Jobcentre sacking gag is Fringe’s funniest

 A joke about being fired from a Jobcentre was named the funniest at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Liverpool comedian Adam Rowe won the award for Funniest Joke Of The Fringe with the line: “Working at the Jobcentre has to be a tense job – knowing that if you get fired, you still have to come in the next day.” Taken from his Undeniable show, it picked up 41 per cent of a public vote. Rowe said: “I wrote it when I was on stage in Liverpool. A guy said he worked in the Jobcentre and I said the joke.”

The Monty Python team once devised a sketch in which a writer called Ernest Scribbler wrote a joke so funny that he dies laughing. Anyone who hears it is killed instantly, apart from the few dullards who take a while to get it. The joke is so dangerous that it is comandeered by the Army and used as a secret weapon. The same fate is unlikely to befall the funniest joke to have emerged from this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This concerns a Job Centre employee and the observation that it is the one office that you can be sacked from that you have to come back to the next day. If that’s the funniest joke in Edinburgh this year, the fringe’s comedic offerings must have been a dour affair. Actually laughing at the jokes no longer appears to be a requirement of jocularity; a groan will suffice.