The Anarchist Doctor Who

or: Matt Smith Stole My Jimmy-Jams

Shockeye o’ the Quawncing Grig

Shockeye, ship’s cook, about to get chloroformed by the Sixth Doctor (“The Two Doctors”).

Doctor Who is an amazing show with almost as many flaws as perfections — but I refuse to trash-talk Doctor Who. There’s enough of that on the Internet and I have no intention of adding to the sad whinging about “Russell T. Davies ♥ David Tennant”, “Steven Moffat eats babies” or “Matt Smith stole my jimmy-jams”. Any particular actor or writer will only ever be a phase in the show’s potentially infinite lifetime. If you still don’t believe I’m not having a go, I can safely reveal that I’m a massive fan of the show and always will be. I love it, pure and simple. It was a huge part of my childhood and is one of the delicious pleasures of my adulthood. Visitors come from far and wide to gawk at my Doctor Who wall with a mixture of awe, pity and sexual envy. The thing is, having watched, read and listened to Doctor Who in all its incarnations, I’ve noticed two problems at the core of the show — two contradictions that run deep and are essentially irreconcilable. One is the Doctor’s xenophilia vs. Doctor Who’s xenophobia. The other is the Doctor’s status as both a rebel against and a symbol of the status quo. El problemo.

It’s hard to describe the essence of Doctor Who to people who don’t understand it. Where do you start to talk about a show that’s run for nigh on 50 years? How do you sum it up in 30 seconds at a crowded party? This is the best I’ve figured out: it’s a show about libertarianism; a love of strange things; a love of exploration; a love of eccentricity; and the defence of the rights of the individual against the establishment. This is probably why gay people have always felt at home with Doctor Who, because it defends diversity and doesn’t preach any Earth-bound political or religious agenda. Compare that with Star Trek or Stargate, which are chock-a-block with dogmatic, imperialist claptrap. Doctor Who doesn’t play tin soldiers.

Xenophilia ties directly in to everything I’ve just mentioned. If you’re a libertarian eccentric who loves exploring new things, you can’t help but love aliens. And the Doctor does. His first reaction upon seeing deadly, monstrous and infernal creatures is inevitably a sort of wonderment. He gushes at the City of the Exxilons. He raves about space-age clockwork. He is practically orgasmic upon discovering werewolves. The Doctor can’t help but love all the strange, cool things that the universe can produce. But: the show can’t abide this. It is an Earth-bound show and it needs to entertain its audience to get ratings. It needs adventures, and you don’t get good adventures without good baddies. Sure there are plenty of stories where the aliens are good guys or the Earth-men are bad guys1, but overwhelmingly the aliens turn out to be bastards. Even if the monsters aren’t specifically evil, we’re all too happy to regard them as disposable — things we can kill and forget without worrying our consciences too hard, like in “Vincent and the Doctor”. There’s no getting around it, it has to happen for the show to maintain its drama. And that’s a problem.

Unfortunately it’s not a problem with a ready solution. I suppose you could create more character-based villains rather than defaulting to “funny-looking = evil”, but that would require so much more depth and subtlety than the show has really had. Which isn’t a criticism — that’s just the kind of show we bought into. It started as a half-hour tea-time family entertainment and carries on today in adventure-packed one-hour episodes. Scary monsters are just a part of that. Doctor Who doesn’t have the time to become a character-driven drama and even if it did manage to turn itself into Downton Abbey it would be a totally different show. Despite the Doctor’s own xenophilia, Doctor Who has to be a xenophobic show.

The Doctor’s glee at causing the Great Fire of Rome.

The Doctor’s glee at causing the Great Fire of Rome (“The Romans”).

