Most useless joke at this year's Edinburgh fringe

5)

Actually, I just picked the best one, oops.

Most useless? 8

I'm sure 8) is a variation on a very old joke but I can't think what the original was.

obviously 4

http://robbeckettcomedy.com/

i mean just take one look at this utter cuntflap

putting tim vine in here is p dense, machinegunning useless jokes is his whole thing iirc

fucking hell comedians are utterly worthless creatures

NONE of these are REMOTELY FUNNY

yeah like can you imagine ever being that desperate for attention

Yep, 4 is the clear winner.

Seems strange to have a competition like this given that the vast majority of modern comedy runs on completely different lines.

9 is the worst in terms of just not working as a joke

4 is the worst in making me think about what an awful human the comedian pobably is

these are never funny. that said it's less an indictment of all comedians, for me (not that I'm much of a fan of the genre) and more just a bizarre media op. one-liners aren't particularly funny as a rule and they aren't even a big part of any decent stand-up.

eh 9 works fine, it's meant to be shit

8 too if it wasnt for the unnecessarily awkward "how ships are kept"

Tony Cowards ‏@TonyCowards
A bloke asked me if he could put a teabag in my mouth and fill me with boiling water, he must think I'm some kind of mug.

fucking winner

Take my wife, Posh and Becks.

i thought 10 was the best... of a bad bunch.

3) might work better if it had a bit more pathos in it like "my sister was devestated" rather than annoyed. that said, jokes are rubbish and rarely work, especially out of context.

What is the joke in #1? (I do know who Posh and Becks are.)

I thought #3 was the only one that was kinda funny even when read as text. Some of the others might work live, but #4 I could never ever imagine laughing to. (Maybe because I come from a working class family, and we had a big shelf full of books.)

(x-post)

I assumed their kids have funny names? Don't know if that's actually true, though.

Oh wait they named one of their kids Seven. Whatever.

I thought Seven was Andre 3000's kid?

Star Trek Voyager has a lot to answer for.

'harper seven'. the seven is, i am informed, after beckham's shirt no.

This whole Tim Vine school of terrible one-liners is very grating. Obviously number 4 is the pits. I'm not against stand-up but firing out a stream of terrible puns like so much Twitter fodder seems really redundant today.

want someone to find out if number four went to oxbridge

http://www.pleasanceahoy.com/media/uploads/profile/0/20120630092833_preview.jpg

seems unlikely

http://www.slashfilm.com/wp/wp-content/images/slimer.jpg

About half of these are passable Reader's Digest jokes. I laughed a little at number 5. I voted for #4 for useless class dickholery.

well i assume the appeal is the speaker's nominal working-classness tbh. can't decide if that makes it worse.

I think it would make it worse, although I don't have any clue what class the guy is supposed to be from. Encouraging the whole system that oppresses you and all. Plus, lots of middle and upper class people have moved to kindles and nooks anyway, so their bookshelves are smaller. It's like making a TV dinner joke in the 1990s.

I totally want to imagebomb a thread with that pic of him though. Really hope there's a clusterfuck today.

http://robbeckettcomedy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Rob-Becketts-Big-Mouth1.png

Yeah, that drawing is a generous reimagining of what's really going on there.

http://sgfringe.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/robbeck.jpg

he looks like this other, female, comedian:

http://media.livenation.co.uk/fido/publishing/artiste/b/h/c/Holly%20Walsh.jpg

bit big.

these are p funny

don't troll

actually it's only 1, 2, 4 that bother me

also on what planet would groupmember making joke about group be less offensive than nonmember doing the same

planet england

2 is stupid. 4 is just a british jeff foxworthy joke. i grinned at 3, 7, 8, 10. none of the rest really bugged me

being a class traitor totes worse than just hating the poor anyway (nb i am pretty sure i don't actually believe this but who knows)

> It's not rocket salad.

this joke first heard in Love Soup series 2, what, 4 years ago? (imdb says 2008, so yes)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51YQDFG1RBL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

There's no logic to that joke either cos surely rocket salad would be really quick to prepare?

http://archives.mikeerickson.net/xhtmlfall09/images/005.jpg

nope

neat how the first ten jokes of like any Rodney Dangerfield standup is worlds better than the best of British one-liners

ban comedians

We can only flag them

xp but 'my set' suggests him actually trying to physically force the badger into a sett entrance that it is too large to fit through, with just its abdomen and back paws showing, though.
'Mr Fatbadger' I like as a faux-Dickensian character name, but it already has 4 google hits

How is this one not on the best list?

6. “I'd like to start with the chimney jokes - I've got a stack of them. The first one is on the house.” - Tim Vine

These one-line twitter pun comedians that seem to be everywhere these days are the worst thing in the world

And I am not against awful puns obv! I've made jokes like those before I'm sure, but the idea of someone having to sit and come up with hundreds of them for a job is so depressing

idk, although not funny there's something perversely admirable about Tim Vine's dedication to his work. One Tim Vine seems plenty, though.

