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It turns out Rowan Atkinson's birthday is actually January 6th. Which makes yesterday's entry even more perfect. It's getting like you can't trust Movies Attack anymore. What are those guys after? And why are they into movies attacking?
Today Ernie uttered the words that every father fears their son might say - "I want to be a comedian". He didn't need to tell me. I guess I've always known. You don't mind so much when it's your daughter, because these days due to political correctness gone mad, 95% of comedians are women, but when it's your son...
"Well, you need to work on your material," I advised him.
Immediately he grabbed my shirt and said "This is good material."
The sky potato doesn't fall from the tree. I wouldn't mind if he was going to be a good comedian, but he is an absolute carbon copy of me and doomed to live the same life as me. I'm very sorry, Ernie.
Maybe a worse life than me, because when I was a kid this job seemed like something that was impossibly out of reach: my parents were teachers, I had no showbiz connections and I lived in Somerset. Ernie has connections and though nepotism won't get him far - I'm hoping I can live long enough to be a nepo daddy who gets work from his success - he has family members who've made a living from this and a dad who will actively train him to be a comedian. Each night I read him feed lines from his book of jokes and he attempts to guess (or remember) the punchline. His answers are usually inadvertently funnier than the actual joke, but mainly because they are a long way from being punchlines.
So I berate him until he gets it right. "NO! Why did the chicken cross the road? Come on, why?"
My dad encouraged me academically and I used to hide in the cupboard under the stairs trying to successfully write a figure 8 in one motion of the pencil, as he was so disdainful of my snowman 8 attempts. The embarrassing thing about this story is that I was 28 years old at the time. And I couldn't even write the 8 in my own age properly.
To be fair, I didn't turn out to be a mathematician, so maybe the best thing is to give him as much comedian training as possible and he will become an accountant.
I've got nothing against comedians- some of my best friends are comics and as long as they do what they do in private with consenting adults then I guess it's OK, if disgusting. But I look at my two happy kids and their happy innocent faces and their enjoyment at making people laugh and fear for them about what the future may hold.
It looks like fun and games, but do I really want that life for them?
Of course I do. It doesn't matter how personally debilitating it will be for them. All that matters is that one of them is successful, wins all the big comedy awards and as they accept them shouts "This is for my dad. He was the greatest comedian ever and none of you acknowledged it. YOU WERE WRONG. AND YOU KILLED HIM."
Fingers crossed.
