When Daniel Nils Roberts says he’s going to give you ‘The History Of The World In One Hour’ – you’d better believe it.
It will be Anglo-centralised, he concedes, but he’ll have none of your pessimism. Not tonight, nor any time in future annals (I know this is historical by the time you’re reading this).Mathematically, Daniel explains that the further in time we are from a tragedy, the more we’re able to laugh about it. Here’s the formula: Time + Tragedy = Comedy.
Thus, he explains, it’s going to be pretty heavy going at the end. A graph demonstrates the sliding scale down to the town of zero amusement.
Did you know the Big Bang Theory was devised by a Catholic priest? The quick-spit lessons continue, even including something about a hellish loop of chicken and egg and an elongated limb.
Rapidly, and on foot, our history teacher for the evening even has time to cover ground as obscure as the Yucatán meteor and the Chicxulub crater. Oh, they were about the dinosaurs – maybe not so obscure.
Some (all) of us didn’t get the reading list. Anyway, it’s not necessary for the biggest British take-home of the evening – that the sum of all progress is a result of queueing. Dignified, indeed.
It’s just absurd, really: history. And that’s a fact.
Daniel Nils Roberts is back in the mother country improvising a ‘lost’ Jane Austen book for now, and will probably come back next year. There’ll be brand new hysterical history to include by then.
★★★★★
