I read a post a short time ago by the wonderful Debby where she used a writing prompt from a journal she bought. This inspired me to buy my own but on a totally different subject (mine is all about cultivating joy and well-being).

The prompt for yesterday was to write a joke. Hmmm, I am not good at jokes, unless they are very rude or very silly. I love the ‘knock knock’ jokes, and the ‘what do you call?’ ones. As in:

‘What do you call a man with a shovel on his head?’ Answer: Doug!

‘What do you call a man without a shovel on his head?’ Answer: Douglas!! (it’s all in the pronunciation)!

I won’t bore you with any others as they are really old jokes and not that funny unless you are me, who finds them hilarious!

Anyway, I decided that as I couldn’t tell any jokes I would talk a little about British humour instead.

The first thing that springs to mind is the fact that we love innuendo, double entendre, and a good pun (or even a bad pun, anything goes)! The ‘Carry On Films’ are a veritable feast if you like that kind of thing, with their silly storylines, and crazy character names such as a surgeon named Dr Carver, and a young doctor called Dr Nookey ( a British euphemism for sex). I’m thinking this must have had an early subconscious influence on my choice of career! They always had such fun in the hospitals in these films.

The Sun Newspaper loves puns and innuendoes too, and they have had some famous (or infamous) headlines over the years. For example, when Elton John and David Furnish married, their headline was ‘Elton Takes David Up The Aisle’ and ‘How Do You Solve A Problem Like Korea’ which needs no explanation!

Sarcasm features pretty heavily in our humour armoury too and it is always appreciated whenever we hear it. Comments like’ I’m returning your nose, dear, I found it in my business’ and one (of many) from Winston Churchill ‘ I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly!’ Another favourite is when parents say things like, ‘I think you have forgotten to put a skirt on’ or ‘can you plaster on any more makeup?’ to their teenaged daughters when they are going out!

This can get a bit confusing though as sometimes we say something straight-faced but mean the exact opposite, such as ‘Oh, lovely’ it’s raining again, I can’t wait to go out in it!’ or even worse. ‘Yes, green is definitely your colour’ when it is obvious that it looks hideous!Mind you, it could be worse if they went the whole hog and said that ‘green is definitely your colour, it matches your complexion!’

One of my favourite types of humour is the observational kind. We have several comedians who are brilliant at this, Michael McIntyre and Peter Kaye are so good at turning the ordinary situations into massive belly laughs!

We have a fixation about class too, and that often comes out in our humour. There was a famous Monty Python Sketch that they showed us at Uni about the British Class system which you can see here.

I suppose our most common type of humour is the self-deprecating type, of the hapless idiot always messing things up. We do love to put ourselves down, then have a major complex if anyone agrees with us. What a mixed-up lot we are!

I hope I have managed to give you some laughs despite the rubbish jokes at the beginning!