Covid’s grim but indomitable humour will triumph

ON this date last year, I asked, “Who wants to play April Fool pranks today?”

Tomfoolery would be out of place, when coronavirus had played the greatest practical joke on the human race.

The price of eating infected animals in China was a deadly disease which could wipe out millions, and japes paled into insignificance against that backdrop.

Worldwide, nearly three million have died, and more than 126,000 have succumbed in the UK in those 12 months. But the pandemic has also yielded an enormous amount of grim humour.

It is a testament to the indestructibility of human nature that we can still find images of the virus funny. I’d tell you a

Covid joke now, but I’d have to wait two weeks to see if you get it. Before, you’d cough to cover up a fart. Now, you fart to cover up a cough.

What’s the best way to stop touching your face? A glass of wine in each hand. And why does the dog look like that at you after three lockdowns? He’s thinking, “Now you know why I chew the furniture.”

I like: ”COVID spelt backwards is DIVOC. What DIVOC is going on?” In Germany, they’re stocking up on sausage for lockdown. This is a wurst-case scenario.

Dr Chris Smith, of Cambridge University, speaks live to TV cameras with a huge clock on the wall behind him, ticking with spikes on a ball like the bug.

It’s been terribly hard, for those who lost loved ones, or suffered the misery of this disease. But if we can come out of this nightmare with humour intact, Covid has not beaten us. The human spirit survives.