The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Misunderstood jokes are dangerous. Taking anything seriously can be dangerous. Taking a run-down London suburb seriously can be extremely dangerous: It might just turn into an empire. When the farcical King Auberon inspires a preposterous love in the heart of a small boy for his ridiculous neighborhood, the youth grows up to have the last laugh: The facetious charge he took for an honest admonition sets the world on its head. “The human being sees no real antagonism between laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whom mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god. When dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which everyone who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. But in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobes of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend.”