smugness and dark humor

The guys at school seem to have a predilection for launching surprise attacks on the students. Today, for instance, we had an unscheduled "doubts" class from 7 a.m. to 12 p.m., during which we explored the finer aspects of being bored to death. In the hope of making the classes look satisfactorily large, the school-folk contrived to hold joint classes (two batches per class). Much to their chagrin, I imagine, only a handful of people bothered to show up. The rest were doubtless happily tucked into their beds, as every sensible person should have been in the middle of what was supposed to have been summer vacation. But unfortunately I am not a sensible person (never was), and I decided against my better judgement to sacrifice my beautiful Saturday morning in favor of exploring the unknown. When I reached school, I again displayed a stunning lack of foresight by promptly sitting down in one of the frontmost seats. It was only when the physics teacher, who happened to teach the other batch, arrived that I realized my folly. I was expecting at any moment to be subjected to some sort of crazy, senile malevolence, for the guy had a haggard look about him that couldn't have promised anything good. Luckily it transpired that he was not a temperamental person, and he didn't ask anyone any questions. At the end of class I felt a whole lot smarter. The feeling lingered even when I found myself unable to comprehend practically anything in chemistry class. It was heightened in math class, in which, despite my state of severe drowsiness, I found myself soundly capable of ratiocination. That I was able to arrive at the right conclusions to most of the problems the math teacher scribbled on the board before many of the others (including the Geek Lords) did, and was sometimes able to arrive effortlessly at conclusions that somehow eluded them, gave me a feeling of supreme smugness that wouldn't leave -- one of the perks of being a lazy genius.

On a different note -- and this is the part where this entry, like most of the others on this blog, proves its loyalty to the undying art of diverging from the starting topic (it's one of the reasons, by the way, that I can never come up with a title that does justice to the things I write) -- I'm reading Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall because it's supposed to be darkly humorous. Even though I claim to be a fan of dark humor, this is actually the first book of the kind I've read. It's not funny per se. (I suppose that after reading Wodehouse, it's impossible to find anything else particularly funny.) But there were certain points at which I couldn't help but laugh. For the most part the humor borders on silliness (the fact that there are characters named Lord and Lady Circumference who have a son named Tangent should explain everything), but the dark humor is manifest, and is immensely enjoyable. For example, "'Hullo!' she [Lady Circumference] said in a deep bass voice, 'how are you? Circumference ran over a fool of a boy. I've just been chaffing your daughter here about her frock...'" Tangent is later shot in the foot by a Butler, who is really an imposter, when the latter fires a gun to indicate the start of a race, and has to get it amputated. It's funny, in a morbid, misanthropic sense. Yup. Dark humor is the thing for me.