Tom Jones wants a go on a space station
including a world-changingly ambitious comedy idea and a strikingly good joke about a Scottish monarch
Hello. It is July 2024. This is the nineteenth monthly instalment of Interesting Skull, a newsletter of thwarted dreams and tarnished gold written by me, semi-conscious wash-needer Mike Rampton. I hope you are well-fed and healthy.
IMPORTANT THING: My book There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question is out on October 10th from Nosy Crow and the University of Cambridge. Amazon! Bookshop.org! Waterstones! (Amazon is, sadly, cheapest.) Please tell anyone who might like it, or who runs some sort of “buying nine hundred copies of a book for some reason” company, or who edits the kind of publication that either persuades people to buy books or might commission me to write some sort of related thing I can litter with plugs. Thanks!
1
“My friend likes sitting in his car with the engine running thinking about film stars.”
“Idols?”
“That’s what he does, yeah, while thinking about film stars.”
2
“I recently watched some beetles mating. They were very engaged in the process.”
“Insects?”
“That’s the process they were engaged in, yes.”
3
“I used to work for a famous horror director, sculpting toilets out of wood.”
“John Carpenter?”
“Yes, that was the job I did... for Mr Wes Craven.”
June vanished in the blink of an eye. Went camping. Watched some football. Had a DBS check. All the things people do for fun! There was an event to launch the range that my book is part of, which took place beneath a giant whale skeleton (or, if I really think about it, a regular-sized whale skeleton — they’re just quite large objects!) and which I spent misusing publishing terms at publishing professionals and offering up truly unhelpful promo suggestions. (Strapping a GoPro to my head and riding my bicycle from one cathedral to another is very, very far removed from the concept of the book.) But my daughter got to hear an important-looking person say my name, and my book was immortalised in biscuit form:
Camping was great. I am really good at camping. I immediately start the smokiest fire in the world, sit almost within it choking and weeping and making myself smell like a roast for several weeks. Then I drink two hundred beers while playing with a Frisbee and getting borderline fatal hat-head. Finally I fall out of a large tree into a small tree. If you’re doing these things, you have to do them right.
Sometimes I have ideas for projects that aren’t really anything other than colossal exercises in arrogance. I once wanted to try to get thousands of people to draw pictures of me, for instance, and got several emails into a project I was convinced made sense where I would be photographed holding award statuettes and vomiting. Like, I’d go to the house of a BAFTA winner and stuff, and include a bit about who they were. So mainly it would be pictures of me throwing up holding different awards. I saw it as a coffee table book. That would not be a good coffee table book!
Recently I thought it would be fun to collate all the interview features from UK papers and magazines that use the same questions every time (the Guardian has the Q&A, the Honest Playlist, the one about people’s perfect Sundays and the comedy one, while Empire used to have a good one called Pint Of Milk, and one Gregg Wallace did about being a maniac recently went viral, there are loads) and just cut out the middleperson and obnoxiously, arrogantly produce a catalogue of press about myself. That’s always seemed like part of the point of them — you read Plastic Bertrand’s answer while mentally supplying your own, or compare your breakfast to the one described by Remington Steele star Stephanie Zimbalist (I think I need to update my cultural references).
Then, with the layouts flawlessly aped and myself also credited as the author, I… do… something… with it? An art exhibit or something. Or, when I die, I have the Gunther Von Hagens treatment done to my brain, plastination, then have an insane, absurd, 500-page book made where one page is a slice of actual brain and the next is a pithy self-administered interview about the things that really make me laugh, then more brain, then my favourite fell-walking spots. Then it’ll be sold at an enormous price like that one Wu-Tang Clan record, an unreadable collection of beyond-the-grave self-importance and preserved grey matter, bought by a madman. Fun! Yes? No? Well, alright then!
4
I've been stuck in a conversation about my vomit for ages. I regret bringing it up.
5
“I got my ears pierced in West London.”
“Turnham Green?”
“Yes, I don't think the piercer used real gold.”
6
“I went spearing with an American hard rock group best known for a 1991 ballad and a jam band famed for every show being different. Guess what happened.”
“Mr Big? Phish?”
