I kept my eye on the kids in front. They stared at the screen as the wisecracks and put-downs began, reactionless. Elsewhere, too, although I wasn’t looking, a profound unresponsiveness reigned. Then the first of the ghosts appeared and we were away. The kids put their fists in their mouths, they put their hands against the sides of their heads, they rose shouting and laughing with fear. As the action progressed and the ghosts multiplied and became more demonic – spirits and demons, of course! – they squashed themselves closer and closer together until at last they were not twenty but one, not so many separate entities of terror but a single compaction, a pure concentrated essence, of petrified child. A corporal dematerialization, 95 per cent efficient – wasn’t that more spooky than anything in the movie?

But then something broke their spell and they all separated; or at least they separated sufficiently to be able to unite again, only this time not in mortal fright but mortal mirth, an amusement so in-wrought and fundamental that they could only express it by leaping into the air and throwing their arms around one another’s necks and then burying their own faces in their own hands. It simultaneously joined and divided them, this thing they’d seen, it threw their functions into complete confusion; the power of their own response literally overwhelmed and even seemed to shame them. And this effect was not confined only to the youngsters either – the whole room, the whole floor, the dogs and Ros and I expected, behaved the same. So what was it that had done this to them? What, in Ghostbusters was that funny?

Why, a white man running away, of course. A soft, plump, pink Caucasian male frightened out of his wits and running for his life, pursued by evil spirits through the streets of downtown New York. The reverse equivalent precisely to what had had them rolling in the aisles the night before in Alice Springs. Except that to amuse the blacks the white man’s bum didn’t even have to be exposed. Naked terror was more than enough to be going on with. What’s funnier than an horripilated black rolling his eyes in fear? An horripilated white rolling his.

So was this racism in action? Hardly. It’s possible that there never is an emotion or an impulse which is usefully described by that word, even if it comes in handy sometimes to express one’s abhorrence of a programme or a policy. For the truth seems to be that races, just like sexes and generations, have a positive need, a requirement of the whole system, to find one another ridiculous and to enjoy one another’s discomfiture. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be the case – though I haven’t myself done the research – that denying yourself the relief of laughing at people who are another colour or another size, who speak peculiar languages or worship foreign idols, actually makes you ill. Certainly those who conscientiously give their lives over to removing offensive adjectives from every library book in North London, for example, don’t look well. And, whatever else the Aboriginal population of Areyonga might have been suffering from, they seemed to be in perfect health when riven with amusement by the trepidation of somebody my colour.