Top ten jokes from the Edinburgh Festival “Fringe“:

  1. I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
  2. Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.
  3. People say “I’m taking it one day at a time.” You know what? So is everybody. That’s how time works.
  4. Drive-Thru McDonalds was more expensive than I thought … once you’ve hired the car …
  5. I was playing chess with my friend and he said, “Let’s make this interesting.” So we stopped playing chess.
  6. My mother told me, you don’t have to put anything in your mouth you don’t want to. Then she made me eat broccoli, which felt like double standards.
  7. I was in a band which we called The Prevention, because we hoped people would say we were better than The Cure.
  8. Someone asked me recently — what would I rather give up, food or sex. Neither! I’m not falling for that one again, wife.
  9. I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can’t even be bothered to check my own voicemails.
  10. My friend died doing what he loved … heroin.

I dunno, seems to me there’s been a falling off there. A couple of those got a smile from me, but no belly laughs. Perhaps humor’s going through a fallow period, like 18th-century English verse. Or perhaps it’s me.

Although, of course, as we all know, nothing’s been the same since the death of vaudeville.