Nothing like a corner yoghurt: Captain Crunch is laughing not crying.

I absolutely love Captain Crunch. And surprisingly enough, Captain Crunch is not a tasty cereal based product or yoghurt with corners, although, again, I almost certainly would love it if it was. Captain Crunch is the Sun’s answer to our current financial turmoil. Fed up with all the doom and gloom of the broadsheets? Captain Crunch will save the day. Cue the middle aged man with dubious hair cut and red, white and blue lycra outfit. I know, I’m excited too.

The banner of Captain Crunch, or “The Captain” as I like to call him, heads up all of the Sun website’s articles about the financial crisis including the one entitled “80p lunchbox for school”, which, I admit, did scare me a little. Turns out it wasn’t quite as bad as I feared – children on the crunch diet do have to live off wafer thin turkey ham (an oxymoron I have never understood) for a week, but also – thank The Captain – get an apple every day.

It’s not just the Sun who have resorted to a light-hearted take on a dramatically less than light-hearted situation; see another of my faves – the BBC’s credit crunch jokes page.

And although interpretations like this may be perturbing to some (and would be to me if instead of the “consumer hero” Captain we were faced with Doctor Natural Disaster or Thunder the Terrorist) I think the whole idea perfectly embodies our ability to laugh rather than cry. Unless we are Brown or Darling (and most of us are neither) there’s not all that much we can do about world economics, and this leaves us with only two options: either turn to the newspaper headlines that make us want to tear them up and paper-cut ourselves to death, or resort to our lycra-clad pal. I reckon paper cuts are a pretty bad way to go, which leaves me with nothing else to say but: Long Live Captain Crunch!