Coronavirus panic is at risk of dulling our sense of humour – even mine

Getting the wrong end of the stick seems to be an occupational hazard at the moment. We can laugh quite easily at small things, but the smallest things are pushing us over the edge too, writes Jenny Eclair

Hair-raising: a misinterpreted tweet got me in trouble (Getty/iStock)

Apparently, the loss of smell and taste is among the symptoms for Covid-19. The loss of a sense of humour, however, isn’t on the list, which is just as well considering that I’ve had a couple of crashing comedic failures this week.

One included getting narky when I was told via social media that my name had been mentioned on Gogglebox, the TV programme featuring real-life people watching and talking about TV programmes.

On Friday night’s show, Giles and Mary, the nice, middle-class, corduroy-trouser and coloured-tights couple, were settling down to watch something featuring Su Pollard. “Oh she does the Vagisil advert”, said Mary. “No that’s Jenny Eclair”, responded Giles.

Ok, there was nothing bitchy about the exchange, but my skin was thin and I’d had a glass of wine. I felt affronted; for starters, the vaginal dryness cream I advertised is called Vagisan, not Vagisil. My jaw clenched and because I was having a sense of humour failure, I was disproportionately annoyed that after years of slogging our guts out doing quite different types of comedy, Su and I are still constantly mistaken for each other and that many people find this confusion hilarious. Oh hahaha... yawn, it’s been happening for 40 years.

So, here are the differences: Su is 10 years older, she can sing and has better legs. I, on the other hand, cannot sing, have appalling legs and write books as well as doing stand-up. Do you see? In typical sense of humour failure fashion, I felt irrationally “got at”. It also upsettingly brought back all the social media grief I got when that advert came out and how I had to keep defending my decision to do it.

Well, may I say how very grateful I am that I did? Because let’s face it, that money is going to come in very handy now that just about everything else has dried up.

Mood swings have become part of this bizarre situation we find ourselves in. I’m much luckier than so many people, but even so, on a daily basis I go from being gung-ho and good-natured to paranoid and a bit mad, taking in frustrated, tired, bored, angry and emotional along the way.

Structure keeps the panic at bay, so in order to instil a weekly routine, my friend Judith Holder and I are keeping our Older and Wider podcast going. It has a small but very loyal brigade of followers of all genders, ages, shapes and sizes and Judith and I value our “gang” hugely.

Since lockdown, we’ve made several attempts to record the show via Zoom, but the sound quality has been appalling, so at the moment, we deliver the podcast via voice memos on our mobile phones. It’s all quite painstaking but we have “Young Daisy”, who produces us remotely and we’ve been managing to make each other and hopefully the listeners laugh from a distance for three weeks now.

Recent topics of conversation on Older and Wider have revolved around personal grooming in these tricky times, with me admitting to Judith that I’d sent off for a professional hairdressers’ kit complete with a plastic cape that I was going to entrust to my partner Geof.

For a couple of weeks on the podcast, I pretended not to be able to get an appointment at Geof’s exclusive Camberwell salon (in reality he kept fobbing me off) but finally I got a slot just in time for the weekend. “Just a cut”, he told me, he was too busy to bleach (too scared, more like).

So my husband cut my hair in the kitchen, it wasn’t a disaster, but considering I had to make my own coffee, I didn’t tip.

I put a photograph of my fallen locks on twitter, accompanied by a tweet saying how I’d “managed to get a cancellation at Geof’s salon in SE5 and would be returning for my bleach next week”.

Well, you can imagine the reaction can’t you? Because it’s not just me that’s experiencing a sense of humour failure this week, instantly my timeline was full of people accusing me of reckless antisocial behaviour; how was visiting the hairdresser in line with social distancing? I was an idiot, etc.

Of course, plenty of followers – and in particular the Older and Wider crew – knew what I was talking about, but for those who’d misinterpreted the tweet, I had to issue a very swift clarification before the chaps with burning pitchforks arrived on the doorstep.

Getting hold of the wrong end of the stick seems to be an occupational hazard at the moment. We are all having days when we can laugh quite easily at small silly things (Matt Lucas’s baked potato song, the goats in Llandudno) but equally, we are all having days when the slightest thing can push us over the edge.

This is certainly the case with me, I laugh, I cry, I laugh again, hmmm, makes me wonder how Su Pollard is coping?