The Doctor’s anarchic, rebellious tendencies are a slightly subtler problem. It’s harder to tackle and to reconcile because the Doctor, like real people, is capable of behaving in contradictory ways at the same time. On one hand the Doctor is a rebel and an anarchist. He ditched his own stuffy planet, he topples dictatorships and bureaucracies with glee and has no qualms about seeing the best laid plans go to hell in a handbasket. This is probably the Doctor I love best, the one who is never happier than when he’s stirring up shit. I’ll never love him more than in “The Macra Terror”. Here I lay down my pen because I can’t do better than quote Robert Shearman in Running Through Corridors:

[The Doctor] arrives in a place that is happy, and the first thing he does is seek out the one man who believes in monsters. And it isn’t with any fear, or out of a sense of concern, no — he listens to Medok’s tale about swarms of insects with eager glee. This is the anarchist Doctor, never in his element more than when he can be the fly in the ointment, the one man in an idyllic society who’ll find its weakness and bring it crashing down around everyone’s heads.2

So why does this man go and flip-flop on us? Why does he maintain the course of history at all costs3? Why does he back away from rewriting the base code of the universe4? Why does he strive to preserve the status quo rather than tear down a stagnant world and watch something new grow up in its place? It’s another significant contradiction at the very core of Doctor Who. I suppose mere chaos would be boring, but realistically I think there are two constraints on the Doctor’s anarchy. One is imposed by the show — it has to reflect the real world. The Doctor can’t rewrite the Earth’s history because the show has to reflect the timeline as we know it. The other constraint is the Doctor’s own character. He is the last symbol of the conservative order of the Time Lords. Even though he rebelled against them he has been too heavily programmed by them to totally reject their laws. The Doctor’s one attempt to ditch the laws of time in “The Waters of Mars” did not encourage him to repeat the experiment.

The Gatherer.

The Gatherer gets lynched as his empire topples (“The Sunmakers”).

I’ve mentioned “The Waters of Mars”, but does Doctor Who make any other experiments in pure, pleasurable chaos? My favorite has to be the Meddling Monk, a Time Lord who acts like an unethical version of the Doctor. The Monk is a schoolboy who kicks ants’ nests just to watch them scurry. He’s not actually evil, he just thinks it would be a hoot to give atomic bazookas to King Harold and watch him stick it to William the Conqueror. I kind of agree, though that’s probably more telling about me than it is about the Doctor. This is the Disney version of Doctor Who when rewriting time was still just for fun. We get a much darker version of the same thing if we’re allowed to delve into more dubious canon — Grandfather Paradox, the leader of Faction Paradox5. While the Monk is an interesting parallel to the Doctor, Grandfather Paradox actually is the Doctor, only corrupted by an evil Gallifreyan death cult. By crossing the timestream and saving even one life the Doctor would render time meaningless and paradox supreme. “On Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays we’ll knock the universe down, and Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays we’ll build it up again.” The Doctor’s response is telling: “In a life where death has no meaning? Where heroism is redundant, sacrifice a joke?”6 It is his familiar appeal to preserve the status quo.

Doctor Who’s ephemeral problems do interest me, but they come and go. Only two real conundrums go right to the show’s core and span its entire lifetime. While the Doctor loves aliens, our beloved show can’t help but cast them as villains. While the Doctor loves anarchy he also defends the status quo. I’m not out to change these — after all, this is the show I fell in love with — but I do wonder what Doctor Who might have been in a different world. I wouldn’t ever want to see Doctor Who recast as Downton Abbey, but subtler villains can’t go amiss and can be just as cool as big scary monsters. I wouldn’t want to see the Doctor stand for nothing at all, but at the same time I live for the day he’ll set the world on fire just to watch the pretty colors it makes as it burns.

