On 11 January 1844 Darwin mentioned his theorising to the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, writing with melodramatic humour "it is like confessing a murder".
Kicking off with Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr Lazarescu – the whispered hit of Cannes that year – this revolution had ready-made class: it was aesthetically rigorous; serious-minded yet buoyed by a mordant sense of humour; it scraped its truths from the dingy fabric of everyday life, often covered in the residue of 42 years of communism.
Despite its black humour, it is a deeply political book.
Notable for its black humour, it is considered one of the author's major early works.
The movie was made by people who remembered the Depression, so for all its crazy humour it is also a sombre lesson in the futility of boom-time societies in which the sources of income are gambling, speculation and casual sex work, but never actual work for wages and production.
Look beyond its slightly surreal humour – it pokes fun at the silly, overblown language of sport – and you'll see that it also pays quiet tribute to the now rapidly diminishing army of men (and women) who continue, against the financial odds, to deliver a daily pint to doorsteps everywhere.
I say attempt, because the most remarkable thing about it is not the shock factor of its content, but how utterly dull and lacking in humour it is.
If humour, it misses (or did for me).
Without the humour, it would just be heavy and boring.
Without humour, it became abundantly clear, these talks would have failed many times over.
Analysing humour, it has been said, is a bit like dissecting a frog.
