People who recycle jokes

There are certain joke standards. I don’t mean that there is a certain level of quality in the world of comedy, I mean that there is a canon of supposedly ‘humorous’ comments known by all. These are jokes that everyone has heard – and quite possibly said – a thousand times over. Nobody finds them funny because they’re so familiar, but still they survive.

Have you ever said: “Who’s strangling a cat?’, or some similar phrase? Have you? HAVE YOU? I bet you have. Well don’t say it again.

For some people this ready-made joke is such a reflex that they find themselves making it even when it isn’t applicable. The point is that someone sounds so bad that they sound like a distressed feline, but for some people any singing at all is an excuse to play the funny man. I’m not a singer and I don’t particularly enjoy my colleagues joining in with the radio, but not everyone sings badly all of the time. You don’t have to make the cat-strangling joke. Just bite your lip. Is everyone going to literally die of laughter? Is anyone going to be even the slightest bit impressed at your witticism?

And if you don’t have sugar in your tea, but someone asks you if you do, for the love of God, don’t say: ‘I’m sweet enough, thanks’. You’re not agreeable enough. Shall I put something in your tea to rectify that? Like arsenic?

You could say that these hackneyed one-liners are a means of social linkage; a way of maintaining communication with those around you and identifying with them. You could say that the underlying meaning is of a shared culture. But that would be to overlook the fact that the clearer message – the message that’s being forced into your ears in the form of tainted air from a halfwit’s lungs – is that this person talks bollocks.