Notes

  1. These date as far back as “The Rescue” and “Galaxy 4” to more recent stories like “The Beast Below”. [↩]
  2. Shearman & Hadoke, 197. We also get a strong hint of the Doctor’s sheer glee at destruction in “The Romans” when he seems positively tickled that he might be responsible for the Great Fire. [↩]
  3. From “The Aztecs” on, the Doctor rants endlessly about the importance of maintaining the timeline. If the timeline were altered, wouldn’t some new timeline arise in its place? Would that be a bad thing? [↩]
  4. “School Reunion”. So what if our failures define us? Why couldn’t we be defined by something new? [↩]
  5. For Faction Paradox see the BBC’s range of Eighth Doctor Adventures published in the late 90s and early 2000s. For Grandfather Paradox in particular check out Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole’s gripping novel The Ancestor Cell. [↩]
  6. Anghelides & Cole, 237. [↩]

Bibliography

  • Anghelides, Peter & Cole, Stephen. The Ancestor Cell. London: BBC Worldwide, 2000. Print.
  • Shearman, Robert & Hadoke, Toby. Running Through Corridors vol. 1. Des Moines: Mad Norwegian Press, 2010. Print.
Posted in Literature | Tagged | 1 Comment

A Radio Fan’s Dream

Zounds! I know I’ve trashed audiophiles in the past but I can’t tell you how nice it is to have a turntable that can do justice to a 78. My old turntable cabinet, beautiful though it is, produces an unbearable machine hum whenever I try to digitize an old record. That’s why my USB turntable with a 78 RPM stylus is such a blessing. It produces almost no machine hum and it makes it so easy to digitize some of the rarities in my collection. In that spirit allow me to present a wonderful old comedy record — “3 O.L. (A Radio Fan’s Dream)” by Rupert Hazell.

A signed postcard of Elsie Day and Rupert Hazell.

A signed postcard of Elsie Day and Rupert Hazell.

Hazell was an English comedian who worked in Australia for a time and often performed on stage with his wife, Elsie Day. You can find the pair of them in a bunch of videos online from the British Pathé archive, like More Harmonylarity (1935) or Hazell and Day (1933). “Dear Mr Hazell, As a comedian you should go a very long way. How far is it to Siberia?”

That doohickey Hazell is playing is a phonofiddle. The man was good at an instrument that most people didn’t consider worth being good at. The only people who gave the phonofiddle the time of day were comedians in music hall or vaudeville because the instruments were such a great novelty. Hazell was such a fan of the instrument that he invented his own multi-stringed version called the cellocordo, which you can read all about in Alison Rabinovici’s fascinating article The Cellocordo (An Australian Horned Fiddle).

“A Radio Fan’s Dream” parodies the popular medium of radio where Hazell was performing, and specifically the radio station 3 L.O. where he actually broadcast. Hazell uses a lot of topical jokes to Australians and, in particular, Melbournians of the 1920s. Being Australian myself and having too much time on my hands, I have transcribed and annotated the dialogue. If nothing else, take a peek at my note on the “White Australia” policy — it’s quite staggering.

There’s something gloriously trashy about vaudeville-style humor. It’s so different from the way we play comedy today. They used a lot of puns and word-play which were often delivered very quickly. Think about the Marx Brothers — blink and you miss the joke. If you deliver it quickly enough the joke doesn’t even have to be clever — a simple non-sequitur will do the trick. Compare it to modern comedy where the performers will actually stop and wait for the audience to get it. They might as well do a “ba-dum-tss” to let people know when to laugh.

So listen in to Rupert Hazell and see what you think. It’s not what we’re used to hearing in 2012, but then that’s part of the joy of rediscovering these old gems.

Part 1

Download 3 O.L. Part 1 (A Radio Fan’s Dream)

ANNOUNCER

3 L.O. Melbourne1, we will now give you the chimes2.

(discordant clock chimes)

3 L.O. Melbourne, the time is now 27 minutes past 12. What a Whale News Service exclusive to 3 L.O. and every other station. The sun will rise in the East and set in the West every morning and night as heretofore until you hear from us to the contrary.

3 L.O. Melbourne, if you stand by for half an hour the studio orchestra will tune up.

(orchestra noises)

3 L.O. Melbourne, we are now to have a song by Miss Construed entitled “Alone”.

(Morse code signals begin to interfere with the broadcast.)

