Today I’m thinking about jokes.  Mostly I’m thinking that I don’t remember them very well.  I suppose I prefer a visual gag (Harold Lloyd especially), but I also enjoy spoken gags that play on words.  My favourite being the Two Ronnies sketch in a hardware store where Ronnie Barker as a yokel asking for a bunch of different things that Ronnie Corbert as the shopkeeper then gets but it turns out to be something different that sounds the same.  It starts with him asking for “4 candles” which the shopkeeper then puts on the counter only to hear “no: fork handles”.  It goes on like this with the poor shopkeeper getting more and more irate and double checking each thing and trying to list all alternatives only to find himself bringing the wrong item anyway.  That’s fabulous stuff, but it doesn’t work as well written down.  Bringing me onto possibly the only joke I can remember easily:

Two nuns are in the bath.  One says “Where’s the soap” and the other replies “Yes, it does, doesn’t it”.

English smut at it’s best.  Nuns, naked, bathing together, with an oblique reference to something sexual, although on the face of it this joke is not at all rude.  It’s just a play on the word “wear”, but as people search for the joke they find the lewdness first and that helps them get it.  But of course washing your legs (or whatever) also wears out the soap.

This double meaning  is a staple of the Marx brothers humour, although often without the sexual overtones, thus

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog it is too dark to read”.

which works pretty well on the page, but much better as a one liner.

Of course the written word also allows the odd joke that doesn’t work when spoken out loud, for example, the funny techy joke you often see in peoples signatures on forums:

There are only 10 types of people in the world – those that understand binary and those that do not.

Not perhaps, side-splitting stuff, but funny on the page.