Welcome to Stiff Upper Quip

Strap in - it's about to get witty

Welcome to Stiff Upper Quip, the new politics and comedy newsletter from James Harris, a 38-year old man living on the contested borderlands of Kingston and Merton Councils.

I’ll be aiming to send you one email a week on Thursday mornings at 9AM. Why 9AM? It’s early enough to look productive, but not quite early enough for eager. It is the time of the morning known as ‘moderately-enthusiastic beaver’. For the time being all posts are going to be frei, the German for ‘at liberty’. Eventually I’d like to build up a paying subscriber base, but I want lots of things, from mandolin lessons to being truly loved for who I truly am. At the moment any contributions are welcome towards the large onyx quill in which I’ve invested in order to better help me fashion these sparkling posts. To quote Oscar Wilde, ‘Genius writes with a fancy pen.’

What am I going to be writing about? Politics, obviously, and culture, and particularly the place where politics and culture meet. And I’ll try to be funny. But funny is hard. Very, very hard. These days you say ‘My dog’s got no nose’ and the audience calls an animal welfare charity. That’s why most comedians these days have abandoned the joke format and have transitioned instead to delivering bog-standard political insights in a cadence which goes up slightly at the end. That most modern British satire is about as funny as a back number of Pravda is besides the point; the people delivering it are successful, and as such it might jeopardize my career if I criticize them. I hope you understand that my personal ambitions leave me inevitably compromised as to the acuteness of the satire I can offer. The only thing I can promise you is that after reading this email you will have more of your life remaining ahead of you than after watching an episode of ‘The Mash Report’, and more desire to live it too.

I’m a firm believer in taking oblique angles on things, which is a polite way of saying that some of these letters are going to be really weird, the kind of stuff no decent, God-fearing editor would touch, at risk of losing his livelihood or any residual social respect attached to his, her or their gradually expiring profession. This will allow me to write about contentious issues in a humorous manner without fear of what the late middle-aged call ‘cancellation’. I am though assured that you can’t get cancelled if no-one knows who you are in the first place.

I normally have about one opinion a year and rest assured you’ll hear it here first. I am currently close, for example, to forming an opinion about the UK’s military presence in Afghanistan. I’d also like to discuss here some of what are known locally as my ‘unsolicited theories’, such as my effort to get the Ministry of Defence to decarbonize the army by putting all soldiers on eBikes. At the moment they’re not returning my calls, and neither have I heard back from Portsmouth if they’ve received my proposal for converting the entire navy to a pedalo fleet. If this continues I shall have to go down in person again. I have packed my best plastic bags full of newspapers in case.

I should also say straightaway that only about 40% of the jokes will be funny, so make sure to only read those.

Anyhow, my bath has finished running - I should never have bought it those shoes! This is a joke. I mean, all of this is. Why are we even here? We will get to the holistic satire on the vanity of human wishes next week, but for now enjoy the final frolics of summer sunshine and, as the kids just love to say, memento mori.