MISS CONSTRUED

All alone, all alone, all alone. There is no-one in the world but —

ANNOUNCER

3 L.O. Melbourne, we are now crossing over to the Moonshine Valley Racecourse where the race for the village stakes will be described by Shotgun, the sporting editor of the Church Times.

SHOTGUN

3 L.O. Melbourne, speaking from the Moonshine Valley Racecourse, the horses are at the barrier for the village stakes, Stabim is playing up, he’s thrown his jockey. I think the jockey’s dead. I knew the horse was. The weather is beautifully fine for mid-Summer in Melbourne. A cold sleet is blowing into the stand. This is a very exciting race. And coming up the stakes Jaundice, Grand Nash and Anthrax are racing neck-and-neck. Jaundice’ll win. No, Grand Nash got up just in time. Grand Nash one, Jaundice second and Anthrax third. The judges’ placings are Deformed first, Two-Face second and Airbag third — I knew I wasn’t far out. The winner’s price, judging from its appearance, is about one and eightpence.

ANNOUNCER

3 L.O. Melbourne, we have had numerous complaints about interruption by Morse. We cannot, of course, entirely eliminate this so the studio orchestra will play something that fits in.

(The orchestra plays to the beat of the Morse interference.)

Part 2

Download 3 O.L. Part 2 (A Radio Fan’s Dream)

ANNOUNCER

3 L.O. Melbourne, Billy Funny will have his little chat with the children.

BILLY FUNNY

Hello children, birthday greetings. Willy… Willy, stop it. Number three the beach Fitzroy, so you’re 98 today, then. You’re getting a big boy now. It was naughty of the boy next door to steal your marbles. I’m so sorry, but only one leg of your Melbourne and Caulfield Cup double came up, but if you look under the kitchen table in the bedroom, you will find four legs!

GRUFF VOICE

Shut up.

ANNOUNCER

3 L.O. Melbourne, we are now crossing over to the stadium where the wrestling match between Slapem and Jobel will be described to you.

COMMENTATOR

Go on, bite him, you savage, bite him. The atmosphere here is unusually calm for a wrestling match. Up till now only three referees have been disabled. Slapem has just put the Yale Lock on Jobel, to which Jobel replies by biting off his ear. Go on, kick him in the —

ANNOUNCER

3 L.O. Melbourne, the Woop-Woop Brass Face Band3 will now play.

(orchestra plays badly)

ANNOUNCER

3 O.L. Melbourne we are now crossing over to the Salvation Army, where Commissioner Peace will give us a little talk on brotherly love.

SPORTS FAN 1

I tell you he fouled him, you pimply-faced —

SPORTS FAN 2

You say that again and I’ll knock your block off.

ANNOUNCER

Sorry, that was the stadium. Our great thought for tonight is, “Someday, perchance, mayhap, maybe, one never knows, perhaps” — Ella Wheeler Wilcox4. We are now crossing over to the Commission of Immigration so that you may hear the speeches.

COMMISSIONER

(drunkenly)

Some prefer a White Australia, some prefer a Black Australia5. Personally I like a drop of Black & White6.

(drunken singing)

ANNOUNCER

3 L.O. Melbourne, weather report: it will by dry over the whole of the continent, except at the Commission of Immigration.

What shall we do now?

CO-WORKER

Oh they’ve had enough. After all, they only pay 27/6 a year.

ANNOUNCER

Right-ho. 3 L.O. Melbourne, closing down. Goodnight everybody and go to sleep.

(orchestra plays a fanfare)

ANNOUNCER

— done my last train in again.

Part 3

Download 3 O.L. Part 3 (A Radio Fan’s Dream)

(seaside noises)

GAMBLER 1

Another jackpot.

GAMBLER 2

I can’t open.

GAMBLER 1

No I’ll open for a ??

GAMBLER 2

I’ll come in.

