Historians

I’ll tell you who I really hate … historians.

I hate them, with their stupid beards, their tweed jackets and their pointless experiments on puppies.

Some of you are thinking I mean scientists, but I don’t, I mean historians. How else do you think they found out about Nazis? That’s right, by dissecting them.

Under laboratory conditions, if you slice open a Nazi, you can count its rings and see how many Gypsies it killed.

And if you boil a fascist, well, it’s just really good fun.

But I hate historians. Thinking they know who won the First World War because it says so on their periodic table.

I don’t care what they say, just because Howard Hughes burns purple in a Bunsen burner flame, doesn’t mean Vietnam ever happened.

I was in Vietnam throughout the late sixties, and not once did the Godfather listen to Robin Williams playing classical music in a helicopter. Not once.

But no, historians come along with their teat pipettes full of dissolved Roman soldiers, drip it on to a bit of paper, see the spot go orange, and bang, that proves they invented Aqueducts.

I don’t think so.

I was forced to spend a week with historians once. A whole week in their labs. They made me do all their shitty jobs. And whilst I was visually inspecting the naval lint of a leopard they suspected had witnessed the Kennedy Assassination, they were all grouped around a work bench looking all coy.

I sneakily watched them. On the bench, they’d laid out a perfectly preserved hippy … and they were taking it turns to smash its face with a hammer. They were giggling as they did it, but when its cheeks cracked open, they soon stopped. Inside its skull, they found a scroll of papyrus, which they carefully unfurled and looked at under an electron microscope.

I knew it was something big, because they were all stroking their beards, and one of them was cupping his groin and hopping up and down. I stared at this loathsome collection of sadistic inveterates as they carefully sliced a section of papyrus, put it in a pestle and pounded it up using a mortar, then eagerly crossed the lab and threw the powder into the eyes of a puppy.

Then they went for lunch, and it was my job to sit and watch this poor dog suffering in its cage, the historic document burning its pupils. It howled in agony, the crooning wail enough to snap a man’s spine in half. Its eyeballs quadrupled in size inside its head. I measured their diameter and entered the figures into a complex computerised database.

And do you know what they had discovered?

That England has beaten Germany in two world wars and one world cup.

It’s cruelty. How many rabbits have to die to prove that Hitler was a bit grouchy?

Four.