“Ha ha! I can see his arse!”

Dear Lord, I love British people:

We live in serious times. … [And] this seriousness is being compounded by an intensifying national determination to behave terribly seriously about it. … This aversion to levity certainly infused the [U.K.] election campaign. But there was a funny bit and most of us missed it. When Gordon Brown got in his car and called that woman a bigot, it was hilarious. It was a properly comical human moment, made funnier by the uncomfortable truths it hit upon, in terms of both the former PM’s flawed personality and the jealous xenophobia that lurks behind many discussions of immigration.

But we forgot to laugh, because some of us have come to prefer the sensation of judging: judging Brown for the gaffe, judging the media for its reporting of it, poring po-facedly over the subsequent pantomime of apology. It was the equivalent of his accidentally showing his arse and yet all we could do was carp: “Has he been concealing from the public quite how fat his arse really is?” or: “Why, at this moment of crisis, are our media focusing on arses rather than policies?” No one said: “Ha ha! I can see his arse!”

Teehee.