Not nice, not funny: the Krankie jibe against Nicola Sturgeon goes too far

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/22/media-joke-nicola-sturgeon-jimmy-krankie

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Since her sensational success in the TV debates the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, has utterly dominated the political discussion. Her triumph has also given rise to the single unfunniest joke in the history of English journalism, outranking orphanage fires and oncology reports in pure unfunniness. And that’s the joke that says Nicola Sturgeon looks like Wee Jimmy Krankie – the pantomime, red-capped schoolboy figure played by the Glasgow comic Janette Tough. It’s been in the papers, Private Eye and even, I’m sorry to say, The Graham Norton Show – and it’s a tired, smug, transparently malicious joke that always says a great deal more about the speaker than its subject.

Of course, politics is a rough game: Ed Miliband gets skewered as a Wallace and Gromit-type idiot; George Osborne is portrayed as an S&M weirdo. But in these cases, the cartoonists are taking on the overdog: they’re punching up, or at least across. The Krankie joke is different. It’s consciously punching down, smacking down a perceived upstart, someone who’s above herself. And the nasty little point about the Wee Jimmy Krankie crack is that this is a female absurdly pretending to be male – and there are plenty of people of every political stripe in the boys’ club made uneasy by Sturgeon. Hence the charmless joke. From now on, pundits who go into the Krankie routine should get what Wee Jimmy himself so often got: a clip round the ear.

The art of disaster

There comes a time of panic in the life of every parent. The time when general grief suddenly explodes into a stress-supernova. And it has come into mine. I had thought I could just about handle everything my 10-year-old son could throw at me – especially things related to school. But no parent can ever handle the art project. It is something for which I have no training or aptitude. My son has got to come up with a fully detailed, 3D model of a natural disaster by the end of next week. We’re looking at somehow creating a papier-mache tsunami, with the little white flecks of foam at the crest of its curvature picked out with paint. Or conceivably creating a scale reproduction of Fukushima from the inner cardboard tubes of kitchen rolls. Art is a nightmare. When I personally try to draw a face or a man, it comes out the same as when I did it at the age of eight. Building a model? I might as well try building a car or an MRI scanner. Aren’t there any art students out there, who could fake a naif-style model for under-the-table cash?

Related: The word is out: I was a teenage astamagootis | Tim Dowling

Street theatre in Caracas

The collapse in the oil price has turned Caracas, in Venezuela, into the queueing capital of the world. According to the BBC’s correspondent, Ian Pannell, the entire population of this once oil-rich nation is in a queue almost all the time. They queue for hours for basic goods: food, coffee, soap. People will join queues not knowing what they are queueing for, just trusting that it must be good, and sometimes arrive at the head of queue to find that this commodity has run out, if it was ever there. Queueing, in all its metaphysical desolation, always strikes me as a very British experience, and reminds me of the 1958 absurdist play The Hole, by NF Simpson, in which a long line of people develops to look at a hole in the road: “This is a small queue which has been forming for weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, aeons …” A visionary declares that it is his ambition to be at the head of “a queue stretching away … in every possible direction known to the compass”.

Perhaps a production of The Hole should be mounted in Caracas. There would be a long line at the box office.