During Christmas dinner, post Christmas cracker pull, I began to muse about the people who write the jokes for Christmas crackers. Does a Christmas cracker company just commission one person to do it, or is there a whole team of people? Is it a work-from-home job or is there a room crammed full of frustrated, embittered writers who failed the audition to write for Mock The Week? Do these writers also work for greetings card companies or maybe on devising the wacky drivel found on product packaging, or are these very separate industries? Perhaps the greetings cards writers and the Christmas cracker writers have an intense, snobbish rivalry between them, and they have snide jokes about each other: the greetings cards writers dissing the Christmas cracker writers with twee rhyming couplets, the Christmas cracker writers retaliating with cringe-worthy pun-based put-downs.
I wonder how much a Christmas cracker writer gets paid. If the money is good then perhaps I might offer to lend my talents to the Christmas cracker joke writing industry. Obviously the money would have to be pretty good bearing in mind that I am currently working as a folk singer and so naturally am raking it in.
I have come up with a few jokes that I think would make for a better Christmas cracker experience than the one we had this year and so am considering creating my own Christmas cracker range. My Christmas crackers would be more environmentally friendly than other crackers because I wouldn’t bother with the hats or any other paraphernalia; just the joke. You might feel that this is short-changing people, but you haven’t read my jokes yet. When you do you’ll appreciate that the jokes are good enough to stand alone as the soul item of the Christmas cracker and that any other frippery such as hats and toys would merely get in the way of people fully experiencing the joke. It would be a shame to dilute the joke’s power with extraneous bumf.
In fact, I’d suggest that people pull my Christmas cracker a good half hour before sitting down to their Christmas dinner, because they will be so overcome by the brilliance of my joke that they will want to discuss it at length. They will want to share how the joke made them feel on a deep spiritual level, and how their lives have fundamentally irrevocably changed as a result. It would be a shame for someone to put all that effort in to making a Christmas dinner, only for it to go cold because everyone is too busy talking about the joke to eat. Obviously I will include all of these guidelines on the packaging so that people know what they’re getting in to before pulling, although, to be honest, no amount of preliminary warnings are going to be able to prepare people for what they are about to experience.
I am about to give you just two of my self-composed Christmas cracker jokes. These are merely a taster of the kind of thing you can expect when my Christmas crackers are officially released. If you are listening to the audio version of this blog post then I’d advise you, if driving, to pull over to avoid causing a road accident upon losing control of your vehicle due to involuntary spasms of hysterical laughter. OK, I have done all I can to warn you. Let’s get to the jokes.
Joke 1.
What does a Buddhist eat for breakfast?
Omelette.
Joke 2.
Did you hear about the scientist whose trousers fell down?
He won the No Belt Prize.
Sorry, I’ve just realised that I should have done a warning for those of you with heart conditions. Hopefully you are all OK. Those jokes are so incredible that some recent research indicates that they have the power to take your mind off depressing Brexit-based thoughts for at least forty seconds.
Thank you to Sam, who commented on last week’s blog post about niche aquatic porn. He says that he would like to have me saying the words “niche aquatic porn” as a text tone. I should probably charge for this service, but as I said before, I am a folk singer and so really don’t need your money, therefore I have clipped me saying the words “niche aquatic porn” from the blog post which you can download as an MP3 here, meaning that there is now absolutely no excuse not to have that as your text tone, apart from the excuse of being a sane and rationally thinking person, but given that you read my blogs that is unlikely to be the case.
Let us know how you get on, Sam. You never know, maybe there’ll be someone on the bus sitting next to you who hears your text tone and they just so happen to be a David Eagle blog listener.
“Are you Sam?” They tremulously enquire, unable to believe that this is occurring. And you confirm that you are indeed Sam, leading the person to swoon at this astounding news, and you immediately both fall in love, united by a powerful bond that can only be known when two David Eagle blog listeners unite.
Of course, there is a chance that this choice of text tone might not meet quite such a desirable outcome. It could easily backfire on you, and upon hearing the tone, the person sitting next to you excitedly informs you that they are also a massive fan of niche aquatic porn. And before you can stop them, they are passionately talking about their favourite erotic whale films, such as Free Willy With Extra Willy, Moby-dick With Extra Dick, and their personal favourite, The Story Of Jonah, in which Jonah rather enjoys being swallowed by the Whale. And now you’re trapped with a filthy fish film fetishist enthusiastically shouting how “that film franchise really does put the sperm into sperm whale,” before laughing maniacally, causing you to recoil in disgust due to their laughter, but also because you’ve just caught a rather disconcerting fishy odour on their breath that is knocking you sick. And now you are ruing your reckless decision to change your text tone. But hey, it’s up to you, Sam. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Oh dear, I was planning on blogging quite regularly this year, but now I am worried that niche aquatic porn might be what kettles was to this blog in 2016. On the subject of which, I was doing a standup gig in London yesterday, and a comedian did an entire routine on smart kettles. I was horrified, not only to see this brazen plagiarism being carried out in front of me, but also because the audience were lapping it up, seemingly completely unaware of the fact that the man who’d just been on mere minutes earlier had written blog post after blog post on that very subject. The comedian in question was Darius Davies. Once I’ve published this blog I intend to write him a cease and desist letter, instructing him to drop all smart kettle related material from his gigs. It wouldn’t surprise me if in a few days Darius Davies announces that he is planning to launch his own Christmas cracker range. Apart from that he was very funny and I’d recommend checking him out, although feel free to heckle if he starts ripping off my clearly original material that only I could have possibly thought of.
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