TaleS told by an idiot

If Karl Pilkington didn’t exist, it would be necessary for Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant to invent him. The melon-headed, bollocks-spouting bloke became the perfect comic foil for Gervais on his weekly podcast (available for free on iTunes).

And now the melon-headed bloke has his own book — mostly a “best of” compilation of priceless dialogues from the podcast, plus lots of cartoons.

The creators of the original, UK version of The Office and HBO’s Extras do a sort of sideline in podcasts, and their sub-specialty is winding up the peculiar Pilkington, a sometime radio producer and cartoonist who was home-schooled in various caravans by his mum and dad (think: trailer park) and has some very strange opinions about the world. Such as why we should use frozen prehistoric DNA to revive carnivorous dinosaurs à la Jurassic Park:

Karl: When you think about it, there’s a population problem. There’s too many of us.

Steve: Yeah.

Karl: We’re saving people all the time. No one’s allowed to get injured anymore. You’ve got to wear a helmet when you’re on a bike. There’s speed bumps to slow people down. Zebra crossings (crosswalks). Cures for illnesses. No one’s dying anymore. 

Ricky: I think they are.

Karl: Not as many as there should be, because the world’s crowded.

Ricky: I think there are still millions of people dying.

Karl: Loads of people are living longer. And that’s the problem. So what I’m saying is…

Steve: You think you should introduce tyrannosaurus rex into London?

Karl: Wandering around.

Steve: Just have them wandering around, picking people off?

Karl: Just sort of random and that. I mean I’m not wishing anyone I know dies and that, but all I’m saying is, I don’t know anyone who’s died for ages. Whereas if a dinosaur was knocking about, you’d go, ‘Oh, Neil’s gone missing…’

This collection of sub-Socratic dialogues might not be as spontaneous as it sounds on paper or on the air (Gervais admits many of these matters have been kicked around with Pilkington in the past), but it’s no less hilarious to read. Pilkington is something of an idiot savant, with the emphasis on “idiot.” He holds strong opinions; it’s just that he lacks the mental ammunition of logic or rational argument to back them up. Instead, he relies on Internet material and urban myth to furnish his “proofs.” This encourages the tag team of Gervais and Merchant (who goad him into spouting nonsense) to circle in for the kill repeatedly, with amusing results.

Karl: There’s a chicken somewhere…

Ricky: Oh yeah, specific…

Karl: … And the owner of it was getting fed up because he had to feed it and that but it wasn’t giving anything back.

Steve: No eggs?

Karl: No eggs, right. So he was like, ‘Oh I am sick of this.’ Anyway, someone told him to pop a little axe next to its house, right, so when it comes out in the morning thinking, ‘Oh I’ll have another lazy day doing nothing,’ he’d see the axe and suddenly think, ‘Oh, aye.’

Steve: ‘I’m for the chop,’ it thought?

Karl: Next day it laid about six eggs.

Ricky: It’s rubbish! The chicken wouldn’t recognize the axe as a threat. It wouldn’t be able to reason, ‘Oh, I’d better start working or I’ll be meat.’ It’s absolute rubbish. Once again it’s this ridiculous thing where you personify animals and give them reasoning powers that are better than yours. I mean you make chickens and monkeys cleverer than you are in your stories, which is weird. It didn’t happen and it wouldn’t work. Next. What else haven’t you learned today?

One curious result of reading The World of Karl Pilkington is that you end up sympathizing with Karl, and may even begin to agree with some of his ideas, even as Gervais and Merchant shred them into mincemeat. The two writers — clever chaps, both — can sometimes sound a little like robotic liberals (or angels’ advocates), sputtering about animal cruelty or evolution versus religion, whereas Pilkington just stumbles his way along, oblivious to the razor’s blade of fact.

Some of Pilkington’s more interesting assertions:

• Penicillin and gravity were “lazy inventions” since they came about (respectively) because Alexander Fleming “didn’t wash up after himself in a science lab” and “all Newton was doing was chillin’ out under a tree.” Besides, “gravity wasn’t causing any problems so there was no reason to worry about it. If we were floatin’ about bumpin’ into stuff, I’d say Newton, sort it out, but we’re not so leave it.”

• People should evolve to having just a thumb and one big finger — “like a built-in oven mitt” — on each hand. This would make it easier to handle hot plates of food because the one big finger would be less sensitive.

• Plato’s intellect was overrated because he died from getting hit on the head by an egg dropped by a passing bird. “If he was working in a factory, he wouldn’t have been wandering on a beach thinking, with big birds dropping eggs, so in a way it backfired. His knowledge killed him.”

• “Horses are hard work. I don’t think people should have pets that are bigger than themselves.”

This last little maxim is from a section at the back of the book reproducing a few pages of Karl’s notebooks. In a way, the handwritten passages remind me of the novella Flowers for Algernon — at the point where the mentally retarded Charlie has the brain operation and begins to construe the world around him with mental baby steps.

Part of the pleasure of The World of Karl Pilkington is the fun that Merchant and Gervais have tearing into Pilkington’s thought process. They seem to hold a particular fascination with the shape of Karl’s head, which they describe as being “perfectly round” and “like a bowling ball.” But it’s the stuff inside Karl’s head that really gets them going. Suffice to say, the Socratic dialogues were never like this:

Ricky: Now that is incredible. That’s his translation of what I just said. That sums it up for me. He sees a headline, he reads a book, and it goes through this weird filtering system. And I imagine there is music in his head — it’s ‘boo bi boom ba eh oh bi ba’ — like a discordant piano.

Steve: I think the noise in Karl’s head is like a fax machine at full volume. Errrrrrrrr!

Ricky: I think it’s like music from a Czechoslovakian cartoon from 1963. Odd noises, woks being banged, pianos being hit by elbows.

Steve: He is the only person you can give a body of information to and he strips away the facts.

Yes, Karl Pilkington may never win the Nobel Prize for his scientific theories. But as The Guardian points out in the book’s blurb: “Not many idiots could make something this funny.”

The cartoons are pretty good, too.