Do You Think It's Funny

After my introductory post a certain ex-fling of mine said: "Sexy? Yes, that you are. But funny? I never really associated you with funny!" - a remark not only obviously rude, but also blatantly untrue. Of course, I am funny. I have been told by many people I am funny! I believe some even used the word 'hilarious' which, I admit, might have been a slight exaggeration. Don't take this away from me! Funny has always been my thing, before sexy was my thing. Yes, I am not an American slapstick comedy kind of funny. I'd like to believe my sense of humour is more subtle. In fact, as it turns out, it might sometimes be so subtle, that it goes entirely undetected.

This whole episode made me decide to investigate the whole matter more thoroughly. I have asked a whole bunch of people what they find funny and made a shocking discovery that different people find different things funny. As a matter of fact, some people laugh at things that to me are not funny at all! So here is a list of different funny things in the order of how funny I find them, starting with the least funny (i.e. not funny at all) to the most funny:

1) Little Britain - OK. I just don't get it. It's just men dressed up as women. And if they are not dressed up as women, they pretend to be gay... That's kind of... juvenile? And  Come Fly With Me is just the same, only also racist. I am sorry about the quality of the second video but if you live in UK you can watch this gem of a show in full on iplayer.

2) A couple of days a colleague of mine emailed me a video of a baby orangutan:

It made her "L O L", "absolutely hilarious". I admit it is a very cute orangutan (PS. for more cute baby animals of various species go to - http://www.zooborns.com ) but it is not really that funny, is it?
And it is not that I don't find animals funny. This dude is just hysterical:

3) Ben Elton - I have just finished reading 'Popcorn' (full review here) and even though it was a very interesting book I found myself laughing once in 330 pages which is just simply not good enough. Writers like him try very hard to be funny in every sentence, they can't write anything normally. Every sentence has to be a joke and no one has got that many jokes. I feel similarly about Jenny Eclair. I read two of her books and her constant attempts at humour made me feel really uncomfortable. Especially that her jokes were mostly about farting and other bodily functions, which would have been fine if I was a 13 year old boy.

4) Cyanide and Happines - we are slowly getting there. Cyanide and Happiness has its moments of brilliance, like here:

But sadly the brilliance sinks in the sea of mediocre.

Keep reading beacuse it gets funnier!

Books and Statistics

I spent countless hours thinking what my first post should be about. I was tempted to write about the capital punishment or human rights in China but certain people advised me to keep it light and entertaining. Thus I decided to write about books and statistics, because what's more entertaining than books and statistics, right?

If you are like me and like to read your books in an organised fashion, there is no better place for you to go than www.goodreads.com. Goodreads allows you to catalogue all the books you have read, you are reading and you intend to read. You can rate and review them as well. Once you provide goodreads with all the necessary data you can clearly see when you read your books, how long it took you and even how long it was between the time you decided upon reading a book and the moment you actually read it. If you log in religiously for a year, goodreads will reward you with yearly statistics. Now you will know just how many books or pages (if this seems more relevant to you) you have read over the year and how many of them you rated with 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 stars. Do that for a few consecutive years and you can compare them and draw conclusions (ex. I shall be 125 years old when I finish 1001 Books to Read Before You Die). You can set yourself a yearly reading challenge (that usually is somewhere down the list of New Year's resolutions) and Goodreads will kindly keep track of it for you.

If this all sounds like heaven to you, you probably have some sort obsessive-compulsive disorder and you might want to see somebody about it. However, before you do, please log in to goodreads and become my friend here .

Now I meant to write about MY book statistics for 2010 but certain people told me to keep it short because people have a very short attention span these days. Also, I fear that many readers might not find it as fascinating as I do.

If you checked this post in hope to find some real statistics about books here they are:

1) 89.5% of people prefer to watching TV to reading books
2) On any given day 1 out of 5 people reading a book on public transport is reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy.
3) 115% teenage girls have read Twilight
4) Only one person in the world has read this book. Me.