A Dutch treat, plumbing the depths of woeful comedy

THE following joke may well be the worst joke ever told. The following joke is too long, stretching to more than 400 words, making it tricky for teller of the joke to remember and difficult for the listener to maintain an interest. The following joke is too complicated, with more strands than the beautiful coast of Wicklow and Wexford. The following joke is too obscure, ideally requiring those who hear it to have knowledge of pop music from the 1950s with particular reference to the output of British entertainer Max Bygraves.

Compare this convoluted tale with the classic: Question – why did the chicken cross the road? Answer – to get to the other side. The only people in the world who need to have the words ‘road’ or ‘chicken’ explained to them are the seal eating Inuit of the trackless Arctic wilderness: No ancient hit records.

The chicken joke is not only universal, it also has the virtue of being brief, all done in a matter of seconds, while the following joke rambles on for close to five minutes. Worst of all, the following joke tends to divide the audience into two camps.

The first camp is comprised of those who see the punch-line coming long before it is delivered, while the second camp is made up of those who do not recognise that the punch-line is actually the punch-line. As a result, that moment which comedians crave, when all present join in a wave of laughter, is denied to the teller of the following joke. The telling of the following joke typically extracts a scattering of guffaws before sympathetic members of the first camp set about explaining what they have just heard to baffled members of the second camp…

Once upon a time and long, long ago, there was a Dutch poet – let’s call him Jens - and he was not a happy man. Being Dutch, Jens assumed a natural superiority of his nation over the neighbouring Belgians. Being a poet, however, Jens bemoaned the fact that he was at a disadvantage in his work as compared with his opposite number on the far side of the border.

The Belgian rival had so much scope, able to rhyme Brussels with hustles, muscles, bustles, tussles and so on – it really did not seem fair. Feeling he was unable to match his rival in celebrating national virtue and virility, poor Jens slipped into depression. He moped. He frowned. He paced his room, muttering ‘answer man’, ‘camper van’, ‘amber ham’ and other like phrases, each one dismissed in turn as unlikely, or unwieldy, or otherwise unsuitable.

A friend – let’s call her Anna – noticed that Jens appeared down in the dumps, so she invited him out to spend some time at her home on the outskirts of the capital city. He arrived in March, or it may have been April, to find that his visit coincided with a spell of decent weather. He was able to spend hours on end in Anna’s lovely garden, through which flowed a small stream. He sat soaking up the sunshine and ruminating – ‘antler Sam’, ‘pan stir jam’, ‘ran for can’ as the search for the right words became increasingly desperate.

Now Anna had recently acquired a couple of pets. The assistant in the pet shop told her they were guinea pigs but they seemed small for guinea pigs and they certainly did not behave like guinea pigs. They were relentlessly energetic and Jens noticed that the alleged guinea pigs had taken to blocking the stream with pieces of wood. And when they had finished blocking the stream, these enterprising little animals began to add a tribute to the Rolling Stones. On top of the pieces of wood, they formed a representation of a large Jagger-esque mouth.

So there was Jens in March (possibly April), in the suburbs of his native town, admiring two rodents which were not quite guinea pigs as they cut off a water-course and paid homage to one of the world’s best-known rock groups.

He was so taken with the little critters that his mumbling ceased. And then inspiration struck and the blues lifted as he drew inspiraton from the great Max Bygraves to sing out at the top of his voice in triumph: ‘When it’s spring again, I’ll bring again – two lips from hamster dam!’

Geddit?

If anyone has a worse joke, please feel free to send it to me.