Warming Up

I love calculating pi so much that I do it 22/7.

And that my friends is my joke for 2023. Fantastic to have got it out the way so early. Can really relax and enjoy myself with that burden lifted.|

I felt sure someone would have done this one before, but investigation turned up only two tweets which were along the lines of going to a pie shop that is open 22/7. But I actually think the additional food pun lessens the joke and maybe even confuses it slightly. 

Predictably someone on Twitter (Funi) had a heckle

"That's not even close to pi. Pi=3.1415... 22/7=3.1428…”

Though as others pointed out - that is pretty close to pi and is also the generally accepted estimate and most comedians aren’t accurate to two decimal places.

But just in case Richard Gray fixed it for me "I love calculating pi so much that I do it 21.99114857512855/7.”

Julian Kilburn thought that "Memorising probably better than calculating”, but he is wrong. I think it’s funnier to imagine someone spending 22 hours a day calculating pi, rather than memorising it and also cs are funnier than ms. Also 22 divided by 7 is how you (approximately) calulcate pi, not how you memorise it. Julian Kilburn is a fucking idiot. But you can't do a joke on Twitter without some cunts wading in and thinking they know more about writing jokes than a comedian (though admittedly one who doesn't write many).

And thus the one-liner becomes a routine. Just another 59 minutes and I’ve got a new show.

There are lots of things that make me relieved that Twitter is going to die a slow death, but it is great for stuff like this.

I also to have brought one player over from the heretical world of 2 player snooker (though he’s still playing on that parodic oversized board and it’s flat as a pancake), Stephen Hendry is now playing himself at snooker.

We went to see my daughter’s end of term play at her drama club. I tried to film her bits for posterity. She stepped towards the front of the stage area so I fired up the camera. It turned out she was coming to ask the teacher if she could go to the loo. So got that on film. It was a production of Robin Hood and my favourite bit was when King Richard arrived on his horse which was a broomstick. He then exuberantly shouted “Yeah, I’m back” or words to that effect and tried to spin the broomstick around but dropped it clattering to the floor and almost fell over it. It was one of the funniest bits of slapstick I’ve seen for a while, made more delicious by the fact that we weren’t really allowed to laugh at it. Luckily the King Richard actor was very funny and wasn’t thrown by his hubristic entrance.

Phoebe was good too. When she wasn’t going to the toilet. You don’t see that in many plays though.

RHLSTP with Nish Kumar is now up in all the usual places.