Walking down to the gym this evening (oh yes) I passed some people standing outside a shop which looked like it was being cleared out. They had various items on the floor around them with signs saying “Free” on them. One of the items was a box of Christmas crackers. I am going to start my show in party garb and idly thought to myself that the paper hats in the crackers might be useful to me. But by then I had passed by and I wasn’t sure I wanted to carry a big box of Christmas crackers with me to the gym at the end of July. People might think I was odd.
Lucy was cooking dinner at home and then I reasoned that it would be pretty funny to turn up for the meal with crackers for all my housemates to pull, so I stifled my embarrassment went back to the shop and said, “Can I have those crackers?” The people giving the stuff away said “Sure!” and didn’t even question why I might want them. In fact one of them said “Would you like a hot water bottle as well?”
“No,” I said, before rapidly reconsidering. It had been quite cold in bed last night. Maybe I would have a hot water bottle after all. “Oh go on then,” I chirped. It’s great getting free stuff, even if it’s stuff you don’t really want. There was probably a sad story of store closure behind this giveaway, but it made me love Edinburgh and particularly the hippyish people at this shop for thinking, “Ah fuck it, might as well just give our stuff away.”
The crackers proved a hit at dinner time. Even though the box would only have cost £3.29 if I had bought it for real (though it was at least a couple of years old as one of the trivia questions was about where the Commmonwealth Games would be held in 2006 – it’s Melbourne, you ninny) the prizes were all quite good: a little water-pistol, some mini-screwdrivers, some marbles, one of those parachuting plastic men. I felt sorry for the people who make cracker toys though, because ultimately for all their effort they are manufacturing things that in all likelihood will go in the bin within 24 hours.
Each cracker had a piece of paper with two trivia questions and two jokes on it and we had some fun quizzing each other – a group of comedians trying to guess the cracker joke. It was about as much fun as a group of grown ups could have with some crackers. And it was genuinely fun. Especially when we came up with better punchlines./
“Why did the frog say Meow?” asked Lucy.
“Because he had a cat in his throat,” Justin snapped back.
This was incorrect – the real answer is “Because he was learning a foreign language”, but Justin’s in funnier.
“What do you call a cheese that is not yours?” asked Justin.
“Stolen Goudas,” I posited. But alas the answer that Justin found genuinely amusing (he was not wrong) was “Nacho cheese”. I like it when pun answers put the actual meaning in brackets, so let’s do that now “Nacho (not your) cheese”.
“Why couldn’t the pirate play cards?” asked Sarah.
“Because he had cut out all the hearts,” I guessed.
But no it was because he was sitting on the deck.
We had a lot of fun going for deliberately unfunny answers or struggling to get to an answer, though things were complicated by the fact that half the questions were trivia.
“How many hearts does an earthworm have?” asked Sarah. We struggled to think of an amusing answer.
“Ten,” she told us. It had been a trivia question.
Then I came across a joke that I predicted would fox the assembled comedic brains round the table.
“When do ghosts usually appear?” I asked.
Everyone was stumped though had a crack.
“A quarter to boo (two)” shouted someone
“Scream (three) o’clock!” someone else attempted.
“Mid-fright” someone else may well have cried.
But no-one got it, as I had smugly foreseen.
I will send all the novelty toys that have not yet been thrown away and an Oh Fuck IÂ’m 40 programme to whoever emails in in by about midday Thursday with the closest to the wording on the paper. Failing that the funniest one will win. My decision is final.
Email to Herring1967@googlemail.com – the answer will be in tomorrow's Warming Up.
