I was going to begin this post with some fancy-pants quote about the serious philosophy behind apparently facile humour, but, frankly, I can't really be bothered. It's Friday afternoon.
Many thanks for responding to last week's plea to send in your best quips and beat the late, great Spike Milligan at his own game. What a funny lot you are - and we mean that in the most positive sense, of course. Even the ones who produced jokes by Spike Milligan.
We got 65-odd in the end, ranging from the gnomic and haiku-like to the utterly overgrown (there are limits, Mr Orange-Head-Joke Man, and I'm afraid you transgressed). They ranged through the mildly scatalogical to the occasionally unnerving, with plenty of solid classics along the way. Brown, sticky sticks? Now you're talking.
Anyway - roll up, roll up ... It's prize time.
Once Marxist wisecracks had been removed from consideration (not for ideological reasons, I hasten to add, but because the person who posted them works for us), we came up with an impressive top three.
In joint third place are PrinceMyshkin237, who delivered the priest, minister and rabbi meta-joke, and gmabarrett, who offered what was for me an entirely new one, a spin on the old omelette-eggs truism whose pun/typography alignment brought particular praise from our subeditors.
In second position comes tolis, with a classic vow-of-silence number - well done, tolis, for reproducing an old classic with such attention to detail.
But our winner is ... the finely named GuidoLibido, whose Beckettian masterpiece had us chortling for several minutes at least. Here it is in all its epigrammatic and improbably olde-worlde (why "quoth", prithee?) glory:
Two ducks watching the river flow by. One to the other: "quack". "That's strange," quoth duck #2, "I was about to say exactly the same thing."
Guido, The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (no, we couldn't find anything funnier, sorry) is yours to have and hold. We'll be in touch so you can claim your prize. And to discuss a regular spot on TV.
