Salman Rushdie: he's funnier than you think

I went to see Salman Rushdie talk about his new book, The Enchantress of Florence, at the Charleston Festival recently. In an utterly compelling discussion about stories and their power in society, his interviewer asked him at one point if he thought we look to the writer as a prophet. Straight away he shot back: ‘I hope not. I’ve had quite enough of prophets, thank you very much’

Inevitably he went onto to talk about the Satanic Verses and he made the now long-forgotten point that the novel is actually quite funny. He said if he truly wanted to be offensive he would’ve taken all the funny bits out and just ranted at Islam. In other words, been as rude as he could. Shouted. Screamed. Hollered. Instead of piss-taking. Which is all it was.

Ok, Rushdie’s novels might not be your thing, you might find them boring, you know, ‘er, they’ve got too many words like’, or you might think, ‘one minute he’s talking about real people next minute this crazy shit about angels and devils’, but offended? Give us a break. Look, you’ve been going since the seventh century and you got 1.8 billion followers and you can’t take a bit of piss-taking?

The first casualty of religious belief is a sense of humour.