By Tony Deyal
A man bumps into a woman in a hotel lobby and as he does, his elbow goes into her breast. They are both quite startled. The man turned to her and said: “Ma’am, I’m so sorry, but if your heart is as soft as your breast, I know you’ll forgive me.” Without batting an eye, she replied: “If your thing is as hard as your elbow, I’ll be in room 221.” It is like the calypsonian who sang about the woman who promised to give him “something, thing, thing.” The joke and the calypso were from an earlier time when having a mix of sex and humour was important, especially in the calypso tents.
Here’s another joke that is from that same era. “A man was lying on his death bed, surrounded by his family- a weeping wife and four children. Three of the children were tall, good looking and athletic. However, the fourth and youngest was an ugly runt. “Darling wife,” the husband whispered, ” please assure me that the youngest child really is mine. I want to know the truth before I die, I will forgive you if …” The wife gently interrupted him. “Yes, my dearest, absolutely, no question, I swear on my mother’s grave that you are his father.” The man then died happily with a smile. The wife muttered under her breath, “Thank God he didn’t ask about the other three.”
While these are still around, increasingly they are being replaced by comments and jokes like, “I was in my car driving back from work. A police officer pulled me over and knocked on my window. I said: ‘One minute I’m on the phone.’” In most of the Caribbean, that driver will never ever bother to stop.
There are two more of what is happening to humour, not just that it is shorter, but the jokes are designed differently; “I always take my wife morning tea in my pyjamas. But is she grateful? No, she says she’d rather have it in a cup.” (Eric Morecambe) and “Crime in multi-story car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.” (Tim Vine). Here are a few more which I call “down to Trump”. “It takes a lot of balls to golf the way I do.”; “I told him to be himself; that was pretty mean.”; and “Don’t you hate it when someone answers their own questions? I do.”
These are all called “One-Liner jokes.” While they have been around for a long time, it is only in the past few years that they have become very popular. They are all delivered in a single line which is punchy, concise, and clever. The “jokers” often make use of the play on words, double-meaning, or double-entendre. Some of the top comedians like Milton Jones, Jimmy Carr and Steven Wright, use one-liners for most of their jokes.
Interestingly, one-liners are also used in film and TV and these become and remain memorable for years. In “When Harry Met Sally” there is, “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the test of your life to start as soon as possible.” And Love Story, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” In GOLDFINGER there was, “Shaken, not stirred.” And my favourite from “Sudden Impact”, featuring Clint Eastwood, “Go ahead, make my day.”
For me, the “One-Liner” became famous as part of the Edinburgh International “Fringe” Festival in August 1947, two days before my birth. The early jokes included, “Trump’s nothing like Hitler. There’s no way he could read a book.” (Frankie Boyle); “I’ve given up asking rhetorical questions. What’s the point?” (Alexei Sayle); and “I’m looking for the girl-next-door type. I’m just gonna keep moving house till I find her.” (Lew Fitz). There are also two that I really like because of the puns, “I wasn’t particularly close to my dad before he died…which was lucky, because he trod on a landmine.” (Olaf Falafel); and “As a vegan I think people who sell meat are disgusting, but apparently people who sell fruit and veg are grocer.” (Adele Cliff). Now on to Helm. He won the tournament with, “I need a password eight characters long so I picked up Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”
One of my favourites, Time Vine, won in 2011 with, “I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.” He then won again in 2014 with, “I’ve decided to sell my Hoover – well, it was just collecting dust.” Vine was followed in 2015 by Darren Walsh with another one-liner which also needed some thought, “I just deleted all the German names off my phone. It’s Hans free.” Then Ken Cheng hit the jackpot in 2017 saying, “I’m not a fan of the new pound coin, but then again, I hate all change.”
In 2021, Masai Graham came up with a brilliant play on words: “I thought the ‘Caesarean’ began with the letter ‘S’ but when I looked in the dictionary, it was in the ‘C’ section.” He got it the next year (2022) as well with: “I tried to steal spaghetti from the shop, but the female guard saw me and I couldn’t get pasta.” Last year, in 2023, Lorna Rose Treen became the first female comedian to win the accolade with, “I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah.”
So, not to be a cheetah myself, here are some of the best this year at the Fringe. Lou Wall at Number 13 said: “Gay people are very bad at maths. We don’t naturally multiply.” Then, at Number 12, was Roger Swift with, “I’ve got a girlfriend who never stops whining. I wish I’d never bought her that vineyard.” One I liked at Number 8 was by a regular, Masai Graham, “I wanted to know which came first the chicken or the egg so I bought a chicken and then I bought an egg and I think I’ve cracked it.”
Olaf Famarel, another of the regulars, spoke volumes with, “My dad used to say to me ‘Pints, gallons, litres’, which I think, speaks volumes.” Mark Simmons won fifth with, “I love the Olympics. My friend and I invented a new type of relay baton: well, he came up with the idea, I ran with it.” Then Simmons won first place with, “I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship but I bottled it.”
*Tony Deyal hopes that one day he will be there in Edinburgh and instead of a hearse he will be on a horse, and if not in a coffin, he will be buffing around the fringe.
