MY FIRST MEMORY of my maternal grandfather is of his dying. Which was typical of him. Not actually dying, you understand, but being in a state of ‘dying’. I think it might be an Irish Catholic thing.
He was dying the entire time I knew him, only eventually making good on the promise a good twenty years later.
The first thing I can remember of my grandfather was meeting him after a major operation. He wasn’t expected to pull through (he did, of course). Four-year-old me was ushered into a darkened room to say goodbye. I didn’t have anything to say but sensed an awkward silence so filled it with some recently acquired information I mistakenly thought would be hugely comforting. I said ‘We’ll put flowers on your grave.’ He laughed. It wasn’t meant to be a joke. But a child pointing out the elephant in the room, the thing no one was talking about, was enough to make him crack a smile.
That was the beginning of our relationship. A relationship that consisted of little other than jokes.
My grandfather told all his grandchildren jokes. Jokes that were more like little riddles when we were infants.
What has four legs and says ‘Boo’?
A cow with a cold.
What has four legs and says ‘Aaaa’?
A sheep with no lips.
What’s orange and sounds like a parrot?
A carrot.
And the one that’s still my favorite:
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One says to the other,
‘Does this taste funny to you?’
I, rather predictably, found them fascinating. And credited my grandfather with their creation.
In the years that followed after my first ‘joke’ with my grandfather, I visited my family in Ireland every summer and saw him often. We never got much beyond joking together. But the jokes did get better as I got older. Which is just as well as I wasn’t told any of them just the once.
A man sees a farmer walking with a pig and notices that the animal has a wooden leg. Curious, he asks the farmer how the pig lost its limb. ‘Well,’ says the farmer, ‘one night the wife and me were asleep when the pig spotted the house was on fire. It broke down the door, ran up the stairs and dragged me to safety. Then it went back in and carried out my wife. Then it went in a third time and rescued my four children. We’d all be dead if it weren’t for this pig.’
‘So did the pig get its leg burned in the fire?’ asks the man.
‘Oh, no,’ says the farmer. ‘But when you’ve got a pig like this, you don’t eat it all at once.’
A man walks into a doctor’s. ‘Doctor, I’m suffering from silent gas emissions. All day at work, I have these silent gas emissions. Last night during a movie, I had ten silent gas emissions. On the way to your office, I had five silent gas emissions. And while sitting in your waiting room, I had three silent gas emissions. As a matter of fact, I’ve just had two more.’
The doctor replies, ‘Well, the first thing we’re going to do is check your hearing.’
Some of the jokes my grandfather told were ‘Irish’ jokes. Coming from an Irish Catholic family and growing up in the Home Counties of England does result in a fair amount of teasing. I always liked ‘Irish’ jokes. I like to think my grandfather wasn’t just trying to make me laugh but teaching a valuable lesson: that you must be able to laugh at yourself. And also maybe passing on a sense of cultural identity.
Ireland’s worst air disaster occurred early this morning when a small twoseater Cessna plane crashed into a cemetery. Irish search and rescue workers have recovered 1,826 bodies so far and expect that number to climb as digging continues.
An Irishman wanders into a library and says, ‘Fish and chips, please’. The librarian says, ‘I’m sorry, but this is a library.’ The Irishman whispers, ‘sorry, fish and chips, please.’
It’s difficult for men, especially men of my grandfather’s generation, to express emotion. It would have been nice for my grandfather to have told me that he loved me and that he hoped I loved him. But that is an awkward thing to say and it never happened. But what did happen was a lot of jokes.
A joke is a shorthand – it’s telling someone that you like them without actually having to say it. That’s what the joke really means.
Years after my grandfather’s death I read somewhere that a laugh is the shortest distance between two people. I rather like that.
When my grandfather finally died for real, someone told me this one at his wake:
An old woman is upset at her husband’s funeral. ‘You have him in a brown suit and I wanted him in a blue suit.’
The mortican says, ‘We’ll take care of it, madam,’ and yells back, ‘Ed, switch the heads on two and four!’
He would have laughed.
Jimmy Carr is a comedian, presenter, acrobat and gentleman. His first book, The Naked Jape, examines the history of jokes and the psychology of joking. It’s the sort of literature you might find in a downstairs loo.