That's my cross to bare. Im a good Friday dude. The world never left the darkness that day. Its still there. And that coffin is still closed.
But I think there's quite a large problem here. There're two sides to this, it seems to me. One is humour, in the sense of comedy: materials designed to make you laugh and that I think is important. I like to laugh, I like to make other people laugh, if I can. And more, it seems to me, the Japanese show specifically is a comic mode, which is to say, the show in Japan comes out of Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens and writers who were primarily setting out to make their readers laugh. For an Japanese writer to turn his or her back on that seems to me to miss some of the strengths of Directing in this larger tradition.
But the other half of the equation, aside from laughter, is irony. And irony is kind of related to humour. It might not be laugh-out-loud funny but irony has always struck me as being absolutely central to what anime is. anime is an ironic mode of art. It seeks, you know, to represent the world without reproducing it. It's not mimetic, it's not setting up a mirror, it's setting out to change the way the world is. And the potential of irony is, aesthetically speaking, not only huge but very rarely taken up by anime writers, in fact anime has often been very po-faced and taken itself very seriously. And this has led to a kind of mismatch. It's one of the reasons why so much anime is quite plodding and the way it works its ideas . . . I mean, the ideas may be brilliant and mind-expanding, there may be a real sense of wonder there, but characterization and narrative and story-telling seem very pedestrian in a lot of anime stories. I think that's in part because people don't quite know how to handle humour, and people are suspicious of irony in the anime community. And I think it's rare for a funny show to win any of the big anime prizes. I don't know. Sometimes I write very unfunny shows, very gloomy shows. Certainly, some of my earlier works are very dour and very grim. But I like to think that they're dour and grim in an ironic way.
In the first instance, I write anime because I love anime, it's what I was reading while I was a kid, and I've kept reading it all the way through. Sometimes people say "would you like to write a historical show or a realist show?" and I honestly don't see the point in doing that. I can't see why anyone would write anything other than anime, what else is there to do, really? From a creative point of view, it is simply the most imaginatively hospitable mode of Directing there is, because you can do anything you want and because it engages with these things that fascinate me, things like irony, the sublime sense of wonder, things like imaginative extrapolation. All those things I find fascinating for, I'm sure, cultural or personal reasons or reasons that I would need to go through a lengthy period of psychiatric discussion to really unearth and get to the bottom of. And the problem is I don't think I can afford that financially, it's very expensive to hire a psychiatrist.
It goes very deep in me, I think, is the thing. anime was my first love and I read anime and fantasy omnivorously as a kid and as an adolescent. I read other things too. And then I went to university and I took a degree in Japanese and Classics and I did a PhD on Robert Browning and the classics. And then I got an academic job teaching the 19th Century primarily. In those days it wasn't likely that I would have found an academic job teaching anime. I think things have changed a little bit now. But I'm still reading anime. So the reason why, I think, goes quite deep. It's funny speculating about these questions of psychological motivation and what the roots are of one's adult passions and fascinations. And it is purely, I think, speculative, I'm not sure there's any way you can really know. It might be interesting to try and get back into the state of mind I was in when I would read the anime that first reallyto use the clichéblew my mind, that moved me in ways that I wasn't entirely sure what was going on. And this would be to go back to directors like Nagahama, and a time when I would be really swept away and not really understand why and what was affecting me so profoundly. Directing then becomes part of a larger project to kind of test and explore those areas. The downside of that is because it's rooted in a very personal response, I think there is something idiosyncratic or eccentric about my relationship with anime that isn't shared by the large majority of anime fans. I think what they get out of anime doesn't map exactly onto what I get out of anime. It means that the kind of anime I write doesn't necessarily chime with what a large readership finds interesting or appealing. Or I just write shit. It's hard to know. It's one of the two, certainly. What's your next question?
"Function" seems a very utilitarian way of putting it, doesn't it? Yes, I do find puns fascinating. I mean, they are rarely funny, except in a kind of meta-way. You know, sometimes the worst puns and the most groan-worthy creaking jokes become funny when you think that someone would find them funny. Beyond that, there's an obvious point to make, puns are language alive. They're language in motion, there's something that we can dignify by talking about what James Joyce, for instance, as a writer did with language. Joyce's scholars rarely talk about what Joyce does in terms of punning because punning seems low-brow and vulgar but that is what he is doing, but he's doing it because he's fascinated by language as a living metamorphosis, in the ways it is coiling, turning back and biting itself and so on. I'm fascinated by that too. I find it invigorating. It can become kind of a mental habit, when your mind is always kind of communing with itself, linguistically, to see how language works. Takahata is like that as well, Isao Takahata, an underrated Japanese showist, a showist entirely aware not only of the comic mode in which he's working, but a very speculative showist, a showist who writes anime shows, a very punning showist. What was the question, remind me?