Jackson Radcliffe's Blog - Posts Tagged "comedy"

My name is Jackson Radcliffe. Welcome to my blog. I’m not new to writing and I’m not new to blogging (my personal blog Blog Blogger Bloggest has been online for two years now). I’m not even new to Goodreads, but since my debut novel - The Yoga Sutras, a tale of sex, lies and spiritual enlightenment - has just been published I’m now here as an author as well as a reader.

Goodreads is an amazing place. As a reader it gives you an incredible way to find books, read reviews, get new books recommended for you personally, and also to connect with authors and other readers. But as an author it’s even better. It gives authors a chance to connect with their readers and find out what they think. That can be scary (‘I think your writing sucks, Jackson.’) but it can also be exhilarating. If you think that’s it’s awesome to talk to your favourite author, I can tell you that it’s just as awesome for an author to hear from a reader.

Let me tell you a secret. You are my favourite reader. I wrote my book just for you. If you were to buy it and read it, I would be in ecstasy. But even if you’re too mean to buy it, I don’t mind. I want you to read my book so badly that I’ve made it available free to read on Goodreads. Just visit my book’s page and click the button that says, ‘read book’. It’s that easy.

You can read the book online in your web browser or you can download it in epub format. Click the 'download ebook' button. You can read an epub on your iPhone, iPad, Kobo reader or even on an Android or Windows phone if you’re smart enough to install the right app. I know that you’re smart enough to do that. I know that you will read my book. After all, you are my favourite reader.

I’m a keen yoga dude, so a few years ago I decided to read the ultimate yoga book. The Yoga Sutras is the Bible of yoga. It was written two thousand years ago by the sage Patanjali.

I read the book and it confused me. The more I read, the less I understood. It didn’t seem to be about yoga at all. At least, it was nothing like my weekly yoga class. The book was all about the mind, the soul and things beyond. It talked about reincarnation and karma. It talked about gaining the ability to levitate. Whoa!

I finished the book and began to understand it a little. I thought it over and it precipitated an existential crisis.

Because of this I decided to write a book to explain the Yoga Sutras in a way that’s more accessible to modern readers. And a whole lot funnier. And with some gratuitous sex thrown in for good measure.

I created a character, Dave, who would read the Yoga Sutras and have an existential crisis so that you won’t have to. Instead you can laugh at Dave and learn about the Yoga Sutras through his own words. If you read my version of The Yoga Sutras, you won’t have to read Patanjali’s original version, which is just as well, because it’s written in Sanskrit verse. And there are hardly any jokes.

So that’s what my book is for. I hope you enjoy reading it.

PS. I forgot to say that if you read my book you will discover the secret of happiness. Wow! Plus lots of jokes and some hot sex too!

PPS. You don't need any previous experience of yoga to read the book.

When I started writing, I adopted a humorous tone, even when writing about serious topics. I thought this was because I couldn’t take myself too seriously as a writer, and that’s probably true. But there’s more to it.

Humour punctures holes in big ideas. It undermines conventions and stands the world on its head. It goads us into questioning things that seem self-evident or beyond debate.

Comedians are everyday philosophers, helping us look at our world through fresh eyes. With my writing, I’m exploring my beliefs about the world and trying to articulate a coherent world view. And you can’t do that without having a few laughs along the way.

In fact, the concept of a coherent world view may turn out to be the ultimate cosmic joke. What if, instead, humour turned out to be the universe’s guiding principle?



This article was first published at my personal blog, Blog Blogger Bloggest.

When my eldest son was about six years old, I sat down with him and we watched the Star Wars double trilogies together. This was a key moment in the father-son relationship. My son showed the event the respect it deserved by dressing up in his Darth Vader costume and fiercely clutching his toy light sabre for the duration of the show.

You can think of Star Wars as the ultimate father-son relationship story. I’m talking about Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker of course.

Vader: Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.
Luke: He told me enough! He told me you killed him!
Vader: No. I am your father.

Admittedly perhaps this isn’t the best role model to present to a six year old, but it seemed to work out OK for my family. No long-term harm done, I think.

The Star Wars movies work because they’re exactly what both boys and dads are happy to watch. ('I’m just going to watch The Empire Strikes Back with the boys again, honey. Yeah, I know I’m supposed to be cooking the dinner / mowing the grass / collecting your mother from the hospital but the kids really want me to watch it with them.')

There are more thoughtful and tender movies dedicated to exploring the father-son relationship in greater emotional depth. But you know what’s wrong with these movies? Boys don’t want to watch them.

Besides, watching Star Wars is a rite of passage. It’s an essential cultural reference point, up there with Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy. That’s how I explained it to my wife, anyway.

When people ask me about my book The Yoga Sutras I tell them it’s a comedy. ‘Yeah, but what’s it about?’ they ask. I tell them it’s about yoga, but they’re still not satisfied.

‘It’s about belief systems, gender identity and the fundamental philosophical questions of existence,’ I say. Then their eyes start to glaze over, so I hurriedly add, ‘But it’s very funny. And it has some strange sex scenes.’

‘Kinky sex?’ they ask hopefully, but I have to tell them, ‘No. Not kinky. Just strange.’

At this point they either agree to read the book or they leave the room.

The problem, I think, is genre. Is comedy a genre? I think it’s more of an attitude, a way of seeing the world.

