Comic Sans not your type?

Comic Sans not your type? Lighten up

What does it say about our times when the revolution brewing isn't against the Iraq war or bankers, but a jaunty font?

"The Guardian want you to write about what?" asked a friend of mine yesterday. "The controversy surrounding Comic Sans? Aren't there, erm, ever so slightly more important issues facing Great Britain at the moment than a typeface?" I regarded him blankly, uncomprehending.

Imagine a clown shoe stamping on a human face – forever. Sounds like a fun image, no? This kind of tyrannical lightheartedness is how many regard the ongoing popularity of the innocuous font, which I am using right now, created in 1994 by Microsoft employee Vincent Connare. It all started so innocently, but as the Wall Street Journal reported, use of the font has "spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp to grade-school fliers and holiday newsletters, Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags, business emails, street signs, Bibles, porn sites, gravestones and hospital posters about bowel cancer".

When the history of 21st-century popular rebellions are written, nestling somewhere between the millions who took to the streets to protest the Iraq war, Ukraine's orange revolution, and Britain's blood-curdling anti-banker riots of 2011, the Comic Sans hate campaign will be the tale of one cause celebre that spread further, and cut deeper, than any other.

After all, people really do get surprisingly wound up by a jaunty, informal typeface being used in mildly inappropriate situations. Time magazine included it in its 50 worst inventions list, but this slight was nothing compared to the militancy adopted by some. When you've finished ranting about the typeface's use on all four corners of the internet, it's time to get active: one can now get "Ban Comic Sans" flyers, comics, stickers, T-shirts, hoodies and coffee mugs.

So if this is our generation's revolution, where is it brewing? Where are its leaders in hiding? Where are its rallies held, where are the candle-lit basements churning out its samizdat publications? Only – and entirely – on the internet. The Internet Hates Comic Sans. If I were Connare, I'd be pretty terrified right now – I mean, look at the fate that befell Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after everyone changed their Twitter avatars green for a few weeks. Oh.

But what this self-righteous rebellion fails to comprehend is the beauty to be found in incongruity. Getting, say, a stern letter of excommunication from the archdiocese of Milan in Comic Sans is like having a man in a Womble outfit conduct your wedding ceremony, or the 10 o'clock news being read by Inspector Clouseau. It might not be your first choice, but our lives would be pretty drab without a bit of absurdity.

Reading the ever-flowing tide of vitriol against the typeface on Twitter, it's almost as if its enemies can't take anything seriously when it's written in Comic Sans. Apart from, perhaps, themselves.