Feb 22 2008
A brain marked ‘F’
Last week Charlotte and I had a really romantic Valentine’s night out; three pints in the Time Bar and then off to the Y Theatre to see Stewart Lee do some stand-up (his tour coinciding with the Leicester Comedy Festival). But it wasn’t sex that filled the air in the theatre, it was brains. This was the first time since my ill-advised attendance at a Logarithms Society meeting at University that I had been in a room full of people who cared nothing for their appearance but were out solely to have their minds stimulated. I waited at the bar and listened to post-graduate students with terrible hair talk about their research projects; I queued for the toilet and watched middle-aged civil servants with really, really terrible hair and tweed jackets that I thought only existed in BBC costume cupboards discuss art and literature; I walked to and from my seat and actually felt quite good-looking in comparison to most of the crowd in there. This is all relative, of course, and I am certainly not claiming to be any Brad Pitt (even though his jaw does seem to be getting wider and wider every time I see him and is now far broader than his forehead), but the whole evening left me feeling quite happy (the comedy was very funny too, by the way).
Stewart Lee is apparently this sort of comedian. He is known for his ‘defiantly cerebral punchlines’ and I read a review of a previous performance where he had categorised sections of the audience from ‘A’ to ‘F’ according to which of his jokes they laughed at. Anyway, having been part of such a clever crowd I went about my business with a feeling of some self-satisfaction for the next few days - that is until Facebook brought me back down to Earth. The particular application that did such damage to my ego offers to calculate the size of your brain; you just take a few tests, answer a few questions and are told, in my case anyway, that you have a brain the size of a Neanderthal. This is not something to be too ashamed of, apparently, because Neanderthals had to do some pretty serious evolving to get to that point. So that’s all right then. Erm, no, it’s not. A few more goes on the tests and my brain size has actually decreased to that of a monkey. There aren’t too many more species that I can regress through before I am a tapeworm, so I think I should leave it there. Should I? Oh no. Two hours later and I have managed to get my brain size back up to that of an average Joe. But that’s not who I was when I was watching Stewart Lee! When I was watching Stewart Lee I was someone special, both unusually intelligent and physically attractive in comparison to my peers! What could have gone so horribly wrong? I had to go and walk the dog (brain size that of a dog) to get the whole depressing affair out of my (average) head.
I am now more or less over the experience and have decided not to think about it any more. It’s only a game on a website, after all. And the fact that Charlotte consistently scores highly enough to have a brain the size of either a scientist or an alien super-being (she’s ‘out of this world’, don’t you know) is neither here nor there.