I don’t really read genre books. I prefer books that don’t fit into any identifiable genre; books that surf the boundaries of classification and laugh in the face of taxonomy. I don’t often read humour as a genre. Romance … mmm. Thrillers … maybe. Paranormal … perhaps. But a vampire lesbian mystery romance with a post-apocalyptic urban setting, based on elements of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and with plenty of dark humour – yeah, I’ll read that, that’s my genre.

All good things must come to an end, and my Goodreads giveaway of The Yoga Sutras has now finished. Amazingly, over 800 people signed up for a chance to win the book. Was it the cheeky title that attracted people? The enticing blurb? Or the outrageous front cover image? I don’t know, but what I do know is that sadly only one person was able to win a copy of the book.

So to make the book available to the widest number of readers, I am doing two things this weekend.

Firstly, I am selling the Kindle version of the book at half price. That’s just $1.67 at Amazon.com or 99p at Amazon.co.uk. The price will return to normal on Monday.

Secondly, I have made a free copy available for download in epub format. Just visit my book’s page on Goodreads and click the button that says, ‘download ebook’. It really is that easy. You can read an epub on your iPhone, iPad, Kobo reader or even on an Android or Windows phone if you download the right app.

On Monday the free download will be cruelly snatched away and the book will return to its usual monstrously expensive price. So grab this opportunity before it vanishes forever. Click the link. Click it now!

Writing’s not easy. You have to sit in a chair all day and move your fingers around rather quickly while staring at the words that appear magically on a screen in front of you. It’s hard work and really quite exhausting.

So when I’m not sitting indoors at my computer I like to work outside in my garden. In English we call that gardening, but if I understand correctly, Americans call a garden a yard and gardening yardwork. This confuses me, because in Britain a yard is an unpleasant square of concrete surrounded by a high brick wall and yardwork is what men with balls and chains around their ankles were made to do in Victorian times as punishment.

Have you ever heard of the Yard of Eden? Me neither.

Anyway, I have veered off topic. What I want to talk about here is what I do while I am gardening / doing yardwork. What I do is write. Or, more precisely, I think. This is the closest I ever get to multi-tasking. I call it duo-tasking and it doubles my efficiency, which is awesome if you think about it, which I do.

Now, when I say that I think while gardening, that is not strictly true. What I actually do is talk to myself.

Talking to yourself is what mad, crazy nutters do. However, if you write it down afterwards, you can claim that you are a writer and most people are OK with that.

So that’s what I do. You could call it yardwork. You could call it crazy, random mutterings. You could call it writing. Whatever it is, someone’s got to do it.

Why does comedy so often involve human suffering? People slip on banana skins. They act stupid. Outrageous things happen to them. And we laugh.

Are we monsters? Do we relish the suffering of others?

Or is laughter a self-defence mechanism? Instead of being a sign of depravity, it’s a way of coping with living in a world that is profoundly and shockingly unsympathetic to human existence.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that we laugh till we cry; that our laughter comes with tears. If we didn’t laugh at misfortune, we’d have to sob instead.

It seems fitting that my first novel, The Yoga Sutras, was a comedy. It reflects an unconscious inability to treat myself seriously as a writer, even though my writing is terribly serious to me - a matter of life and death.

So by all means laugh at my jokes. But please don’t laugh at my ideas, because I would hate that. It’s probably what a writer fears most, after obscurity. That's the greatest fear. To be ignored would be horrible. So awful I might have to laugh.

Words. I tend to think a lot about them. They seem like logical, reasonable constructions, yet they hide subtleties within them that confuse and perplex me. Perhaps if I had a Classical education I would understand them better, but as it is I am often baffled.

Today I’m thinking about words that should exist but don’t.

I don’t mean silly made-up words like fumblebluster (someone who blusts a fumble?), but sensible, logical words that really should exist, but don’t seem to have been thought of. They are like holes in the English language that could be really useful, if only someone had bothered to add them to the dictionary. Here are some examples of missing words, with some suggested meanings:

Mistrapolate – to extrapolate erroneously.
Disguided – given the wrong directions.
Mistribute – to share unfairly.
Reavoidable – worth avoiding more than once.
Obnostic – disgusted by the lack of evidence for God.
Remotional – used to describe the kind of person who breaks down in tears every single freakin’ time.

Do you see what I mean? These words should exist! They would be so useful, and there is no logical reason for them not to exist. Can anyone explain why English is so full of holes? Or perhaps you would like to propose some other non-words and suggest their possible meanings?

First published on Blog Blogger Bloggest.

Why is work better than sex?
Do Bond villains lack ambition?
Are you an alien terrorist?
Is the world getting better or worse?
What is the best undead creature to actually be?
How can you reliably predict the future?
How do wasps get into the house?
How can you live to be 100?
Do we possess free will?
What are brains for?



If you enjoy asking unusual questions and getting unexpected answers, this book is for you.
In a collection of his 100 best blog articles, the writer Jackson Radcliffe spans a diverse range of topics, from comedy to spirituality, and from tax forms to philosophy & science.
Short and witty, Radcliffe captures an entertaining and stimulating vision of the world in friendly, bite-sized chunks.

The book is free and is available from Amazon (UK and US), Kobo, Nook and iBooks.