With martial arts training, it’s mre about the form, the spirit and the attitude of the student than it is about the actual specific movement or skill that’s trained. So a physical description of the basic techniques provides technical rather than spiritual insight – at least when it’s read rather than physically studied. On the other hand, the illustrations in this book demonstrating how to deal with an attacker armed with a gun, knife or rifle, are extremely spiritual. And by spiritual I mean funny.

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It is a very common notion that the study of humour is a dry and boring thing to attempt. While that is true, it is not necessarily a bad thing. We wouldn’t expect hydrodynamics to be wet, or neuroscience to be clever, so why should humour theory have to be funny, or even just entertaining? It should, however, have substance, and here most attempts are lacking, this book being no exception. It is little more than a collection of quotes and tidbits from humour theorists over the centuries, with a lot of the name dropping which is so oddly popular in the humanities. “This is what X means, when he says Y” seems to take on the force and role of a stringent logical argument, and rather than being a mepotistic anecdote, it’s supposed to illustrate something deep. But I digress.

The main theses the reader is left with in the end are that the highest moral value o slaughter is achieved when it’s reflective; when we laugh at ourselves, and that humour is the uniquely human ability to counter the absurdity of physical existence with a psychological distancing movement, and a mocking finger pointed at the physical from afar. Which, of course, is just reactionary balderdash.

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Partly insubstantial ramblings, partly interesting Martial Arts stories, this was a nice and entertaining read. Slightly annyoing that he mixes fact and fiction in his anecdotes, without making clear, which is which. But judging from his website, he’s just too great to care.

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I should have known. While I enjoyed the charming simplicity of the plotlines in the Narnia series, and appreciated them as the children’s books they were intended to be, none of their story elements packs the mythological punch of Tolkien’s writing, and the Christian parable feels tired once you’ve spotted it. Which is hard not to.

To start with the positive, the movie is nicely done, devoid of cringe-inducing lines or badly done characters, wich is saying something for Disney. But it is also quite boring, and at least a half hour too long. To strip a story about an oppressive regime, war and an epic battle for the survival of a whole world of all the nastyness these things should involve, and leave it with decoratively frozen puppets and the frosty looks of Tilda Swinton, is to deny the book its impact. Sure, you shouldn’t frighten your underage audience into little whimpering heaps, but surely some sense of the consequence of evil would have been appropriate.

Plus, not surprisingly, seeing the crude metaphor for the New Testament, Aslan’s sacrifice for the reinforcing of the “old magic”, rather than reading about it, makes it’s crude and unsubtle symbolism so painfully apparent, that I change my initial statement above – there is a cringy moment there, but it’s all Lewis’ fault.

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