After 50 years of dreaming, I know we won’t win the World Cup - Matthew Norman
This question may look deceptively rhetorical, but it begs a starkly literal answer. Is laughter the best medicine? No, it is not. If it were, those diagnosed with atrial fibrillation would be prescribed a Seinfeld box set instead of a blood-thinner and beta-blockers. But imagine for a moment that laughter is a uniquely effective drug. In that event, anyone exposed to John Cleese these past several decades has been in the placebo group. Mr Cleese’s bitter resentments and ravening sense of entitlement denied have transformed him from arguably the funniest man on the planet to the least amusing life form in this, or any, quadrant of the galaxy. Yet we cannot damn an aperçu out of contempt for its mouthpiece. So the time comes, as every fourth year, to trot out the Michael Frayn line Mr Cleese’s character speaks in Clockwise: ‘It’s not the despair. I can take the despair...
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