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crackerjoke (EDITED)

Spank me. Only a few posts after slagging people who are stuck in the past, I’m spouting childhood anecdotes. It’s as though I, too, am stuck in the past.

I was reading “Awakenings” recently, and it occurred to me that both the phenomenon of nostalgia and the topic of cry-laughing are reflected in the L-Dopa trials. After spending years as dribbling Endymions, the old grippers were given L-Dopa and became super-elated. Some of them did not adjust well and stayed stuck in the year of their affliction. A particularly articulate subject compared his frozen mind-state to that of Rilke’s Panther. I, along with all the women in their twenties who coquettishly dress Iike children – like all the business men, for that matter, who dress like children in customised suburban retreats – if I am a panther, I am the Pink Panther. The Rilke Dilke Panther. And yet I not only shun the scripted humour of the office worker, but I shun the irony and gallows humour of a student. So what do I deign to laugh at? My thoughts turn to Patrick Bossert. When I laugh at him, I’m laughing at myself: surely one of the healthiest forms of hilarity. The precocious child unwittingly making a tit of himself by trying to use his erudition to get friends. How I glowed when the big girls in drama class showed interest in repeated recitations of Jabberwocky! How they laughed with joy at my whimsy! “You Can Do The Cube” was a favoured subject of mockery between my brothers and me. My five year old brother looked at the back cover’s picture of Bossert shrugging smugly behind a dismantled Rubik's Cube, and gasped scandalously: "She's broken hers!". This simple phrase makes me piss myself laughing to this day.

Bossert got a haircut and went on to save the world from an apocalypse.