I am a fan of hilarious one-line jokes.
I put a skylight in my apartment recently – the people upstairs are furious.
Of course things are always in the last place you look. You don’t find something and then say I’ll just take another look over there.
Why do elephants have corrugated feet? To give the mice a fifty-fifty chance.
If you had six apples and I took away four what would you have left? A very bad reason for staying in business.
Sometimes they are just plain silly, sometimes they turn the tables on what you expect from the assumptions you have made about the world. Humour they say, is a way of communicating important lessons about the world but whatever comedians say, the messages always stay humorous. It is easy to encapsulate something about human behaviour – be it racism, paedophilia or whatever – in a gag that makes a point but never stops being a gag. That’s why comedians don’t actually ever change public opinion.
Of course we come away saying ‘they are so right’ but we are laughing and that makes us feel good. Good that we got the point? Good that we see what the comedian sees? Good that we have been a little risqué, that the envelope of taste and acceptability has been pushed a little higher? Many years ago someone at college gave me a joke for anyone. You choose the nation you don’t like and insert it at ‘x’.
Why are there only two people at a ‘x’ funeral? It only takes two to hold a dustbin.