Shrnk, or The Unbelievable Shrinking Men
Mr Bean was the first to go.
It had been said for a long, long time that, while women were frightened that men would kill them, men’s only fear had been that women would laugh at them. This dark quip had summed up the enormous imbalance between the way men and women had to live their lives, the daily walking risk assessments and car-keys in fists and creepy first dates and anxious management of overly familiar males on public transport. However, no one could have had any inkling why women laughing would be anything for men to worry about – until the inklings began to seep in, bringing their horrible new understanding with them.
With all the re-runs going on all over the world and Mr Bean’s status as an international icon of hilarity, Rowan Atkinson slipped off the face of the earth in a matter of days. When the story hit the news cycles and his tiny face was shown peeking out from the sheets of his hospital bed, even before he had to be moved to the neo-natal unit, the small minority within the grief-stricken, soberly concerned masses, the few million people who couldn’t help but laugh, only hastened his way into total obscurity.
But what did it mean? Why was it happening? How could migrants be blamed or tofu-guzzling lefty lawyers? What were those woke snowflakes doing that caused their honest, hard-working fathers and brothers to melt away? What could men have done to deserve this terrifying cosmic joke? Had they masturbated too often? Was it aliens, preparing the planet for conquest? Was it feminism? Was it Brexit?
Ironically, the men who first tried to alert people to what was happening were among the first to disappear completely, as people laughed in their faces, cry-laugh emojis dissolving them to nothing before their shrinking fingers could even delete their social media accounts. Doctors, biologists, psychologists (no one called them shrinks any more), astrologists invited accidentally in all the confusion, astrophysicists, retired astronauts, comic book writers, poets, rabbis, shiny-faced influencers, community leaders in new suits that were still too big for them, pagan witches and cardinals too old to care whether their time was coming – all crowded the newspaper columns and YouTube channels and broadcast media for a few days offering up unconvincing explanations about what might be happening until everyone decided that no one had a clue and that is was too tragi-comic to handle.
It was happening everywhere. No one in public life was safe. Former US President Donald J Trump disappeared from public within a few days of the crisis breaking out, issued a couple of video addresses (with no one stood next to him for scale), then a few angry tweets about how he’d never been bigger than he was right now, then nothing. The already diminutive Sunak had already slipped through his mortal coil by the time rumours thickened the Internet that Putin was now purely an AI construct, taking his place among the legion of bots that he had unleashed on the virtual world. Everyone agreed it was best if Merkel and Ardern and Pelosi took over for a while. (No one thought to ask Truss.) People were urged in helpful tabloid articles and morning TV segments to remember that there was ‘good’ laughter, the laughing-with kind, and ‘bad’ laughter, the laughing-at kind. It felt important that distinction was made.
Unfortunately, the more treasured the celebrity, the more laughter and joy he (and it was always he) had brought to the people, the quicker he would wink out of existence. Billy Connolly faded away to nothing in no time. The remaining Pythons too ceased to be in the time it took to quote the Spanish Inquisition. Bill Murray, Steve Coogan, Jim Carrey, the more global and universally loved, the quicker their exit from the stage. Edgier, more obscure and more controversial comics lasted longer – Chris Rock, Frankie Boyle, Bill Burr, Daniel Kitson. True to his craft to the very end, Stewart Lee continued to make the exact same sarcastic remark about how small he was getting over and over in front of a live audience that howled with laughter until he could no longer be heard or seen. When Vic and Bob died, within minutes of each other, there was such emotional turmoil that not one man in the UK shrank for almost 24 hours. Repeats of Morecambe & Wise and Laurel and Hardy and Dad’s Army flooded the TV schedules again. Robin Williams and Richard Pryor were all over Netflix. Commissioning editors even organised some more shows with women comedians! (Historical note: the last show with living male comedians on it to be taken off air was The Last Leg, although it seemed to many watching the last edition that those guys hadn’t shrunk much at all.)
For a few days, the hitherto constant moral panic about trans people mutated into attempts to work out why they (pronouns are important) seemed largely unaffected by the issue, no matter which toilets they used. Some offered the opinion that trans folk had already suffered enough ridicule and gender-based violence that they were possibly immune to whatever this was, but then attention turned back to the cis men. Women could laugh at women and men at men seemingly without causing any life-threatening shrinkage. It all seemed so unfair!
Some men tried to hide in soundproof sheds, but the problem was that it didn’t matter whether or not they themselves heard the laughter, the tree in the forest dwindled away to nothing all the same. Comments and DMs and opinion pieces in national newspapers were full of women laughing at men. Social media giants and telecoms corporations were begged by newly created Men’s Protection groups (like Just Stop Laughing) to remove any smiley emojis or laughing yellow faces from their apps and products, but the companies were slow to act and millions more men disappeared from the web, either physically or virtually in an attempt to stir up as little mirth at their expense as they could. The activists began to be labelled with darkly funny nicknames like ‘inch-cels’, which only made matters smaller. Revenge bants became a thing, women and girls spreading the funniest possible stories about their exes as far and wide as they could to maximise the suffering and minimise the exes. The more serious the crisis became, the funnier it got.
Of course, some men adopted the same time-honoured, patriarchal tactic of murdering as many women as possible before their time was up, but once their ridiculousness became obvious, their time was very short indeed. The angrier and more murderous they got, the funnier they looked, and that was that for them. Others, driven from the internet by mouthy women-trolls and their witty putdowns, tried to comfort themselves with porn mags but could no longer reach the top shelf – and that was so funny to watch. So funny that CCTV footage from newsagents and corner shops would be edited together and uploaded for the amusement of millions of women and girls out there.
Many men inviting ridicule thought themselves completely blameless. They weren’t even trying to be funny but just to get on with their daily lives. Women might accidentally erase their husbands as they just couldn’t help themselves from laughing at the very thought of them. Dates at restaurants, before straight men stopped going on dates altogether for safety reasons, would end in disaster as prospective partners would begin to struggle to see over their menus, which would only make it harder to keep things safe. Guys braving going outside for a run would begin to feel their tracky bums sliding towards their ankles as the women, sitting wide-legged and lairy on pavement pub gardens or hanging out of office windows, would giggle, obnoxiously, and bray and guffaw at their latest targets. I mean, if these males didn’t want to be laughed at, why did strut about in such a risible way, comb their hair over like that, dress in such a provocatively amusing way? What else did they expect?
After a few weeks, gangs of women would roam the streets, tanked up on nitrous oxide and LSD, and the slightest embarrassment, the glimpse of a white sock with sandals maybe, could be a death sentence for an unwary man. Men no longer wanted to go out at all. They learned to keep their opinions to themselves. Men in mixed company hesitated before speaking, worrying that they might say something dangerously amusing or attract too much attention from some female just looking for a laugh. They kept out of DMs and out of the comments. They steered clear of bus stops and night clubs. They kept their shrinking mouths shut and, for many, the silence was platinum.
Women felt terrible about the whole business, absolutely dreadful, of course. They agreed that something had to be done to protect these tiny, terrified creatures, but what could they do to help, really? If something was funny – and some of these cute little guys were absolutely hilarious, whether they meant to be or not – you couldn’t stop yourself from laughing, could you? It was a natural response, a hard-wired human behaviour. You might as well try to legislate against gravity. Safest thing would be for men to stay at home, keep quiet, and not draw any attention to themselves and their amusingly shaped bodies. There was still the occasional high-pitched whisper about who would take out the bins or clean the sewers, but otherwise things just got along fine.
But then they would, wouldn’t they?