ANNOUNCER

So will I. Look out, we’re on the air! 3 L.O. Melbourne, the time is now Queens or better — er, 2:15. The Woop-Woop Police have asked us to broadcast the following. Will any listener knowing the whereabouts of Hyam Dilley last seen refereeing a football match at Footscray, kindly communicate with his relatives at Kew.

3 L.O. Melbourne, we are now changing back to the stadium for a continuation of the wrestling events.

COMMENTATOR

3 L.O. Melbourne broadcasting from the stadium. This is the fifth round of the wrestling match between Polishimoff the Reckless Russian and Herpantes the Greek Garroter. So far the honours are even. Herpantes has a teeth scissors, face bar, Japanese ear bar, saloon bar and fetlock on the Russian and is slowly forcing Polishimoff’s false teeth down his throat. I haven’t seen anything so uplifting as the Russian’s agony since Aunt Jane caught her nose in the mangle7. He can’t get out of it! He can’t get out of it! He can’t ge— he’s out of it.

(crowd cheers)

Ah, now the Russian’s on top! He’s got a quarter nelson on the Greek, half nelson, full nelson, nelson-and-a-half! I think this is where Nelson lost his eye8. He can’t get out of this. He can’t get out of it! He can’t ge— he’s out of it.

(crowd cheers)

Ah, ah, now Herpantes has got a lovely flying goat and a couple of Boston lobsters. Now he’s got the splits — so have the Russian’s tights. He can’t get out of it! He can’t get out of it! He — he’s out of it.

(crowd cheers)

ANNOUNCER

3 L.O. Melbourne, we are now to have a fashion talk by O.I. Say of Woolwich and Bencock’s.

O.I. SAY

Hello, listeners. Well, I suppose you’re all wondering what the fashions will be for the coming Winter, but I don’t know so I’ll tell you. For breakfast the fashionable miss will wear a robe of Turkish cowling trimmed with eggs and bacon. For lunch an 18-piece costume with lace excursions running round the hip-hip-hooray. For bathing a two-piece costume as before except at Villierstown, where the council insists on a costume of cast iron trimmed with little bows of black crêpe9. Evening dresses will start a little later and finish earlier than heretofore. I learned from Paris that night dresses will be shorter than last year and in order to be thoroughly in keeping with the festive season they will be trimmed with little sprigs of holly.

ANNOUNCER

3 L.O. Melbourne, our great thought for tonight is “Wake up, Australia”.

Part 4

Download 3 O.L. Part 4 (A Radio Fan’s Dream)

ANNOUNCER

3 L.O. Melbourne, we are now changing over to the Spencer Street Bridge so that you may hear the work in progress at that hive of industry, and as we listen in to the sounds of honest labour, every good Australian will thrill with pride.

(hammering noises)

HARRY

What pass(?) did you get, Tim?

TIM

5:4 and the cow ran like a hairy goat. By the way, Harry, when’s this bridge supposed to be finished?

HARRY

1968, they say10.

TIM

Some hope! “Oh it must be for years, and it may be for —”11

(TIM breaks off in laughter.)

Here, what’s that noise going on?

HARRY

Oh, that’s Bill with his hammer. He’s work-mad. He’ll finish up in a giggle factory.

TIM

Oh well tell him to stop.

HARRY

Ay ay ay, stop that hammering, Bill! Have a heart. We can’t hear ourselves speak.

ANNOUNCER

3 L.O. Melbourne, we are now going to rebroadcast an item from 5 S.W. Chelmsford, England.

(Music and narration start up at the same time. The music soon drowns out the man speaking.)

SPEAKER

Now boys and girls, you remember I told you about the dishonest little boy who — and how difficult it was for him to get a job. Well now I’m going to tell you about the honest little boy — and they made him the steward at the — Now wasn’t that nice for him.

ANNOUNCER

3 L.O. Melbourne, the item you have just heard was a song “O Peaceful Night” sung by the Russian prima donna Madam Nora Earsoff, rebroadcast by us from 5 S.W. Chelmsford, England.

GRUFF VOICE

Very clever.

