Lexicon - Max Barry
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" It may be a coincidence, but Max Barry's Lexicon bears a remarkable resemblance to one of Monty Python's best comedy routines, 'The World's Deadliest Joke', collected in the feature And Now For Something Completely Different . In the Python sketch, a writer stumbles upon a joke that is so funny that the writer himself dies laughing. Recognising the potentital of the joke as a weapon, it's employed by the military, translated into German under controlled laboratory conditions (" one translator saw two words of the joke and spent several weeks in hospital "), and used to bring about an end to the war, although the casualties on the German side apparently were " appalling ". Max Barry's Lexicon however is no laughing matter. If the resemblance to the Monty Python sketch is just a coincidence, it's probably more to do with the recognition that words have much more power than we think. Barr...