Well deserved
I first saw Tim Vine in his very first year at the Fringe (1992?), and have been a fan of his mad genius ever since!
Dave TV has honoured Tim Vine with its Joke of the Fringe award - the annual celebration of the Best of Edinburgh quippery. "Pun punditt" Vine beat off some stiff opposition with: ''I've just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I'll tell you what, never again.'' Eight comedy critics sat through "60 performances, totalling 3 …
Shows how subjective comedy is.
Thought the winner was pretty poor, the funniest being No 8, with 3 a close second.
Thought this (from the "shamed" list on the BBC website) was better then the winner, too:-
***"Bec Hill "Some of my best friends are vegan. They were going to come today but they didn't have the energy to climb up the stairs."***
I expect it also saved on air freshener..........
A lot of pubs give you a wooden spoon with a number on it when you order food to indicate your order number.
When the barman / waiter calls out your number, you wave the spoon and the food gets delivered to your table.
The point to the joke is you write a number on your own spoon and steal someone else's meal.
The joke is probably a lot funnier if you are pissed as it fails to take into account:
The number you pick may not be called for a long time and/or may not actually have an order associated with it at all.
You may not like the food you end up with.
The person whose meal you steal may beat the shit out of you (possibly in a crude attempt to recover the stolen food).
I'm amazed any of you can ever find any jokes funny with your extreme dependence on absolute logic.
"Why did the chicken cross the road? How could anyone know what a chicken's motivation is? This joke just doesn't stand up on any level at all. I fail to understand how anyone could find it amusing. It makes no sense."
"This joke just doesn't stand up on any level at all. I fail to understand how anyone could find it amusing. It makes no sense."
That made me wince a bit and remember Christmases past. My step-grandfather (I emphasis 'step' to make it clear not a blood relative!) was a former physics teacher and could not cope with jokes in Christmas crackers. He could genuinely not understand that they were nonsense and would actually try and work out a logical answer, wouldn't allow the answer to be read out until he'd pursued every option and then express disgust and frustration that the answer made no logical sense.
Believe me, when you've sat through an entire Christmas lunch lasting an hour or two, with someone spending the entire time trying to apply logic to answering a cracker joke, you really don't want that memory dredged up... ;)
Many pubs that serve food give you a wooden spoon with a number on it when you order, and when the food is ready they call out the number and you present the spoon to get the food. So presumably if you go to a pub with your own wooden spoon you can get the order with that number that someone else had paid for - so long as you can eat it before the fight breaks out.
In pubs and other informal restaurants, your food order is placed at the counter.
If the table you are sitting at isn't numbered (eg in the beer garden) then you are given some sort of marker that the kitchen staff will recognise when they bring the food out.
Some places use a wooden spoon.
That should leave you with enough for the punchline to pack a little tingle.
When you order food in many pubs these days, you are given a wooden spoon with a number on it which you place on your table to identify yourself to the bar staff (instead of each table being individually numbered). Hence, if you take such a spoon in with you, you may be given food that someone else ordered, for free.
Not the best joke on the list. My favourite was no. 7, although it has been around for ages in the form of: "What do you call a dog with no legs? Anything you want because it can't chase you" (or something to that effect).
His show was called "The Joke-a-motive", so presumably he was chuffed already.
Ithankyew, 'm here all week, try the veal.
I went to it. Can't say how it measures up to the competition as it's all I've been to this year, but we were creasing up for an hour solid. Only problem is it was so quick-fire that I remember very little of the individual one-liners :(
I have to agree with the Runcible Spoon, and the following AC - i thought that Emo Phillips one was best...
as for the wooden spoon joke, i think it refers to the wooden spoon-like flags some "order food at the bar", wotherspoons type "restaurants" have, to signify a food order has been placed...but i don't really know, and certainly won't lose sleep over it...
"alleged" joke alert
I read the ten best and worst in Metro (itself a fairly tragicomic publication) on the way to work this morning, and the former barely raised a smile, while I chuckled frequently at the latter.
And that Tim Vine joke sounds like it was borrowed from Bob Monkhouse (not that that's a bad thing).
Oh and @AC, re. Wooden Spoons - in many pubs in London (and presumably elsewhere), when you order food, you get given a wooden spoon - somes in an empty wine bottle - with your order number on, so if you turned up with your own spoon, you could nick someone else's meal.
And no, it wasn't funny if you did know what the conceit was either...
Oh God I DON'T CARE and I doubt many others do either. Hands up who cares about this?
Some usages of words and phrases are strictly speaking incorrect, but it would interrupt the normal flow of a sentence if they were used correctly. Language allows for little hiccups over time. 'Hoi polloi' with an extraneous 'the' on the beginning is clearly one of those.
Find me an example of someone using 'hoi polloi' correctly and post it up. Seriously. There will be one or two but I'm betting most writers just add 'the' even in the knowledge it's not strictly correct, because it's likely most readers would go "hey they missed the 'the'" and would write in complaining. You can't win, see? I'm not saying you're *wrong*, I'm saying you're *pedantic*. And yes, I'm a pedant for a living and I believe in a degree of vigilance about proper English but I have my limits and sometimes, please God, I need it to stop.
Thanking you.
I came across the expression for the first time in Iolanthe by Gilbert & Sullivan.
’Twould fill with joy, And madness stark The oί πoλλoί! (A Greek remark.)
Since it was written in 1882 it seems the usage with a definite article has been around for some time.
Is correct someone's English (I don't do that here because I don't speak your type of English.) then find out that I have a typo in my correction.
This is usually a Face + Palm moment.
(although in the past I have found that posting something with every other word misspelled while correcting syntax can be slightly funny.)
If you have enough alcoholic beverage (hey, you still have that point system? that is so cool, if I were a starship I could has hyperspace.)
<tongue location="cheek">
What ever do you mean, sir? I do believe that "nit" refers to the eggs or young of the louse, so a nitpicker would be a person engaged in removing such things, presumably from a human head. Whatever does the removal of parasitic insects have to do with pedantic criticism? I do not follow your logic and require a detailed explanation of the relationship between these concepts.
</tongue>
I guess it depends somewhat on your geographical location, our colonial cousins across the pond seem to have a slightly different take on the matter ('two countries separated by a common language' etc.)
According to the Oxford English Dictionary…
forum n. (pl. forums)
1) a meeting or medium for an exchange of views.
2) (pl. fora) (in an ancient Roman city) a public square or marketplace used for judicial and other business. Origin ME: from Latin, lit. what is out of doors.
But...
According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the plural of "forum" is "forums," although "fora" is an acceptable option.
However, the plural in Latin of forum is not fori. Fori is the singular genitive. The nominative (and accusative) plural of forum is indeed fora.
For nouns, Latin dictionaries usually give the nominative and genitive singulars, so that students will know what declension the noun is in.
Fori identifies forum as being a noun of the second declension. This affects the way the other cases are formed. But nearly all neuter nouns, of all declensions, take the "a" as the ending in the nominative/accusative plural.
Is that clear enough?