It’s tough living in a reality where, if you make a joke about something, you become that thing.
In a recent tweet I made a joke about the process in which plants use light energy to convert water and carbon dioxide into oxygen, and now I have literally been transformed into 142-year-old conifer tree. Which, if you think about it, is really one of the worst trees to be. Instead of soft, flappy leaves, my body is covered in prickly needles that would probably give me a rash if it weren’t for the fact that my skin is now made of hardened, coarse bark.
The joke wasn’t particularly funny, but it was a joke all the same. After Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn was sacked by Disney for making paedophilia jokes 10 years ago, I described the Nazi-founded children’s entertainment company as a plant life-like organism that sucks in young people and morons and converts them into mediocrity perpetuators who, ironically, waste oxygen.
Shortly after losing 327 followers, branches began to sprout from my fingers and my feet became rooted to the ground. My testicles slowly started to resemble pine cones and a thrush wasted no time in building a nest in the crevice where my ear used to be.
How was I to know that by combining certain words to generate ironic meaning that my biology would be irreversibly altered? If I had, I would have made a joke about people with low hairlines and perfectly healthy bowels.
So I have to confess that I sympathise with James Gunn who, having made his pedophilia jokes 10 years ago, is now condemned to spend the rest of his days as an actual, disgusting paedophile. Although, I couldn’t care less about Guardians of the Galaxy, what with it being a cross between an 80s edition of Top of the Pops and a comic book shop owner’s wanking fantasies. And I find the depiction of the tree character deeply offensive.