Free Making the Cat Laugh by Lynne Truss
Authors: Lynne Truss
While I may sometimes
feel
like a criminal, for instance, I have never yet been obliged to shoot my way out of an emergency exit after watching half a reel of the film.
But what is the alternative, anyway, to going alone? It is
to go with other people
– and are you telling me this is preferable? How many times has one agreed, casually, ‘Hey, let’s do a movie!’ only to discover that one’s good friend Mike has never been properly cinema-trained? Me, I like to concentrate on the film; but for the universal Mike the cinema is a place where people are mysteriously quiet and sober-sided, where they have forgotten the value of voluble free-association, and need to be reminded of it. He is a restless kind of guy, and chatty. I mean, is this a funeral, or what?
‘Doesn’t that bloke remind you of Phil?’ he will chuckle loudly, briefly standing up to point at Mickey Rourke. I ignore him, of course, and bite my scarf, hoping that my explicitly hostile body language will tell him to shut up. It doesn’t. ‘Remind me to tell you later what Phil said at lunch-time,’ he adds, with an exaggerated nudge to the ribs. ‘It was such a scream.’ He then performs a nonchalant spot of overhead juggling, using a Malteser, a carton of Kia-Ora and a fully extended umbrella.
On really bad days, moreover, it transpires that Mike also suffers strange lapses of concentration, rendering him incapable of following plot. ‘What happened to the blonde girl?’ he suddenly enquires, at a moment of maximum plot interest. ‘Lynne, what happened to the blonde girl?’ he repeats a little more loudly, thinking I haven’t heard. ‘She died,’ I whisper back through clenched teeth. ‘Really? When?’ he asks. At which point I start to look round for the manager.
I suppose the tragic image of the single person in the cinema derives from the idea that they can’t have any friends. Perhaps it is time for this assumption to be overturned – since it is more likely, in my opinion, that the lone cinema-goer is simply attempting to preserve the few friendships she has still got left. Personally I associate the plush seat and the bag of chews with nothing other than pleasure and freedom. For me, the really tragic aspect of cinema-going is to hear people say, ‘Oh yes, I wanted to see JFK, but unfortunately I couldn’t persuade anyone to come with me.’ That’s so sad.
I have started getting a bit peculiar in Sainsbury’s. I knew it would happen eventually – that I would stop being Little Miss Reasonable at the check-out, and start getting verbal. ‘There’s no
point,
you know,’ I say, waving my hand in the face of the woman on the till. ‘There’s no
point
checking these things through so fast, because I can’t possibly pack them at the same rate.’ She nods, but takes no notice; just sets her jaw and carries on rolling tins down the conveyor belt three times a second, in a manner reminiscent of a thousand infernal-machine scenes from Jerry Lewis and Jacques Tati movies.
I always buy the same things in supermarkets: multiple tins of cat-food, multiple pots of hummus, multiple rolls of swing-bin liners. Take my advice: if you are the teensiest bit neurotic– can’t cope with all the choices in the modern world, check all the taps twelve times before answering the phone, won’t speak at dinner-parties until someone has said the word ‘badger’ – then shopping feels much less dangerous if you don’t give any consideration to what you actually want to buy.
Cat-food, hummus, bin-liners; cat-food, hummus, bin-liners. I exercise an astounding degree of self-control in this respect, though on every trip I also give myself seven minutes for open-mouthed wonder, as I stand in front of the biscuit displays, eyes all aglow, and look at the lovely, lovely things that can be made by simply rubbing together fat, sugar and flour. When my seven minutes are over, I ritually push my trolley past temptation, and have a little sob by the
feel
like a criminal, for instance, I have never yet been obliged to shoot my way out of an emergency exit after watching half a reel of the film.
But what is the alternative, anyway, to going alone? It is
to go with other people
– and are you telling me this is preferable? How many times has one agreed, casually, ‘Hey, let’s do a movie!’ only to discover that one’s good friend Mike has never been properly cinema-trained? Me, I like to concentrate on the film; but for the universal Mike the cinema is a place where people are mysteriously quiet and sober-sided, where they have forgotten the value of voluble free-association, and need to be reminded of it. He is a restless kind of guy, and chatty. I mean, is this a funeral, or what?
‘Doesn’t that bloke remind you of Phil?’ he will chuckle loudly, briefly standing up to point at Mickey Rourke. I ignore him, of course, and bite my scarf, hoping that my explicitly hostile body language will tell him to shut up. It doesn’t. ‘Remind me to tell you later what Phil said at lunch-time,’ he adds, with an exaggerated nudge to the ribs. ‘It was such a scream.’ He then performs a nonchalant spot of overhead juggling, using a Malteser, a carton of Kia-Ora and a fully extended umbrella.
On really bad days, moreover, it transpires that Mike also suffers strange lapses of concentration, rendering him incapable of following plot. ‘What happened to the blonde girl?’ he suddenly enquires, at a moment of maximum plot interest. ‘Lynne, what happened to the blonde girl?’ he repeats a little more loudly, thinking I haven’t heard. ‘She died,’ I whisper back through clenched teeth. ‘Really? When?’ he asks. At which point I start to look round for the manager.
I suppose the tragic image of the single person in the cinema derives from the idea that they can’t have any friends. Perhaps it is time for this assumption to be overturned – since it is more likely, in my opinion, that the lone cinema-goer is simply attempting to preserve the few friendships she has still got left. Personally I associate the plush seat and the bag of chews with nothing other than pleasure and freedom. For me, the really tragic aspect of cinema-going is to hear people say, ‘Oh yes, I wanted to see JFK, but unfortunately I couldn’t persuade anyone to come with me.’ That’s so sad.
I have started getting a bit peculiar in Sainsbury’s. I knew it would happen eventually – that I would stop being Little Miss Reasonable at the check-out, and start getting verbal. ‘There’s no
point,
you know,’ I say, waving my hand in the face of the woman on the till. ‘There’s no
point
checking these things through so fast, because I can’t possibly pack them at the same rate.’ She nods, but takes no notice; just sets her jaw and carries on rolling tins down the conveyor belt three times a second, in a manner reminiscent of a thousand infernal-machine scenes from Jerry Lewis and Jacques Tati movies.
I always buy the same things in supermarkets: multiple tins of cat-food, multiple pots of hummus, multiple rolls of swing-bin liners. Take my advice: if you are the teensiest bit neurotic– can’t cope with all the choices in the modern world, check all the taps twelve times before answering the phone, won’t speak at dinner-parties until someone has said the word ‘badger’ – then shopping feels much less dangerous if you don’t give any consideration to what you actually want to buy.
Cat-food, hummus, bin-liners; cat-food, hummus, bin-liners. I exercise an astounding degree of self-control in this respect, though on every trip I also give myself seven minutes for open-mouthed wonder, as I stand in front of the biscuit displays, eyes all aglow, and look at the lovely, lovely things that can be made by simply rubbing together fat, sugar and flour. When my seven minutes are over, I ritually push my trolley past temptation, and have a little sob by the