How (un)Insulting

Poised over the keyboard with more random thoughts to commit to paper then I have the structure to hang them together or the wit to wind them together in a shape that I could pass off to the unsuspecting reader as worthy of their most precarious commodity it’s perhaps time to make another post.

A thought that I found interesting, and really what other criteria can I have for mention here, is that friendships for me have an interesting pattern. I find, and perhaps this is more common then I believed (or that Simon was simply being nice, which I don’t rule out entirely), that the more free flowing the friendship, the more open it is, the greater the reciprocal trade in insults.

I don’t mean serious ripping meat of the bone insults, words designed to hurt and to leap deep scars, because who knows better where to aim then those who are privy to the targets weaknesses, but a more casual form of what I guess is really called banter: casual name calling, making dumb jokes at their expense, poking fun at their idiosyncrasies and laughing at their foibles. All secure in the knowledge that actually its okay, that there’s no bite here, no meaning behind sharp words, its all a bit of meaningful if harmless fun. We do it because we know that the other won't take offence, and in a way we create a bond, our own set of in jokes and rituals that can bind a friendship through giving it its own esoteric rites.

Of course this is not a universal, there are those that we dare not mock, that we cannot take the risk of saying the wrong thing because either the relationship is not secure enough or you get the impression that the person is too fragile or too serious to take the brunt of even the glib and unmeaning tongue. Or that your friendship is found on such a serious plateau that somewhere somehow there was no room made for comedy. So perhaps its not all definitive as that, but there is certainly a class of people that I find are in the insulted class, and they’re the best people out there: the most fun, the lighthearted, the quick witted and the happy.

Isn’t it interesting, almost rather perverse, that the closer we get to people, and the better we get to know them, that the amount of mockery and insults increase rather then decrease? And that it seems symptomatic of a healthy relationship is a juxtaposition that I truly love.