Most useless joke at this year's Edinburgh fringe - 2016 edition

full versions:

The top 15 funniest jokes from the Fringe
1."My dad has suggested that I register for a donor card. He's a man after my own heart" - Masai Graham
2."Why is it old people say "there's no place like home", yet when you put them in one…" - Stuart Mitchell
3."I've been happily married for four years - out of a total of 10" - Mark Watson
4."Apparently 1 in 3 Britons are conceived in an IKEA bed which is mad because those places are really well lit" - Mark Smith
5."I went to a pub quiz in Liverpool, had a few drinks so wasn't much use. Just for a laugh I wrote The Beatles or Steven Gerrard for every answer… came second" - Will Duggan
6."Brexit is a terrible name, sounds like cereal you eat when you are constipated" - Tiff Stevenson
7."I often confuse Americans and Canadians. By using long words" - Gary Delaney
8."Why is Henry's wife covered in tooth marks? Because he's Tudor" - Adele Cliff
9."Don't you hate it when people assume you're rich because you sound posh and went to private school and have loads of money?" - Annie McGrath
10."Is it possible to mistake schizophrenia for telepathy, I hear you ask" - Jordan Brookes
11."Hillary Clinton has shown that any woman can be President, as long as your husband did it first" - Michelle Wolf
12."I spotted a Marmite van on the motorway. It was heading yeastbound" - Roger Swift
13."Back in the day, Instagram just meant a really efficient drug dealer" - Arthur Smith
14."I'll tell you what's unnatural in the eyes of God. Contact lenses" - Zoe Lyons
15."Elton John hates ordering Chinese food. Soya seems to be the hardest word" - Phil Nicol

The first one reminds me of the awful joke I made once, wondering whether I should update my driver's license after dropping my old Farfisa off at the Goodwill.

Then again, 9 is clearly useless. Then again, 3 is bloody ancient.

10 is quite good.

voted yeastbound

enjoyed 5, 9, 10 and 14.

The obvious answer for this poll is 12. Unforgivable.

3, 6, 7, 11 probably the worst, maybe throw 15 in there.

Yeah, you don't order Soya, that's an ingredient.

Fuck me, 3 is so old it only just post-dates the development of human language.

i thought 9 was the best of a bad bunch - some of them in other years are like "groan" but a lot of these are quite shoddy even within the parameters of shit comedy. like they don't even feel like the best versions of themselves.

15 is fucking horrendous. not least cos it's p rare to see "soya" and not "soy".

6 is like something somebody would say in passing, not a joke. 5, again, doesn't seem to have involved any observation or thought. 7 the same.

I'll give 14 a vg+

That's more 'good' ones than usual. But boy, the bad ones...

I think 7 is ; starts by sounding like "its easy to think Americans are Canadians and vice versa" and then the switcheroo.

9 is a joke?

think the problem is "americans and canadians are stupid" isn't funny.

9 was p good imo. seems an effective parody.

re: 9 (xposts) Then again, a whole section of the audience laughed #EdFringeAudiences

14, I quite like.

even by the standards of comedians Watson and Smith should be ashamed of trying to pass those jokes off as their own

Arthur Smith only just post-dates the development of human language, iirc.

A funnier joke, in Graham’s view, might be this: “I got ripped off in Ireland recently. I bought some cocaine from Limerick but the third and fourth lines were a lot shorter.”

this might be useful to have online if he's ever going through customs and wants to demonstrate that he knows literally nothing about cocaine

9 is the best. Many are the worst. 6 isn't even a joke.

15 is clearly the worst.

Bizarrely the perpetrators of 6 and 15 run a pretty good new-material night - though it drags a bit when they're onstage.

A funnier version of 3 is "My wife and I were happy for 30 years...and then we met"; esp. as delivered by Bob Dylan on Theme Time Radio Hour.

Voted for #6, any remotely incisive/angry comedian could find Brexit fertile ground for bitter laughs, but that's the best they could come up with?

I don't mind #2 btw, might just be me.

Slim pickings all round certainly though.

For comparison, here are some jokes from the thread called, um, homemade jokes. Basically, you lot:

What do you call an agony aunt that doesn't exist when you get close? Mirajorie Proops.

Where did the rasta cook his teryaki? In Jah Pan!

if they do decide to ignore the results of the referendum we could call it Votey McVolte-face

Your momma's so dumb she thought abstain was what happens when a guy pulls out

What do you play when you have coffee in the morning and you're in a rush? Poopmon Go

Q: Where did the British Crossfit athlete go to feel better after losing the competition? A: The Chin-Up Bar.

