Category Archives: Humour

Humour: no laughing matter?

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Laughter has not always been prized as a wholly positive phenomenon.  In the 18th century Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son: ‘there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.’  John Ray called laughter ‘the hiccup of a fool’, and Oliver Goldsmith thought that it spoke of ‘the vacant mind’.  As recently as 1964 a specialist psychology dictionary characterised laughter as an ‘emotional response, expressive normally of joy, in the child and the unsophisticated adult.’ …

Edinburgh Fringe – Best Joke

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Nine judges narrowed it down to a short-list of 27 jokes, and then comedy fans voted for the top ten jokes at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

Out of the top ten, my personal favourites are:-

Paddy Lennox – “I was watching the London Marathon and saw one runner dressed as a chicken and another runner dressed as an egg. I thought: ‘This could be interesting’.

Jack Whitehall – “I’m sure wherever my dad is; he’s looking down on us.…

Well, I Never Knew That!

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The following set of unusual facts was emailed to me a while ago.  I don’t know the original source,  but whoever it was – thankyou.…

Thoughts on growing old

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A bishop was making a pastoral visit to an old people’s home in his diocese.  He went up to one elderly lady, sitting in her chair, and asked her how long she’d been living there.  “Why do you want to know?” she snapped.

He carried on regardless.  “Do you have your own room?”

“Go away and leave me alone!” she said.

The bishop wasn’t used to this kind of response.  “Do you know who I am?”…

All those denominations

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To be honest, one of the most serious problems of Protestantism has been its tendency to split into factions.  Douglas Woodruff, for example, tells of ‘an industrious German, the father of a large family, who, with the help of willing child labour compiled a dictionary of Protestant sects.  His name is Grundler, and he has often kept his children in on a Sunday to help him arrange the cards, listing 2,639 different Christian denominations, the glorious fruit of the Protestant Reformation.’…

Logical Laws

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Time for another smile.  Everyone’s heard of ‘Murphy’s Law’.  Not everyone realises that there’s a whole family of them.  Here are a few members of the family:-…

Children’s Letters to God

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A bit of light relief.  Here are a few of my favourites from Children’s Letters to God:-

Dear God…

‘I would like all the bad things to stop.’
‘My father is mean.  Please get him not to be.  But don’t hurt him.’
‘Instead of letting people die and having to make new ones why don’t you just keep the ones you’ve got now?’
‘Please send me a pony.  I never asked for anything before.  You can look it up.’…