The Joke

(1)

Go back go back
to your diseased-hut-control room

Don't be don't be
nice about it
just spit it back

Why don't, ward off
why don't you be mature about it
in your grey raincoat

Off ward, ward off
The Joke

Violent food
descends over you, huh
Off ward, ward off The joke
Ward off, off ward The joke

The Joke
five years in a PC camp (2)

Multicoloured sweets 
in bottom of white sweet pack
The realization burns into my back

The Joke
Five years in a PC camp
The Joke

Violent food
descends over you

The Joke

The Joke
Five years in a PC camp

The Joke
Five years in a PC camp
The Joke

Five years in a PC camp

1. This may be a vague screed against political correctness, but maybe there's more to it. In any case MES, as usual, has the virtue of not making sense just when you think things are getting too banal.

Junkman:

"MES had this to say:

'People are very afraid to say things in England at the moment if they're not PC. It's getting very American. It's being pushed on us, I think, through the media. Y'know, food and everything has to be green related and all that. It's quite funny seeing British people adapt to that sort of thing as we've always had really shitty diets. We eat worse than the Australians and New Zealanders' (Rip It Up Issue 215, Jul '95)."

Reformation has the following to say:

The title is possibly taken from Milan Kundera's book of the same name, published in 1967. The Wikipedia entry for this book says: The novel was referenced in The Fall's song "The Joke" on the album Cerebral Caustic. The song's refrain is, 'The Joke! Five years in a PC camp - The Joke!', linking humorless Eastern Bloc authoritarianism to political correctness." This may or may not be accurate.

^

2. In Kundera's The Joke, Ludvik Jahn finds himself in trouble after writing a joking postcard to a girlfriend in the 1950s. I haven't read the book, but according to Wikipedia:

Since Ludvik believes she is too serious, he writes on the postcard, "Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!" His colleagues and fellow young-party leaders did not see the humor in the sentiment expressed in the postcard. Ludvik finds himself expelled from the party and college and drafted to a part of the Czech military where alleged subversives form work brigades and spend the next few years working in mines.

^

The Joke: Fall Tracks A-Z

The Story of the Fall: 1995