Featured in the Psychiatrist episode of Fawlty Towers, aired just over forty years ago, this two-word question must be a serious contender for the prize of the world’s shortest joke. If slipped in fast enough, it might have enabled Tim Vine to make a world record of 500 jokes told in an hour instead of which, he has had to be satisfied with a mere 499.
Tim was also funniest joke winner at the 2010 Edinburgh Fringe Festival when he dropped in:
“I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I tell you what, never again!”
I don’t know about you, but I am very grateful to God for including humour in our make-up. You will find, if you read my blogs regularly, that I can be a pretty serious bloke, and at times I might get a bit heavy, but I just want to put on record that I also believe humour is a gift we can be thankful for. As with all aspects of our humanity, humour needs redeeming and refining. We won’t always get it right and there will, no doubt, be times we need to repent and times to switch off. But if humour is an integral part of the process of becoming whole – and wholesome – people, we should expect some elements of fun in the learning process.
Here’s the top two of my favourite jokes.
No.2
What’s got four legs and one eye?
Two chairs and half a pig’s head.
No.1
I was at the doctor’s, and I mentioned that my dad had got a pig.
The doctor said, what about the noise, the squalour, the degradation?
I said, well he’ll just have to put up with it.
This from Black Country comedian Dolly Allen doing the Social and Working Men’s Clubs as a 70 year old to an audience who understood perfectly, and probably experienced in their own lives, working class people keeping and feeding a pig in the back yards of their terraced houses – for slaughter – together with the noise, squalour and degradation of their own lives.