The Short Humour Site









Home : Writers' Showcase : Submission Guidelines : A Man of a Few More Words : Links

Writers' Showcase

London's Greatest Postmodern Soap Opera: 'Hackney Conversation Enders'
by Wallace Runnymede

A recent TV programme has finally cornered the crowded market of postmodern London soap operas. Millions of viewers are tuning in every week; and yet, nobody seems to have the slightest idea 'wass goin' on?' in this rather bizarre and challenging television classic. 

I haven't added any character names. It's more confusing this way!

Ey! Shut it, you plum! Don’t you blumming understand that bourgeois logocentrism may be all very well for our Jean-Jacques, but pity the same can’t be said for you, ey? I mean, you literally don’t know NUFFINK about our groundbreakingly innovative poststructural semiotic collaboration! Nah! Tell ya something for nuffink, mate… you literally don’t know NUFFINK!

Eh, wass goin on?

Oi, shut it! Ain’t NUFFINK going on, Michel… I mean, it’s just blumming semantics, innit!

Well, let ME blahddy well tell YOU something for nuffink, mate! That’s well out of post-Derridean meta-order, that is!

Oh, is it? Well you can just shut it and blahhddy well go back to your poncey old Jean Baudrillard, you can!

Urgh! Unreconstructed Derrideans these days, I blumming tells ya…

Sorry man, that was well out of non-order, I mean, it’s just, I just kind of woke this morning and felt a bit logocentric, ya know ‘ow it is. I didn’t mean to say nuffink, I swear!… I mean, end o’ the day, ya can’t say it all at once, can ya!

Oi! Whatchoo doin? Get your bloody semes off my ‘usband! I’ll semiotically cloture your gob before you know what’s coming to ya!

Hm. Another grand narrative, eh? You bloody unreconstructed pre-Saussurean foundationalist slag… Wouldn’t expect any better from the likes o’ you… positivist, mainstream-Newtonian tosser!

Oi! You take that back!… And then let me take it back! I mean, at the end of the day, it’s all dialectical, innit!

No it ain’t… well, it is as well, innit!

Hm. E’s cruising’ for a bruisin’ e is.

Yeah ‘e is, just ‘is nature. Just can’t ‘elp ‘imself, can ‘e?

Never changes. It’s just ‘im.

Oh… oh… oh God!

You… you bloody bahrstard! NATURE?! Did… did you just make an ESSENTIALIST COMMENT?!

No, no, listen, er, er, I swear, Theodor-Hannah, it were just rhetoric. I mean, I di’n’t say it were actually true, did ah?

Urgh… y’know what, this street is going down the bogs. Seriously, man!

OHHH… down the bogs?! YOU SHAMELESS TELEOLOGICAL HUSSY! JUST YOU WAIT TIL I GET YOU ‘OME!

Sorry, mate. You can’t. Ain’t no such thing as ‘ome. We are forever rootless, decentred nomadic subjects in an aching, bleeding, and irredeemably syntactically rent, semantically dechained, libidinally disenchanted, non-monadic anti-Kosmos, wherein…

‘Ere, ‘e don’t arf go on, do ‘e?

Pretentious twat.

Hm. Sod it. Let’s go ‘n’ get some blumming chips, Felix.


Also published at wallacerunnymede.wordpress.com: http://wallacerunnymede.com/2015/08/28/new-postmodern-london-soap-opera-hackney-semiotic-closers/