Collector wrote:Datadog wrote:I brought this up with my team at lunch today, and the younger half's takeaway was that drunken comic relief is sort of an "old man" thing. Like, to them, social drinking is fine, but drunk as a punchline isn't.
Beware of anecdotal evidence, especially from such a small sample. Your "younger half" may not be all that representative of that demographic. I am not saying that they are wrong, just that they might not be on the mark. Remember that drinking and getting drunk has been a common thing for millennia. You cannot compare it to smoking, which has been a common thing for mere few centuries.
That said, even if they perceive it as an "old man" thing, maybe that would still work for your purpose.
Hmm, this is only half-true. People have been brewing beer or honeyed wine ever since the ancient Babylonians - roughly 5,000 years ago. Archaeologists have found a 3,900-year-old Sumerian poem honouring Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing; the poem contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from barley via bread. Meanwhile, in China, residue on pottery dating from between 5,400 and 4,900 years ago shows beer was brewed using barley and other grains.
Tobacco smoking is almost as old; the practice was believed to begin as early as 5,000–3,000 BC, when the agricultural product began to be cultivated in Mesoamerica and South America. Many ancient civilizations — such as the Babylonians, the Indians, and the Chinese — burnt incense during religious rituals. Smoking in the Americas probably had its origins in the incense-burning ceremonies of shamans, but was later adopted for pleasure or as a social tool. The smoking of tobacco and various hallucinogenic drugs was used to achieve trances and to come into contact with the spirit world.
The reason that we think of tobacco as more recent than beer is that it was only introduced to Eurasia in the late 17th century. But the practice of smoking, whether tobacco or some other drug (whether legal or not today) is very old indeed - and indeed, incense-burning is still carried on in many different religions.
Maybe I'm a little more tolerant of alcohol use because I've seen it happen so often here in Australia (and it was sometimes even celebrated, which I find very odd). It seems that any holiday here in Australia - Australia Day, Easter, Christmas, horse races... hell, just the weekend - is invariably marked with copious consumption of beer. I think it's strange, but there you go.