“I missed lots, of all sizes! That’s what happened, when I went spearing with Extreme and Dave Matthews Band.”
One day I will do the best thing in the world, which will be this: a spreadsheet, 100 cells wide and 100 cells tall, with the same list of 100 subjects on each axis. There will then be 9,900 absolutely brilliant punchlines, each to the joke “What’s the difference between [X] and [Y]?”, all involving a spoonerism and trailing off halfway through.
Two examples of this kind of joke, written by me and excellent, are:
What’s the difference between James I and Prince Albert? James I is a kingly jock…
What's the difference between a piece of self-assembly office equipment and my bottom? One has files and parts...
It’s a good format. So then, also in it would be, for instance, “What’s the difference between James I and a piece of self-assembly office equipment?” and “What’s the difference between Prince Albert and my bottom?” and you’d (I’d) have to (absolutely not have to) come up with a punchline for people to enjoy (not enjoy). And 9,896 more.
(It’s 9,900 rather than 10,000 because there’ll be a snazzy-looking diagonal line of blacked-out cells going through it because you can’t have [X] equal [Y]. I feel like I’m describing it in an over-complicated way, perhaps!)
There’s a chance, a really tiny chance, that this might be a thing that AI could be used for. It wouldn’t be quick or easy, even for big fancy computers, and it would still need to be filtered through the greatest joke-writing machine in the world: that’s my name, don’t wear it out! So if you are an eccentric Silicon Valley billionaire trying to use technology to bring the world laughter, consider presenting me (MIKE RAMPTON) with a lot of money and a fancy chair. This is the project that could complete comedy.
7
“We need a name for this cow.”
“Annabell?”
“No, just a name.”
8
“One of the Fellowship of the Ring wants a lend of a space station.”
“Boromir?”
“No, the ISS is the one Legolas wants a go on.”
9
“I buy saucy lingerie all year round. I buy it in winters, in springs, in autumns…”
“And summers?”
“No, Agent Provocateur.”
June in numbers: Spent two nights in a tent. Bought one porcelain dog from the dump. Heard four jokes from this newsletter disappoint comedy legend Milton Jones on Time Out’s Love Thy Neighbourhood podcast (wasn’t expecting it, was casually listening to a months-old podcast while making a sandwich, heard my own jokes, felt extremely disoriented). Voted one government out (TBC at time of writing, but come on). Fell out of 1.5 trees. Managed zero jokes with the punchline “spheremongering”. If you tell an entomologist his fly is down, does he check his zip or prescribe his pet a tiny antidepressant? A clue that the doctor thinks you have a low sperm count is if they ask for a seman sample. That Tom Jones song should really be called “It's Usual”.
Some work I did: I keep forgetting to link to work I’ve done. Here’s a fun piece I wrote for the i paper about summer being rubbish — I got some really nice emails about it from strangers. Here another one I wrote for them, about Father’s Day, for which I got some less-nice feedback from strangers (I am, apparently, a “disgrace to my gender,” which was news to me). Here’s a fun thing for Thrillist about rubbish airline earbuds, and another about Anguilla and AI (which includes, I think, the only head of government I’ve ever spoken to).
Project updates: They’re all behind, everything’s behind, it’s all gone wrong, woe is me. I am woe. Do depressed surfers say “Whoa! is me!”? Probably not. The best font for a coming-of-age tale is, of course, Times New Bildungsroman. Please buy a million copies of my book so that the deadlines I’m actively missing have less of an impact on my career, please, thanks, love you, bye.
I’m so sleepy! If you want to PayPal me £5.30 for a big pint, I’ll drink it. Or, just tell me I’m good!
Next issue: August 2nd. I’ll be on holiday in a different country, but the same state (“flustered”)! HAVE A LOVELY MONTH
10
WHAT I AM CURRENTLY READING
Complete This Phrase: This Message Blank Blank Destruct In Five Seconds by Will Self
Another Successful Morning As A Sheep-Shearer by Shauna Lamb
I Am Hot by Ray D. Ator
Don’t Use This Toilet by Lewis Broken
Have You Been Playing Charades? by Jemima Book
