A JOKER’S SEVEN RULES

If you want to perfect the art of telling jokes, there are only seven rules. Why are there rules? “Simples,” as Orlov the meerkat in the TV commercials likes to say because if you want to be a successful joker you need to know the rules. Here they are:

before you tell a joke in public

DO speak clearly without rushing what you’re saying, and look at your audience when you are telling a joke

DO choose the right moment to tell your joke, because if your audience isn’t in the right mood even your funniest joke won’t make them laugh

DON’T tell jokes that will hurt anyone’s feelings

DON’T start a joke unless you know how it finishes, because the end – the punchline, as it’s called – is usually the best bit

DON’T tell the same joke to the same audience twice

DON’T tell a joke unless it’s one that makes you laugh

NAUGHTY… BUT NICE: Knock knock! Who’s there? Statue. Statue who? Statue, bro?

boy involved big, fat telephone directories, literally two inches thick. Growing up in London, there were four of them and my father would place them on top of a half-open door. As you went through the door, they would land on you. Hilarious.

My mother put a stop to it when he almost killed the cat.

We used to go to joke shops and he bought me a special dribbling wine glass. It looked like crystal and had little cuts in it so that you dribbled when you drank. He adored it. Sadly, our house guests did not. We would knock over their cups of tea with the squeezy tubes, serve them wine in the dribbling glasses and then catch them with the falling telephone books.

So I was brought up on jokes and inherited these wonderful Victorian joke books, which my wife eventually threw away because lots of gags were inappropriate. She said, ‘We can’t have these in the house, they’re awful.’ So when we started having children – a boy and two girls – I didn’t have any jokes to tell them. I decided I was going to collect my own and write down my one-liners, pranks and puns for my children.

One year, after Christmas, I went to Selfridges and saw they had a lot of surplus