A couple of years ago I got a short-lived, but reasonably lucrative gig writing jokes for a mobile phone company.  I know this sounds amazingly glamorous, but in reality meant a lot of staring out of windows, eating biscuits and creating puns so bad they physically hurt to put into words on the screen.

The constraints were simple, the joke had to be of twitter-esque length in characters (a bit less, actually), and not be too rude.  Sounds easy eh?  It wasn’t.  Mostly it was making up horrible puns, or tweaking old jokes into a usable format.  I soon realised however that they weren’t interested in quality, they wanted groaners.

Well, I was clearing out an old email box the other day and found many of my submissions.  It made me wince.  Did people really pay for this?  Yes, yes they did.  I can only imagine the disappointment of the customer who had paid 50p or a pound only to have one of my one-liners sent to them by return.  Consider this an open apology to everyone who ever paid for one.

So, for reasons of catharsis, and because so much time has gone by that I think it’s OK to put them here now, please find some of the worst jokes I have ever written.  Do not judge me. Please.

  • My Grandma suffered a massive seizure yesterday.  I didn’t know she could even LIFT that much Heroin.
  • A puppy born without an anus is taken to the vet.  “Can you help?”  The Vet replies, “I’ll give it a crack.”
  • I like to win at cards, which is why I only play Snap with stutterers.
  • Which Sith Lord always crosses rivers at their shallowest point? Darth Wader.
  • My girlfriend wants to retrain as a steamroller driver.  I’m not going to stand in her way.
  • When I was younger I used to collect Panini stickers.  I had them all except the ham and cheese melt.
  • Gary Lineker described England’s last match as a game of two halves. Personally, I found it a game of eight pints
  • I’ve got this mate who keep putting laxatives in my drinks.  With friends like that, who needs enemas.
  • A necrophiliac was caught trying to dispose of the evidence to passing strangers.  It was a dead giveaway.
  • People who say “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”, have clearly never arm-wrestled a stroke victim.
  • My Dad is an Imperialist.  He hates people who still use feet and inches.
  • My girlfriend suggested using toys in the bedroom, the sex is still rubbish, but now I’m much better at Scalextric.
  • When it says test your smoke alarm regularly, they don’t mean with a series of small domestic fires.  Firemen don’t like that.
  • My nephew wants a pirate outfit for Xmas.  He can dress up all he likes, he’s never going to look Somalian.
  • A man in a big car is said to be making up for a tiny penis, so what should we make of a woman driving a Mini?
  • A guy was interested in my car.  I told him it did 100 mpg and never broke down.  He didn’t buy it.
  • Being fat sounds so negative.  I prefer to look at it positively, being immune to Anorexia.
  • Why say “turn a blind eye”?  Surely it’s the GOOD eye you should turn. The blind one can look wherever it wants.

{ 6 comments }

The human body is a wonderful device.  It has all sorts of clever ways of telling you when something is wrong with it.  It can make you sick, it can make you pass out, it can even make it feel like your heart is about to leap from your chest in the search of a few fleeting moments of rest.  Which is how I felt as her words were shouted at me.

“Okay, that’s it for the warm-up, now we can get started!”

This was my third circuit training class since a friend convinced me it would be a good way to keep fit during the summer with little or no football available.  You know, when you write it down like that, it seems like a perfectly sensible, even logical argument, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, ten minutes in, unable to breathe and with the early signs of a cramp developing in my left buttock, it seemed so completely illogical a statement that it would probably drive Dr Spock to self-harm.

From this point on, my thoughts turn merely to damage limitation.  You simply can not leave a circuit training class without looking like a wimp, and although my puce-faced appearance probably already classified me as such, I was going to try and retain what little dignity I had remaining.

I worked my way to the back-left corner of the room in the hope of being out of sight of the female instructor, as she began detailing the next thirty minutes of “military style fitness training.”  However, it is difficult to ‘hide’ when the walls on three sides are covered by floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

Being shouted at by a woman to ‘work harder’ and ‘put some effort in’ is deeply unpleasant if you’re not sporting an erection.  It’s not all that pleasant if you do have one, but at least it’s probably being made up for with other things.

Fifteen minutes in and I genuinely thought there was a danger I might die.  Twenty-five minutes in and I began to fear I might not.

The final fifteen minutes or so are something of a haze.  I have read that the mind can sometimes block memories of particularly traumatic experiences, and I am pretty sure that this is what happened here.  Though I am quite sure that I am the first person to ever suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from a circuit training class.

“Good work, did you enjoy that?” asked the instructor as I staggered from the studio.

“Yes, see you next week,” I lied.

{ 0 comments }

I've got one of those faces

May 20, 2010

I’m sure we’ve all been caught in a conversation with someone we don’t know, whereupon when one of you has said, “Oh, I guess I’ve just got one of those faces.” But the thing is, I really do have one of those faces.

Read the full article →

It look like Daniel

April 27, 2010

Cliff getting a new watch strap – though listening back I think he was basically admitting a sexual assault. Ben was bored at home and found a place to confess all of his sins – online – and I did some rubber necking. All this plus birthdays for Eric Bristow, Beethoven writing a song for his ‘bit on the side’ and why you shouldn’t buy cigarettes for kids in your dressing gown.

Read the full article →

JonnyB writes a book!!!

April 26, 2010

Those of you who have been on the Internet for more than a couple of years will no doubt know and love JonnyB.  His Private Secret Diary is one of the funniest things on the Internet (well, it’s in the top couple of thousand, easy), and was very much an influence on iamlivid.com back when [...]

Read the full article →

Updates and that…

April 15, 2010

Every time I sit down and think, “I should write something for the blog” I almost immediately find myself thinking, “I should save that for the podcast”. It’s difficult, because I am torn between the desire to write down lots of jokes about how Ben sounds like Louie Spence from Pineapple Dance Studios, and the [...]

Read the full article →

My new scar

March 31, 2010

Scars are cool. I heard that somewhere once. I’m pretty sure the words I heard next were, “Chicks dig guys with scars”. I’m also pretty confident that what they meant to say was, “Chicks dig guys with scars – as long as they weren’t earned in a ridiculously embarrassing manner.”

Read the full article →

Quizzle fo Shizzle

March 17, 2010

If you want to hear this week’s podcast, head over to the Angry and Cliff podcast page… The latest episode includes Cliff‘s imaginatively titled quiz, ‘sound for a pound’, Angry’s intense hatred of Pandas, Google street view, lesbian school discos, and why Crufts is essentially a Nazi’s dream. All this plus the Pope apologising to [...]

Read the full article →

Dead Steve and the Pert Knockers

March 10, 2010

The podcast finally reaches pensionable age – if it were a woman – and show 60 sees Cliff, Ben and I discussing the week just gone, which includes me making a drunken tit of myself in front of TV’s David Mitchell, Cliff getting into trouble at the Tate, and Ben finding the Oscars very, very [...]

Read the full article →

Doggedly discussing dogging

March 3, 2010

Podcast 59 is upon us, with Cliff, Ben and I discussing our experiences over the last week, which includes a telephone encounter with a ticket tout, being whistled at in the station, and learning how ‘watching strangers have sex in the car’ became known as dogging.

Read the full article →