The funniest joke ever!
QUESTION Who said the perfect joke was one where the set-up and the punch line were the same?
CANADIAN comedian Norm Macdonald described his holy grail as a joke where the punch line was the same as the set-up.
He became famous for Weekend Update, the comic news bulletins on the Saturday Night Live TV show in the U.S., but was sacked for telling jokes about O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson.
The closest Norm came to his perfect joke was: ‘Julia Roberts told reporters this week that her marriage to Lyle Lovett has been over for some time. The key moment, she said, came when she realised that she was Julia Roberts and that he was Lyle Lovett.’ Country music star Lovett is known for his distinctive features. Another example followed the death of Jerry Rubin, a leading figure in the U.S. counterculture and co-founder of the Youth International Party (YIP), whose members were called Yippies.
Norm began: ‘Yippee! Jerry Rubin died last week...ahem!... that is, Yippie Jerry Rubin died last week.’
Rory Wilson, Bath.
QUESTION What was the first item on ITV’s News At Ten when it launched on Monday, July 3, 1967?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, News At Ten began life on July 3 as a 13-week experiment, but ran in the same format until 1999. Prior to this no bulletin had lasted more than 15 minutes.
The first item was an abandoned strike from the NUR, also on the menu were reports from Suez and Aden, the abduction of former Congolese Prime Minister Moise Tshombe, the development of China’s first Hydrogen bomb and Montreal’s Expo 67.
The second half had a sports bulletin featuring tennis and cricket and a report from the House Of Commons.
News At Ten opened with the instantly recognisable theme tune called Arabesque, written by Johnny Pearson. The programme had intended to use the chimes of Big Ben prior to the news beginning. By happy accident the engineer played it over Andrew Gardner’s words and he fitted his soundbites into the bongs, creating the show’s famous signature opening News At Ten was also the first British news show to have two anchors.
Jason Black, Coventry.
QUESTION What was the Nootka Crisis?
THIS was an 18th-century dispute over the seizure of vessels at Nootka Sound, an inlet on Vancouver Island, which almost sparked war between Britain and Spain.
Its resolution ended the Spanish claim to monopoly of trade and settlement on the western coast of North America and made possible British colonial expansion to the Pacific. The incident began during the summer of 1789 at the Spanish outpost Santa Cruz de Nuca, named after the original inhabitants, the Nuu-chah-nulth Nation.
Commander Jose Esteban Martinez seized four British trading vessels owned by Captain John Meares that were there to establish a fur trading outpost.
Meares appealed to the British government, sparking an international incident. The Spanish claimed possession of the north-western coast of America based on a papal bull of 1493.
Pope Alexander VI had divided the western hemisphere into Spanish and Portuguese zones, in theory granting nearly the entire New World to Spain. Britain contended that rights of sovereignty could be established only by occupation of the land and threatened war. The Spanish backed down.
The Nootka Sound Convention, signed on October 28, 1790, acknowledged that each nation was free to navigate and fish in the Pacific, and to trade and establish settlements on unoccupied land.
Joseph Ware, Dawlish, Devon.
QUESTION What’s the most irritating advert?
FURTHER to the earlier answer nominating GoCompare, in its 2019 ad, the fictional Welsh tenor Gio Compario crashed into a tree and flipped his car. It was one of the most complained about adverts of all time with road safety charities claiming it trivialised accidents.
Surely the most irritating, or some say brilliant, ad was Fruit Pastilles’s ‘Got to chew’ adverts in the early 1980s. I still have to consider whether I’ve got to chew the blasted things.
Emma Murphy, Cardiff.
QUESTION Who are the most unlikely actors to feature in a horror film?
THE X-Files: I Want to Believe featured one of the most unusual pieces of casting in a horror movie. This 2008 film avoided the ongoing extraterrestrial-focused storyline that had come to dominate the X-Files TV series. Instead, it was more of a self-contained horror story.
This creative decision could have been met with enthusiasm from fans of the show, many of whom had become tired of the series’ alien conspiracy obsession. However, the movie was somewhat undone by an odd casting choice.
The story sees Mulder and Scully reunite to investigate the mysterious kidnapping of a fellow FBI agent. Central to the plot is a paedophile former priest, ‘Father Joe’, who appears to be having psychic visions linked to the crime.
For such a role, an actor with the ability to make the viewer’s skin crawl, and transmit the ugliness of