I heard farms will no longer produce circular bales of hay. Cows couldn't get a square meal.

Whole Foods is getting rid of their shredded cheese. They want to make America grate again.

Q: What do you call a Glaswegian rock 'n' roll singer who is a recovering alcoholic? A: Chuck Bevvy.

Q: What do you call a Glaswegian impressionist? A: Zack Same.

you hear about the grass that got recently converted? christian bale.

In the latest example of heathen liberals taking God out of everything, TGIFridays is now known as Fridays.

That Elton John one is tooth gratingly bad

10 and 14 are the only ones which aren't irredeemably awful.

I've seen Gary Delaney live a couple of times and I really don't trust the judgement of anyone who thinks that that joke is the best one of any of his shows.

lol I literally wrote four of those terrible homemade jokes. I need to spend more time working.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-37154550

can't believe that the organ donor one was voted the best of these

Voters also got to select their most "groan-worthy" jokes of the festival.

They included Adam Hess' one-liner: "In France, J-Lo is called 'I have water'", and Darren Walsh's gag: "What do you call three members of Abba in a French slaughterhouse? Abba trois."

wonder if they literally just flip a coin to decide if a joke goes on the shortlist for "funniest" or "most groan-worthy"

could somebody explain the Tudor joke?

I think it's just a pun on Tudor/"chewed her", unless there's another level I'm missing

http://www.museudacerveja.com/colecionador_bolachas/AG1/AA/AG1_TUDOR_CRISPS.jpg?PHPSESSID=6c44da6dff93c22d053f6ffcce40c4f1

13, also very useless

Setup for the Liverpool zing seems really clunky

Yeastbound and soya are unconscionably lazy and stupid as are the public domain efforts ("efforts"). How are these always so fucking awful? I guess they represent the most lamentable phenomenon, where the height of comic ambition is to be exactly like every second asshole on Twitter (if they'd said these were 15 random tweets by ppl with 100 followers nobody would bat an eye)

Like ok the ilx homemade jokes are rough (except mine which are ageless classics obv) but the difference is none of us are suggesting that a good evenings entertainment would consist of someone reading out a hundred of them. Also as occasional efforts they usually involve a little more inspiration than "take a common expression and work backwards" which seems to be the method that gets your modern gagmen declared geniuses

The "groan-worthy" ones are much better as jokes of this sort go!

I liked 9. No use for the Clinton joke.

I definitely look to comedians to make the exact same mildly sarcastic statement I could find being made by dozens of comment box plankton after like 5 minutes' googling

kind of how I expect stand-up comedy to be tbh

one-liners are shit anyway. a funny comedian is a comedian who tells stories/jokes imbued with their personality, or can do observational stuff well. these shit puns might be mindless fun except that i think twitter has eroded the value of puns significantly. when every single shitty business and comedian, indistinguishable from each other, uses them to hawk their wares then it kind of removes the basic childish joy of saying "are you codding me?" just because a person says they've been to a fishmonger.

A definition of the kind of stand-up I enjoy that I came up with that isn't perfect but applies surprisingly well to most of the ones worth paying attention to is "a person on stage being unreasonable". But yeah you want a glimpse of the way someone's mind works which I don't get from these tweet merchants - I know comedy nerds who would declare Gary Delaney some kind of fucking sorcerer for noticing that the word "confused" can be understood two different ways

I enjoy puns (obv) but they are not things to labour over imo

Yeah, that's why I hate 15. Bad puns should ideally be in response to someone else's setup. Then at least there's something clever about spotting the opportunity. In 15, to set up the weakest imaginable pun, he just asserts the premise. Also, "soy" would have been a little better.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

hnnnnnnggggggggg

This really had to be done. I'm so glad somebody did it. #EdFringe17 pic.twitter.com/6EURwqTdOQ

— Susan Mansfield (@wordsmansfield) August 3, 2017

No it didn't and you shouldn't be.

Where else but the fucking Edinburgh Fringe.

very edinburgh fringe.

It's in settings like this that little ducklings like Dominic Holland can transform themselves into swans, but mostly with the help of an anaesthetised fuckwit R4 type comedy audience who "like a good laugh" more than the actual performance.

Bleed the bastards dry...

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15035858.Edinburgh_could_become_first_Scottish_city_to_introduce_tourist_tax/

... actually they do that anyway but still they come.

Bring in a laugh tax imo. But Dominic Holland might disagree.

actually it might work in his favour.