ANNOUNCER

3 L.O. Melbourne, Culinary Counsel. How to make a hash of a steak. Take two pounds of steak. If the butcher sees you take it, put it back. Take two eggs. If fresh, beat them. If not fresh, give them a jolly good hiding. Mix together one cupful of flour, pint of vinegar, the juice of a nutmeg, two pints of rum, salt, pepper, boot polish and anything else that happens to be lying about. Add water and stew for six hours. If the dog won’t eat it and the cat doesn’t want it, give it to your husband — that’s what husbands are for.

3 L.O. Melbourne, we are now crossing over to the All Trembling Hall so that you may hear the Impunity Singing.

(Piano music starts playing.)

SINGER

Now then, all together. Hello, people, everybody happy?

PEOPLE

You bet!

SINGER

That’s the idea. Had your ??, feeling bright and snappy?

PEOPLE

You bet!

SINGER

That’s the idea. Love from morning till you go to bed, love while you hang your ?? head. Hello, people, everybody happy?

PEOPLE

You bet!

SINGER

That’s the idea. Well, cheery-ho, everybody.

PEOPLE

Cheery-ho.

Notes

  1. 3 L.O. Melbourne was and still is a real radio station. I don’t know why the record is called “3 O.L.” or why Hazell occasionally interposes the letters. [↩]
  2. “Give you the chimes” means to play the sequence of chimes that tells you the time. [↩]
  3. In Aussie parlance, “Woop-Woop” is an imaginary town in the middle of nowhere. It’s roughly the equivalent of American “the boonies”. [↩]
  4. Ella Wheeler Wilcox was an American poet. I can only assume that this string of abstractions is mocking her writing style. [↩]
  5. This is a very politically charged joke. From the very year Australia became a federation they began to restrict immigration on the basis of race. They had, of course, been abusing their own Aborigines since long before that. The term “White Australia” was used to describe these racist anti-immigration policies. My own favorite for its sheer evil ingenuity was the dictation test. If the Australians didn’t like the look of an immigrant they could give him a dictation test upon arrival. This might not have been such a terrible idea if the test had been in English. Actually the immigration officials could administer the test in any European language they liked. So if you were Chinese and they really didn’t want you in the country they could give you the test in, say, Scottish Gaelic. Dastardly, no? [↩]
  6. Black & White is a brand of Scotch whisky [↩]
  7. A mangle is an old-fashioned, hand-cranked washing machine consisting of two rollers you squeeze clothes between. [↩]
  8. A full nelson (etc.) is of course a wrestling hold. Lord Nelson, on the other hand, was a British admiral who was killed during the Napoleonic Wars. He is famous for having lost an eye and an arm in combat before going on to lose his life. [↩]
  9. Australia used to have professional “beach inspectors” whose job it was to make sure everyone at the beach was decently dressed. He measured to make sure everyone’s costumes were a decent length and not too much skin was showing. By contrast, an article from 1938 reveals that beach inspectors in Sweden had to ward off “unsightly specimens of humanity”! [↩]
  10. The bridge was, in fact, completed in 1930, though it had been in planning for decades and was proposed as early as the 1860s. A competition to design the bridge in 1890 resulted in a fistful of designs that were structurally flawed and prevented the judges declaring a winner, although they did pick one bridge that would fall down that they liked better than the other bridges that would fall down. [↩]
  11. The full saying is “It must be for years and it may be forever.” [↩]

Bibliography

  • Hazell, Rupert. 3 O.L. — Parts 1 & 2. Columbia 0539, 1927. 78.
  • Hazell, Rupert. 3 O.L. — Parts 3 & 4. Columbia 01274, 1928. 78.
Posted in History, Humor | Leave a comment

Santa Claus vs. the Birthday Man

The Birthday Man was simply a fact of life I grew up with. My mother always told me about the big ledger where he writes down the birthdays of all the little boys and girls in the world. Then, every night, he flies on the back of an elephant delivering birthday presents before anyone is even awake. Of course when I was six or seven I figured out the Birthday Man was really my father wearing a cardboard fez, but the magic has never entirely gone away. So you can understand how shocked I was when I handed my friend a birthday present wrapped in Birthday Man wrapping paper, only for him to exclaim, “But it’s got Santa Claus on it!” I was, for a moment, speechless. Santa Claus indeed! My friend had the effrontery to suggest that I had wrapped his birthday present in Christmas paper. It took a few seconds, but I realized I had finally come face-to-face with a proponent of the so-called “Santa Claus”.

