SCOTTISH football is nothing if not a bit of a giggle and my goodness did we need a laugh this week.

As even more lurid stories emerged about the seemingly epidemic child sex abuse scandal, as predicted in this column last Saturday, it became difficult to pick up a newspaper as more former players came forward to tell their own tragic tales, bottled up for years, as they revealed how lives have been ruined and even taken as some victims simply could not cope with the shame.

In no way is this an attempt to sweep under the carpet the revelations which have emerged this month but those of us who love the game in this country really need a bit of light shone on the darkness, a reminder that football is supposed to be one of life’s joys. Even fun.

So thank the wee man for Joey Barton who re-entered public life after what for him was a long period of exile – about five weeks give or take – when he spoke to the BBC about what happened to him Rangers, even if he couldn’t go into all the juicy details.

And what a hoot it was.

A barrage of comic lines were spouted by the Scouse Socrates, the Greek fella not the chain-smoking Brazilian footballer, and while none of them were intentional jokes, they all hit the funny spot with the sort of precision which was absent from his own performances during that eight-game career at Ibrox.

Barton blamed the media, of course, as everyone does these days. Our crime on this occasion was to build him up as some sort of footballing God; an image which was always going to be impossible to live up to.

Now one or two certain newspapers, be they hacks or pundits, suggested this was a good signing. However, when you go back to when he first arrived, the overall feeling among us Press folk was “hmm, let’s see where this goes’ rather than what the bold Joey read into it.

“The difficulty for me lay in the fact that before I went up there they kind of built me into this Neymar, Messi kind of player, which I wasn't,” he said.

Of course, not a single journalist came close to spouting such nonsense. The biggest compliments were more of the ‘he’s done okay in England so he’ll coast it up here’ kind of thing.

To put Barton in context, Lionel Messi scored his 473rd goal for Barcelona in the midweek Champions League win against Borussia Monchengladbach. Nobody has ever thought the journeyman midfielder with one cap and no major honour played the same sport as the Argentine or his Brazilian team-mate for that matter.

Barton went on to explain; “I'm a player that's never been blessed with an enormous amount of talent, speed, tricks. I'm somebody who has always served the higher purpose in terms of the team, always done well when that's been at the fore. I've never done particularly well when the onus has been on me to go on and create and do things.”

Hold the bus. Was it not Barton himself who claimed that Scott Brown wasn’t in his league? Yes it was. On a radio interview. Unprompted.

Barton also said that he would be the best player in Scotland, which if we go by his comments the other day means that he believed that every single player in this country had less talent than someone “not blessed with enormous talent.”

And a year or so ago, once again on the wireless, Barton claimed if he had been born Scottish he’d have won 100 caps because, well, he would walk into our national team. Take that Graeme Souness.

Let’s be honest, he wasn’t even the best midfielder from Liverpool at Rangers. That’s Jordan Rossiter.

"Everyone was saying 'you've been caught out by the standard of Scottish football, you've looked down your nose at Scottish football'. I didn't. I knew what I was getting into,” was another barb.

Barton clearly had no idea about the size of Rangers, the demands which would be placed on him and the speed of our game. He looked done. It’s as stark and simple as that.

And here was his final take on Scottish football. He said, wait for it, that Celtic and Rangers should try to join the English Premier League. Now why hasn’t anyone at the club thoughts about that? It’s a real mystery.

I have got to give him one thing. Barton did help sell a few papers up here – oh the irony – and he remains an interesting character who is easy to write about because he does give out a decent quote.

But it was a deal that even from the start, and this is not from a position of hindsight, which looked doomed.

Just the other day Mark Warburton suggested he would be prepared to take a similar risk on a player whose reputation was lower than a turtle’s tummy. No he wouldn't.

Barton one day will spill the beans on what really happened and it would be nice to think he might accept some of the blame could be laid at his own door.

But that would take some humility.