Joe Miles Week 7: JCR Joke motions are no laughing matter

JOE MILES thinks JCR joke motions are no laughing matter


As you may be aware, my native college, Wadham, voted to ban all animal products from our evening dinners on environmental grounds; namely, that the college environment wasn’t sufficiently smug, right-on and left-wing enough.

On the one hand, this fortunately means I never have to eat the college salmon again. Unfortunately, it means neither I nor anyone else will get to eat much else either.

I back myself to put up with it for up to two weeks before I inevitably snap and end up pot roasting the college tortoise inside its own shell. Incidentally, if any of you know what sauce goes best with tortoise, feel free to leave your suggestions in the comment section alongside the inevitable verbal abuse.

To this day, neither I nor most of the people in this college have any clue how this motion managed to get through. Presumably we thought it was a joke, and we enjoyed the joke so much that we decided to go as far with it as we thought we could get away with. Except now it’s not funny anymore. Watching the debate was like watching a bad clown at a kid’s birthday party- he starts off doing a few subtle innuendoes for the grown-ups to enjoy, and five minutes later kids are running around crying whilst he does a massive dump on the birthday cake as “ironic humour”.

 

 

There is a real sense of ambiguity surrounding just how serious a JCR has to be. I attempted to pass a motion declaring war on Trinity College as light humour and was met with a barrage of objections about “making a mockery of the SU” and had to back down. Yet the same week, The Queen’s College then voted to force all JCR members to wear pink on Wednesdays.

Personally, I think it’s about time we recognised that JCR politics doesn’t have to be, and in fact should not be, always entirely serious. In our meeting on Sunday, aside from a highly ambiguous “joke” motion about vegan food, we also discussed with great seriousness and respect the issues of introducing a BME/POC officer, and alcohol awareness workshops- both incredibly important policies.

The fact that we don’t take ourselves too seriously makes our SU meetings far more enjoyable, especially given the amount of nit-picking that I am sure is frequent in every JCR. If we want to take ourselves seriously to the point of absurdity, we should run for the NUS- some of whose senior members are so out of touch with reality that, rather than simply encouraging responsible alcohol use, want to make it almost entirely impossible to drink on campus.

Although there is one very serious motion I want to propose to Wadham SU. I know we thought it was funny at the time, but seriously- I want my bloody meat back.