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But I don't want to live in interesting times...
Doing bedtime jokes with Ernie and Phoebe started shouting the answers from her bedroom. I gave them one point for the right answer and two points for a better answer than the official one.
The best of the bunch was
"What do you get if you cross a sheep with a kangaroo?"
Phoebe "An abomination!"
It's true, making jokes about interbreeding animals is unacceptable in any context.
Weirdly I clearly remember the first time I heard that joke. I was in a car with my grandad and he tried this one on me. I didn't know and he told me (the inferior "woolly jumper" punchline) and I didn't get it, but I laughed anyway. Because I didn't want to look like I didn't get jokes.
I was 28 years old.
The jokes I didn't get often stuck in my mind, like little puzzles that needed to be solved. The penny would drop days, months or with some of the ruder ones years later. Right from the start all I cared about was comedy and trying to understand this confusing art form.
When I was even younger my grandad asked me if I'd ever seen a pig with one eye. He then put his hand over his own eye and I laughed because I thought he was the pig. Still the joke was in the mental rolodex and many years later I realised that the joke was that you could see a pig with one eye, by covering one of your eyes. It was a classic misdirection. Maybe I knew that my interpretation of the joke was not satisfying and finally I worked it out.
Thankfully my audiences are quicker at getting jokes than this. It'd be awful if you had to wait thirty years for your laugh.
It's strange because I've never been very good at remembering jokes mainly because I quickly started to see their limitations. Yet I remember the ones that confused me. When adults laughed at something that didn't seem funny to me, the comment would stick in my mind, until years later I would realise what the joke had meant. Usually something to do with sex or penises. Is there any other comedic subject?
Of course these childish jokes are rarely very good (though tonight I found this one from the internet funny - "A lot of people cry when they cut an onion. The trick is not to form an emotional bond.") but they teach us how to be funny and also give us our own emotional bond to the person who told them. Nice to have the baton passed with the kangaroo and sheep joke and to get a memory that my daughter might pass down to her kids and grandkids and to imagine about how my grandad might have reacted to Phoebe's punchline.
I actually don't think he'd have liked it. He was a traditionalist and Phoebe's subversive punchline might have confused him. But that seems appropriate.
I also enjoyed "What do you call a cow without a map?"
Phoebe (deadpan) "A cow."
Another guest announced for the Edinburgh run of RHLSTP. On August 9th I will be talking to the UK's second best ventriloquist, Nina Conti.
Tickets here.
