Pure, simple jokes are a lifeline in lockdown

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Two men with masks walk into a bank, and one of them says: “Don’t worry, it’s JUST a robbery.” Or this one: I bet the makers of sanitising gel are rubbing their hands together right now. Here’s one for the biologists in the room: two bacteria walk into a bar, and the barman tells them to get out. “But we work here,” says one bacterium, “we’re staph.” That one deserves to go viral. I know, sorry…

I can’t take credit for the authorship or the quality of these jokes, and I can’t even claim that, in the middle of a pandemic, they are in good taste. But I can say that jokes have been one of my chief forms of solace during London’s lockdown. Not clever memes or elaborately staged Tiktok spoofs, though they are fun too, but pure and simple jokes.

There’s something beautiful in the democratic, shareable nature of a joke, and an elegant simplicity to its basic setup-and-payoff structure. True, a Joe Wicks YouTube workout might get your endorphins pumping, and completing Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light in three days flat might fill you with a smug sense of intellectual endeavour. But you can’t beat the swift, cathartic serotonin hit of a belly laugh triggered by a good gag well told.

I’ve loved jokes, silly or smutty, Dadaist or daddish, since I was a boy, but for years they were seen as a low form of wit. For the bright new alternative comedians of the 80s and 90s, with their explicitly political or surreal patter, telling jokes was an old-fashioned endeavour, a throwback to working men’s clubs and TV variety shows. Years later, these young blades would pay tribute to the professionalism and sheer joy that the likes of Bob Monkhouse, Les Dawson, even Jimmy Tarbuck, brought to their gags.

For non-comedians, telling jokes was a paradoxically sad thing to do. A sign of oafish common-room self-regard or an expression of a desperate desire to be liked, always accompanied by a hollow, debunking drumroll and cymbal clash: badoom-tss. At a party once a friend introduced me with the words: “This is Nick, he tells cracker jokes.” I was annihilated.

Salvation for the joke came partly from the boom in TV panel shows but also from social media. I remember Tim Vine’s quickfire one-liners, pure haikus of comedy, circulating on Facebook, often wrongly credited to Tommy Cooper. And Twitter has proved the perfect vehicle for the succinct, well-crafted gag, as well as for trolls and bots. Last week writer David Quantick set running the hashtag #nationalpunchlinedatabase and the payoffs poured in from all corners of the net. For joke connoisseurs, this was like the quick-hit equivalent of crack cocaine.

Social media yuks have been even more of a lifeline following the closure of the nation’s comedy clubs and the cancellation yesterday of Edinburgh’s annual festivals, including the Fringe, where comedians make their reputations and hone their material. We can use a laugh more than ever right now, however we get it. I’ll leave you with Bob Monkhouse’s masterwork: “When I told people I wanted to be a comedian, they laughed. They’re not laughing now!”