The Santa Claus myth and the Birthday Man myth have their origins in the same historical figure — Hannibal. Hannibal is famous today for his march across the Alps and invasion of Italy, with elephants. In contemporary Roman depictions Hannibal is clearly shown with long, aggressive nasal hair that was the style for Carthaginian generals of the time. It was said that the sight of untrimmed nasal hair at a distance of two or three miles was enough to strike fear into the heart of the toughest Roman soldier. Hannibal is also shown wearing lurid red battle armor, an artistic embellishment designed to portray a man steeped in the blood of the Roman people. These key features — the nose hair and the red armor — are the origin of the modern Birthday Man’s luxuriant white nose hair and red fez. Even more iconic, however, were the elephants on which Hannibal crossed the Alps. These elephants worked their way into the modern tradition as the animals on which the Birthday Man flies around the world in a single night. The flying elephant bears a number of uncanny parallels with the 1941 film Dumbo, leading many historians to suspect that Walt Disney was a closet believer in the Birthday Man at a time when Birthday Man followers were suffering terrible persecution.

The same cues that inspired the Birthday Man also evolved into the myth of Santa Claus. In the case of Santa Claus, however, we shall see that the myth has become significantly bowdlerized. The warrior’s nose hair, so threatening and deadly in Roman times, became Santa’s jolly white beard. The blood-soaked battle armor evolved somehow into a set of pajamas so oversized they could only be worn by a morbidly obese man of advanced years. This “Father Christmas”, if you will, is supposed to live at the North Pole (ridiculous!) and fly around the world on a sleigh pulled by reindeer, an animal which no-one has ever actually seen and which is currently thought to have been invented by drunk and unsuccessful game-hunters. We know for a fact that Santa supporters had to reinvent the elephants into reindeer in the 14th century when Pope Innocent VI, embroiled in the theological debate over whether elephants can become priests, stated unequivocally than elephants don’t have souls.

The supporters of each myth have a sorry history of hatred, conflict and blood-letting. Henry VIII famously rejected the Birthday Man and turned instead to Santa Claus, while Mary I reversed his decision and burned Santa supporters at the stake. These events were couched in the political dialogue of the time, but their visceral dispute over Santa Claus vs. the Birthday Man is self-evident. The debate continued to rage as recently as the Iraq War, no mere war for oil, but actually a desperate bid to reclaim Hannibal’s final resting place and determine once and for all what he wore — was it a fez or was it pajamas?

Too much blood has been spilled over these petty details. After our misunderstanding my friend and I were able to take pleasure from each other’s cultural differences. I look forward to that day, maybe in the near future, when a man who believes in Santa Claus and a woman who believes in the Birthday Man can, in happiness and harmony, be married by an elephant priest.

Bibliography

  • “Amnesty For Santa Heretics?”. Tomorrow’s Times 25 October 1941: 7. Web.
  • Clodhopper & Grosset. “Depictions of Fezes in the Early Roman Republic”. The American Journal of Antique and Antiquarian Headgear 11.7 (1925): 344. Print.
  • Gloom, Prometheus E. Pardon My Nasal Hair London: Hutchinson & Co., 1898. Print.
  • “Race Riots Mar Birthday Bash — Hundreds of Fezes Destroyed”. The Sydney Morning Herald 10 February 1953: 16. Print.
Posted in Humor, Pseudo-history | Leave a comment