detective, I wanted to be a forensic scientist, I wanted to be an author and they just rolled their eyes and said, "Oh, it's Alan." So with what I do now, they just roll their eyes, "Oh, it's him again."
But after so many years being the brunt of the family joke, I wonder whether it is especially important to feel he has finally earned his parents' respect? 'It is,' he says, lapsing into seriousness for a split-second. 'I think everyone wants to please their family, don't they? I rang my mother up to say I got nominated for a Bafta today and she was over the moon and that's nice, isn't it? It's better than a grandchild, which Mum's rooting for. I keep saying a Bafta's for life - it never cries, you never need to change a Bafta's nappy, do you, Mum?'
He never told his parents or his younger brother, Gary, that he was gay. Partly, he says, it was 'just there' and partly it was because they simply weren't that kind of family. They didn't sit round the kitchen table leafing through self-help books and emoting; they just got on with things.
'There was no "Everyone, I'm ga-ay!" There was none of that. People sort of knew before I did. I remember sitting down when I was about eight and writing to Jim'll Fix It asking to meet Wonder Woman; you know, so it was there. My mum once said to me, "Why aren't you like other boys?" so I just said, "I am like other boys" and continued reading my Agatha Christie. It's such a tough time when you're growing up that you don't know what to do. I mean, role-model wise, I didn't see any gay people on the telly.'
Does it ever come up now? 'No, it's never mentioned and I wouldn't want to embarrass my dad. My mum will never ask if I'm seeing anyone; I'm not that kind of person anyway. I'm very private.'
Carr is not dating ('This is going to sound so showbiz - I'm so busy at the moment I wouldn't have the time'), but admits that he would like a boyfriend, particularly when he finds himself on his own during dreary Sundays in his house in Crouch End, north London. 'I'm at a difficult stage because people come on to me because they think I live this wonderful life. The civilians think we're all off to Elton John's St Tropez house with Duncan James from Blue and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson. And, actually, I just sit at home reading.'
But in spite of his private nature and his professed distaste for the vacuous nature of fame, Carr is currently undergoing the modern celebrity's rite of passage and is penning his autobiography. Unlike Jordan, he is writing it himself. And unlike most of the dross spouting forth from erstwhile Big Brother contestants, it promises to be rather good.
'It's cathartic going back and looking at stuff, remembering it all. I just like writing. The publisher [HarperCollins] went, "It's so well written for a first draft" and that's so important to me because another criticism I get is that it's just the face and the voice that make people laugh, so I wanted to write a book which is funny. Unless I've written it in a pink font, there's no way they can slag it off.'
Due out in October, his publishers no doubt hope to capitalise on the extraordinary popularity of comedians' autobiographies - when Peter Kay wrote The Sound of Laughter in 2006, it sold 600,000 in the first two months and was nominated for book of the year at the British Book Awards.
Has he read Kay's book? 'I'm steering clear because I'm one of those people who starts absorbing other people's experiences and thinking they're mine. I'd be saying something to my mother: "Oh, do you remember when that happened?" And she'd say, "No Alan, that was Poirot."'
But he confesses that he likes good historical biographies. He particularly enjoys Peter Ackroyd and we have a long conversation about the Claire Tomalin biography of Samuel Pepys, which vividly recounts Pepys' excruciating operation to remove a bladder stone. 'Cutting him open without anaesthetic,' says Carr, flapping his hands in horror. 'I can't even imagine!'
I'm looking forward to reading Carr's book, even if it contains a distinct lack of bladder stones or pink lettering. He is such an engaging, easy presence and extremely funny company, even though the target of his acerbic humour is, more often than not, himself rather than other people. After years of not fitting in, of not being picked for his school sports teams, it seems that Carr has turned this nerdy uniqueness to his advantage. It's not clear whether he's quite worked out how he feels about his sexuality, but perhaps this discomfort is what makes him so likable - people can understand his flawed insecurity.
On his website, there is a section called 'Ask Alan' where you can log on and ask him a question. He says he used to answer them all himself, but now there are too many to deal with individually, particularly as he shares his name with the late Allen Carr, the anti-smoking guru who died in 2006. 'I'd get people writing in saying, "I'm on 20 Benson & Hedges; should I choose the patches or one of those plastic things?" And I just got sick of it in the end. People ask you all kinds of stupid things like, "Where do you live?"; "Can I come round for dinner?" and I get lots of people saying, "I'm like you".'
He rolls his eyes in mock-horror. But for all that Alan Carr is a one-off, he knows that his audience like the feeling that they can relate to him. He might not get back to you about the nicotine patch, but that's not because he doesn't care.
by Elizabeth Day, Sunday 13th April 2008
Poem by Frank O'Hara
Poem
Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
by Frank O'Hara.
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
by Frank O'Hara.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)