Like well fucking done you thought of a common phrase and worked backwards, now tell me a joke

Saw one of these fucks called Gary Delaney, he was MUCH worse than Vine

Gary Delaney
Film writer
Gary Delaney is an English writer and stand-up comedian. Delaney was born in Solihull. BBC Online described Delaney as "the man Jimmy Carr tries to be". He writes for Birmingham-based FM radio station Kerrang! -Wikipedia
Born: April 16, 1973 (age 41), Solihull
Spouse: Sarah Millican (m. 2013)
Movies: Trash House

As I'm sure I've said upthread somewhere, I don't find Tim Vine funny, but he does kind of get away with it because this is so much his schtick, it's not just bad jokes, it's bad jokes as a raison d'etre.

1. “My mate sat on my pumpkin. He butternut squash it.” - Leo Kearse

This is definitely the worst. The tenses don't even really work. In the past an activity took place, but you are punning on a future imperative? Like, it's actually easy to make it better just by resolving this conflict: "My mate asked if he could sit on my pumpkin. I said yes, but you'd butternut squash it".

see i assumed that was a joke about butts and nuts

anyway, stand-up is 96 percent bullshit and within that context Tim Vine seems quite likeable and easily as funny as most of his peers

Tim Vine kind of wears you down with sheer volume of bad jokes until you start laughing despite yourself (well I do, anyway), I think his jokes suffer from being taken out of context like this, which maybe seems counterintuitive?

Yeah, with Tim Vine its definitely a case of quantity over quality, but sometimes gorging on laboured puns is enough,.

Sometimes it is, not enough.

That post only works because of poor grammar.

the problem with lex' denunciation of comedy is, to adopt zizek, that is isn't violent enough

maybe it's short for gangban comedians

Saw one of these fucks called Gary Delaney, he was MUCH worse than Vine
― Hogan's Bluff (wins)

Gary Delaney is a GREAT joke writer - a real old-school craftsman. He's got a Steven Wright vibe to his best work. His interview on Stuart Goldsmith's podcast is fascinating for anyone interested in the mechanics of joke writing.

Huh when I saw him it was basically tim vine with added xkcd/ONLY INTELLECTUALS WILL GET THESE CRAP PUNS audience-flattering lameness

Like I'm coming across as a grump but I'm not much troubled by discernment irl I basically like everything but I'm struggling with the idea that there is any overlap between ~smart comedy~ and "the punch line is trigonomnomnometry"

Have to admit I've got a real soft spot for Tim Vine.

"My wife hadn't heard of 'mansplaining', so I told her what it was"

1-5 on the good list are all par or above

XP ysee if mansplaining is just being a man explaining something to a woman then that doesn't work, but obv on ilx it has a chance

Yeah, it's 'only' a ... actually, no it's a true story it happened yesterday.

It needs an insert along the lines of ' I told her slowly and carefully' to be a joke, but it's not.

the problem with lex' denunciation of comedy is, to adopt zizek, that is isn't violent enough

IT CAN BE VIOLENT

Nah, the mansplaining thing needs to be more like "My wife was telling me about 'mansplaining' yesterday, so I had to tell her what it was" (this is not funny but truer to the purpose of the neologism).

What my wife was telling me about was a situation where it seemed clear that it was a colleague had an issue, but was explaining it to her as if it was her problem or issue. When I had said what mansplaining was, she said "yes, that's exactly how it was".

Timing!

ya to both

it is a bad joke, anyway, I think were all agreed

my gf went to a lecture where she learnt about mansplaining, when she told me i said "oh yeah mansplaining let me tell you all about that". we both lolled, trufact.

Close. To the ledge.

Jamaica I hardly Antigua

the tim vine joke really sucks

sorry, no, his joke was great, but the subject matter really sucked

The problem with it is that the common phrase isn't "collecting dust", it's "gathering dust". I would never describe an unused object (my exercise bike, for example) as collecting dust.

I think people say 'collecting duct'.

'dust'

course they do. joke passed.

"collecting dust" About 842,000 results (0.40 seconds)

"gathering dust" About 623,000 results (0.34 seconds)

^^^ mansplaining fyi

"collecting duct" (464,000)

The Gary Delaney jokes I like take about a half second to land, e.g. "Why is it every time I go to the gym, Princess Diana dies?"

But yeah, his last show had a big chunk about memes and Wikipedia (like him having edited the "Alf" page to claim that it stood for. "Alien I'd like to fuck") - I could see that stuff being more annoying.

But he's a very funny dude I think

Wait - Tim Vine is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Vine 's brother?

Yes.

I bet Tim is grim and realistic at family dinners and Jeremy is vv funny.

saw someone say they were brothers y'day and thought they were joking

J Vine's trembling 'emotion' voice while speaking to people about grave issues on air is one of my least favourite sounds in the world

Jeremy vine is profoundly worthless

I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I've got this Delaney character all wrong, but after 20 mins I was like just gimme a genial idiot talking about how his dad is a bit weird or whatever

"My wife was telling me about 'mansplaining' yesterday, so I had to tell her what it was" (this is not funny but truer to the purpose of the neologism).

if this whole sentence was the joke then i would approve 100%

The mansplaining joke more or less reworks this Jimmy Carr bit:

"Someone came up to me after a show and said he thought I was paytronizing. I said well I think you'll find that's pronounced 'patronizing'." (Aside to front row): "It means when you talk down to someone."

http://i.imgur.com/NXeiY0b.jpg