You will need to read Key’s Cupboard in The Dabbler with particular care this week. I am planning to use each of the phrases listed therein as the punchline of a spectacularly well-crafted and hilarious joke, each joke to form one chapter of a spectacularly well-crafted and hilarious comic novel. The critics will be helpless with laughter, and I shall be awarded laurels.
That, at any rate, is the plan. If it has a flaw – oh, and it does! it does! – it is that I am not much of a gag-writer. So that is where you lot come in. Readers are invited to provide me with jokes to which the lines listed in the cupboard are the perfect, irresistible punchlines. I will then cobble them all together into the funniest novel ever written.
Naturally, I will take full credit, to make certain of getting those laurels wrapped around my head. Your reward, and it is a fine one, will rest in the knowledge that your wit and hilarity is represented by a laurel leaf touching the bonce of Mr Key. Whingers and ingrates may be further placated by having their names scribbled on the leaves with non-permanent marker pens. I can’t say fairer than that, can I?
What did the servile piece of litter say to the aristocratic piece of litter?
You may dispose of me as you will.
I trust the above meets the required standards of hilarity.
What did one mountaineering gambler say to the other mountaineering gambler, upon losing some game of chance conducted at the peak of Everest?
My misfortunes are at their height.
What did Keith Richards’ guitar say after being pleasurably strummed during a rendition of one of the Rolling Stones’ most famous hits of 1965?
I have never experienced such Satisfaction.
What did the prude say upon writing to the man from Blackpool?
There is something repulsive in his address.
Could also work for Scunthorpe, that one, if in more adult company.
What did the thesaurus say upon witnessing some atrocity or other?
It is abominable, horrid, infamous.
That’s yer first few chapters sorted, anyway.
Fine work indeed, Brit. Now you’d better have a nice lie down.
Every one a coconut!
I’m here all week.