Nothing new under the sun?

I wonder whether Douglas Adams forsaw how this wonderful phrase would become part of everyday speak for those of us privileged to be contemporary with the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (and those we have enthusiastically inflicted it upon ever since).  I'm tempted to add the eptithet "Life? Don't talk to me about life" and that I too have a pain in the diodes down my left side because Marvin the Paranoid Android inspires me at times along with good old Eeyore and his gloomy thoughts. But then I might remember the words to the philosophers' song from Monty Python and fall off the chair laughing at the pronouncement Rene Descartes was a drunken fart : "I drink, therefore I am".

I can't understand the people who don't find that sort of thing hilarious and deserving of endless repetition. I could easily turn this page in a homage to every witty utterance from the Young Ones, Monty Python, Red Dwarf and Hitch-hiker's guide just for starters but I guess I'll settle for bunging in the odd quote easily recognisable both by those both amused or irritated by them. When my daughter was very young, and I don't think she was remarkable in this (although I am quite sure she was in other ways of course....) I marvelled at her capacity to watch the same videos and hear the same stories read to her time and again. When she read the Harry Potter books she didn't just read them once and she could have been on Mastermind with that as her chosen subject. I bought her the HP trivia game but there was no point in playing it as she knew all the answers and nobody else did. It didn't stop her reading them all again though. But equally it didn't stop her devouring other new books in the same way that I can find contemporary humour just as hilarious at times as good old Reginald Perrin.

So is it any wonder that as adults some of us are clinging fondly to stuff we've been chortling over for years yet still find funny? Am I the only one tempted to reply "I won't" when someone wishes me "Have a good day"? How many adults of a certain age know perfectly well the significance of the number 42, or that nobody expects the Spanish inquisition? Who thinks Smeg is just an electrical appliance manufacturer unless they never watched Red Dwarf?