I'M NOT A LUMBERJACK AND I'M OKAY

"Any reason why you've gone for the lumberjack look?" asked Lisa, laughing, while I logged onto the call.

I was wearing a checkered black and red shirt, and a cap. I smiled, along with everyone else.

I very nearly said:

"Well I do sleep all night and work all day..."

But a thing occurred to me, quite quickly, and, in just enough of the moment for me to lose the window of comedy timing. And the thing that occurred to me (sitting there in my lumberjack 'uniform') is that I don't think I ever found Monty Python particularly funny.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the humour mechanics of Monty Python. A man writes a joke so funny that it can be weaponised by nation states, another guy does a dance and slaps someone in the face with a wet fish. Meanwhile there's an office for people who want to have an argument, and of course, a pet-shop owner tries to convince an irate customer that the parrot he just bought is simply 'pining for the fjords'.

These phrases entered our culture a long time ago, and in certain subsets of social groups, they keep reappearing - even now. 

At university you were considered the height of wit, a regular Oscar Wilde in fact, if you put on your best French accent to retort to an argument with:

"Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries!" 

I kid you not: everyone fell about at that kind of pre-Internet 'meme'.

For some reason though, I don't think I found it funny then either. It was surreal slapstick, sure, deliberately designed to make no sense at all and use surprise twists or rambling non-endings to derive the laugh; it combined cartoonish grizzle with irreverent silliness, subverting any previous expectations we may have had, by obliterating the traditional sketch structure that (until that moment) had needed a solid set-up and punchline. I get it - that subversion in itself, is humour, not to mention the rebellious Britishness of the thing.

However, surprise really is at the heart of funny - and by the time I encountered this subculture, the 'surprise' element of all of those jokes was already well known. 

What I'm saying is that nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition any more, except for everyone, who suddenly very much expected the Spanish Inquisition. And the only humour that was left was the shadow of that first funny appearance, re-shaded by students in halls in the 1990s who coalesced around the fading remains of an old fire, warming their hands on the neatly quotable memories. Hilarious. But not (I thought) funny.

So I didn't say anything, even though, my colleagues were probably of just the right age to have loved Monty Python almost as much as they loved quoting it. It would have been a cheap laugh I didn't believe in.

Plus, the more I think about it, the more I think it would have been me stoking that fire, doing the very thing my friends were doing in 1996 that made me not want to fit in in the first place.

And even lumberjacks have to be true to themselves, don't they?