On the wonders of found humour and fish goujons

I am a great enthusiast for found humour. You know – stuff in everyday life that’s a complete crack-up.

The highlight the other week, for me, was a menu featuring ‘Goujons of Fish’, which had all sorts of possibilities. ‘Goujon’. A cool word, and so bursting with potential for scurrilous-sounding meanings. Say it slowly. ‘Goujon.’ I mean, it might be a pretentious way of describing a deep-fried slice of fish, but to me it sounded more like yet another euphemism for the same body parts they use in deep-fried ‘Mountain Oysters’ at the Hokitika Wild Food Festival, only of the piscine variety.

Another fertile source of found humour is the comment streams in Facebook groups. I’ve spotted a few goodies on the back of my own interactions. One was when a fellow writing as group admin (using the name of his group, not his own) started quoting the Book of Matthew at me on the basis that I should know it because my name’s Matthew. What would the guy have said if my name was, say, Donald or Thomas?

I spotted another a few weeks back – a discussion about feature articles I was writing in a field I’ve specialised in, professionally, for over 30 years. One guy was running a narrative – by his own admission, based only on the articles he’d read – to the effect that I was an incompetent amateur hack who always made ‘mistakes’ – not that he defined any – and they were trying to figure out who to ask for more detail about their allegations. That was when I suggested they could ask directly. Here’s the screen shot.

Would that I had goujons of a size that I could make undefined derogatory allegations about somebody of whom I was ignorant, and then deny that anything the target said was valid.  But, of course, this guy was oblivious to what this behaviour made him.

Even funnier, he was backed by a group admin who informed me that the purpose of their discussions was falsifying the work of others, including living people. Spoke volumes really – I mean, it was obvious that all they were doing was gathering up an echo chamber for their in-crowd bully fantasies. All I did was laugh, and so did my friends at the pub the following Friday.

Oh, and if anybody has received a delivery of fish goujons, here’s the recipe: https://www.radionz.co.nz/collections/recipes/deep-fried-fish-goujons

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2018