Humour as a Tool
It always occurs to me that humour is one of the most useful things to this world as it currently exists - it's the one thing which we will always demand is new, changing, different. It has been, in recent months, more of an inspiration to me that speculative fiction, which is too often by people who prefer physical engineering to social engineering. A large chunk of it is rubbish - just jokes, puns, Milton Jones being Milton Jones1.
On the other side, I'm writing this first part whilst listening to Mark Thomas's The Manifesto. I'm now disappointed I missed the first three series, despite the fact it's all rubbish from what I can tell - it is a comedy show. But, like some of the other comedy shows, it makes some interesting points.
One of these from a year ago was Top Gear's attempt to make a snow plough out of a tractor. As I was discussing with friends recently, because of the normally low levels of snow in most of this country, I'm not sure that how many of the councils actually own any snow ploughs at all. Tractors, on the other hand, we have a lot of. In both cases, they're out of use for a large chunk of the year, so some attempt to combine them does make quite a bit of sense.
An interesting one in this episode of The Manifesto was the idea of having the Lords run like jury service - everyone gets put into a pool to be called up and scrutinise the workings of the government. Now, given some of my views on the intelligence of the average member of the voting public - which I would put below the average member of the House of Lords - I'm not really sure this is a good idea. However, it is most definitely an interesting one.
It's also rekindled my interest in the Lord's reforms - not that I've missed much, judging but the mutterings I've heard on my radio listening. The rest of the programme on the other hand...well, it was all well and good until it switched to a cringe worthy section on someone who wanted to majorly overhaul the content of the education system, and got drawn into a debate with a teacher.
On a related note, a newspaper article recently berated the BBC for the lack of scientists and engineers on Question Time, and also the decision to have comedians presenting the Stargazing mini-series. The writer has a point, and I generally find the contents of the Lay Scientist column to be rather good, although he seems to have completely forgotten some of the qualifications the BBC comedians have2
So, back to my point. Most of the world is built primarily of tradition - not in the sense of religious tradition in all cases, but often just trying to adapt what we already have rather than starting from scratch a cherry-picking the ideas we want.
As has often been noted
Just because ideas are tenacious, doesn't mean that they're worthy
New ideas are sometimes hard to come by - especially in areas which are a specialisation of some sort. Fiction and, too a lesser extent, non-fiction, has examples of people realising something because of what some simpleton says; in a high flying academic field, someone just studying an element with a couple of extra quarks might as well be a simpleton from the point of view of your field, but can still says things of great relevance.
So, I've come back to the conclusion that humour is the simpleton to the politician, in a way resurrecting the archetype of the court fool. The combination of an audience, the demand for novelty, the connection to the common person all combined with the need to have a knowledge of the goings on to undertake the performance leads to a person who can say things that, even if they do not realise it, are of great use for finding new things to do with governance.