It is a tragic fact of life that when you get past a certain age, nobody asks you about your favourite dinosaur anymore.
Would You Rather?
Chances are that you’re likely to have to choose between two different sets of curtains, or decide between granary bread and brown bread on your sandwich, or what filling you want in said sandwich. Prosaic stuff, and way less fun.
So what is the point?
Let’s face it, the world is not as much crashing down around us as deflating like the last balloon at a long-ago Wedding reception. Where there’d been three fist fights between drunken uncles, two accusations of inappropriate dancing, a bridesmaid crying because it’s not her turn; a wedding reception where the bride’s definitely up the duff if you look, and look, she’s not drinking so there’s something definitely going on, and the groom looks sick as a dog. And where the happy couple have already got divorced, and due to an electrical fault the post-scran DJ’s decks caught on fire and someone had to throw the wedding cake onto them to put them out.
We need to breathe sweet air back into that balloon. We need it to inflate, to dance around on zephyrs of hope and silliness and fun, and we need it to make us smile.
Benjamin Franklin summed it up when he said: “Trouble knocked at the door, but, hearing laughter, hurried away.” Happiness, and silliness, are the safety valve that humans possess even in these brutal days. Another quote: “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” That’s from Danish comedian Victor Borge, and that connection is more important now than ever.
And that is why Would You Rather exists. It’s a collection of questions that you might not have been asked for years, and certainly a fair amount of questions you may not have been asked ever. It’s a game, if you want it to be, and it’s an ice-breaker round a table at a tense wedding or a knife-edge family Christmas, and it’s a book that seeks to bring some fun back into a world where it is sometimes in short supply.
Cause when someone asks you if you prefer cheese or avocado in your sarnie, they never ask you why you like it that way. That’s why you don’t go to many comedy shows in sandwich shops. There’s no follow-up, no context, no invitation to expound further on your love for long-off milk or stony middle-class fruit.
Hypothetical questions such as would you rather be a T-Rex or a Diplodocus? put that secondary question back into the equation. Because the most fun in life is asking why you’d rather be a Trump-armed rapacious predator with sharp teeth, and a jaw bigger than a Fiat Punto, or why you’d rather be the dinosaur that hands down did the biggest ever poos in the history of this fabulous, flawed earth of ours.
Would You Rather contains over 200 of these open questions, and the best part about it is that there are no wrong answers, but only funnier, more ingenious, or more lovely ones.
Joe Shooman’s favourite dinosaur is Stegosaurus. Joe Shooman is the author of Would You Rather? (John Blake Publishing) out now
RELATED: Chrsitmas Crackers: Why we all need a quiz this Christmas by John White
