Scan Magazine | Humour | Columns
IS IT JUST ME…
By Mette Lisby
…who’s getting very mixed signals from the times we are living in? In an article about how online dating has made us less truthful, this statement struck me: “Everybody lies a little on their online profile. But if you come out and are open about it on the actual date, people like it. People respond well when someone is honest about their lying.” Huh? Very confusing times, aren’t they? We crave authenticity but watch reality TV, where every conflict is carefully crafted and every scene is edited and manipulated. We to go to great lengths to eat organically because we don’t want to fill our bodies with toxins, but we happily stuff our faces with botox, injections and line-fillers. We want to live our lives to the fullest and wish to stay alive for as long as possible, but no one wants to look like they have actually lived a life. We pant for pureness yet we keep trashing the planet. We want quality but require instant gratification, so on social media we’d rather follow someone who
posts mediocre stuff constantly than someone who posts quality updates once a month. We want our superstars to be human but we want humans to be flawless. We yearn for intimacy, yet mainstream porn has put the most intimate act on display to such a degree that we accept the presence of it without raising an eyebrow – this level of intimacy on display has become ordinary. We ache to connect but spend our time looking at screens in the company of people we could actually connect with. We long for something to believe in, yet more and more we disconnect from the thought of a God. We call for leadership but prefer leaders and politicians with no prior experience of how to actually lead a country. We thirst to find something ‘bigger than ourselves’, yet increasingly we become centres in our own universes, evolving around ourselves, building our own narratives, our own personal truth and reality.
Look like other people “You’re Big Smithy’s daughter!” a man in a dusty top hat shouted delightedly at me across a pub last night. I reassured him that my dad is not Big Smithy, but a rather slim Swede, but he was having none of it. “You’re definitely a relative of Big Smithy’s. There’s no mistaking you lot, you all look the same.” It’s rare that I get mistaken for someone else in England. In Sweden, on the other hand, I frequently spot people who look like me. They’ll have the same kind of body frame and facial features; they’ll dress and even move in a way that seems familiar. There’s something incredibly reassuring about looking like other people, a safety in numbers kind of thing. It’s also undeniably a balm to the selfesteem. I cannot criticise myself without also criticising the strangers who look like me, and that would be rude, even by Swedish standards. 128 | Issue 124 | May 2019
I only hope people respond to me being confused about the confusion, as well as they respond to liars admitting to their lies.
Mette Lisby is Denmark’s leading female comedian. She invites you to laugh along with her monthly humour columns. Since her stand-up debut in 1992, Mette has hosted the Danish version of Have I Got News For You and Room 101.
By Maria Smedstad
tion of shouting “sorry!” until, naturally, I was obliged to tell him that the fault was all mine. Because this is what becomes of a person who has lived in the UK for a long time: I might not look like a Brit, but by God can I solve a problem by engaging in a game of endless apology, until everyone forgets what the initial issue actually was. This, to me, is just about the best national look there is.
Actually, thinking about it, it does happen that I get confused with someone else in the UK. “Adults only!” a doorman at a venue yelled after me a little while ago. When I turned to face him, revealing that I am not in fact a child, but a very short grown-up, he resorted to the British solu-
Maria Smedstad moved to the UK from Sweden in 1994. She received a degree in Illustration in 2001, before settling in the capital as a freelance cartoonist, creating the autobiographical cartoon Em. Maria writes a column on the trials and tribulations of life as a Swede in the UK.