“What a wonderful idea!” – Miles Kington

“It’s funnier than Squib was.” – Tony Husband, cartoonist and former editor of Oink!

“Brilliant effort!” – Steve Way, ex-cartoon editor of Punch

“No” (in answer to four out of six questions on our questionnaire) – John Brown, publisher of Viz (so we must be doing something right).

The following messages were also received:

“Good luck and best wishes”- Richard Ingrams, editor of The Oldie

“Any quality humour magazine has my best wishes” – Bill Tidy, Punch cartoonist.

WHY -OH-WHY do supermarkets use superglue to label their fruit?

WHY-OH-WHY do insurance salesman ring you up for ‘a little chat’ and then go on to try to sell you insurance?

WHY-OH-WHY is pornographic,lewd, sexist, racist and totally puerile humour classed as ‘adult’?

WHY-OH-WHY doesn’t the man on the Clapham omnibus get off?

WHY-OH-WHY doesn’t the man in the street go indoors?

IN MORE ROBUST times than ours, any courtier who incurred the monarch’s displeasure was stripped of his finery, kitted out in sackcloth and ashes and paraded through the streets for the amusement of the commoners. From ‘His Grace’ to disgrace was but a change of gear; the link between rank and apparel became firmly established.

Autres temps, autres moeurs.

These days, an Rt. Hon. whose misdemeanours pile up the column inches in the tabloids and drives down the government’s approval rating more than a notch or two can expect to be handed the monogrammed nightwear before you can say ‘Sleaze Factor’.

Hence the phrase: ‘The Prime Minister gave Mr Mellor a dressing gown.’

The implication is clear. Any further hanky-panky and it’s straight to bed. And no bedtime Tory.

PARIS. A HISTORIC court action was started here this week. The plaintiffs are the French Association of Clowns who are accusing the defendants, Banana Skins of flasely masquerading as a comic device.

René Pou-Pou, the clowns’ spokesman explained:

“Eets incroyable. Pour trop longtemps ze skins de bananes avez a comic reputation completement false. Combien de people savez vous who have slippé sur un skin de banane? Huh? Zero! Avez-VOUS ever slippé sue un banane skin? NON! C’est un grand deception qui avait lasté trop longtemps. Nous voulons putter le record straight.”

The Association of Clowns expects to win damages of over one million Euros to compnesate for the years of humiliation and professional distress caused by completely failing to slip on banana skins in front of audiences.

“Ze trauma of ne pas getting a laugh devant hundreds de peuple lasts éternalement. Il can ruin votre reputation. C’est pourquoi nous seek redress.”

As he departed, René’s trousers fell down, he stepped in a bucket of paint and then disappeared down a manhole.

Ha! October 12th Cover

LONDON ZOO IS a good place to go if you want to look at animals. But then so are the Houses of Parliament or any tube train in the rush hour.

A visit to the zoo always raises suspicions that the animals are also looking at us.

Recently a crowd of stunned penguins had to be revived after witnessing (true event:) a transvestite and his companion in a head-to-toe rabbit outfit.

It should come as no surprise that lions and tigers, in their grassy knolls, are whispering into recording machines every little twitch of human behaviour. “The self-absorbed humans seem unaware of our presence as they eat pizzas and shout at eachother…”

The development of more natural enclosures leads to further logical conclusions. They are so rarely seen by zoo visitors that the obvious next step would be to leave them in the faraway countries where they were captured. Zoos with completely empty cages except for some exotic plant life will still flourish. Zoo keepers can still walk around with buckets of ‘elephant poo’, except that it will be horse poo – no-one will notice. They can still slap moist slabs of meat into the lion enclosure. They will be retrieved after the visitors have gone and the zoo employees can have their barbecue. They will also have to occasionally rustle some leaves in the enclosures and let out an assortment of howls and whoops to complete the deception.

Zoos without animals. This concept is already taking shape. Particularly in the insect and reptile houses.

The reptile house presents that revelation that reptiles are, in fact, just dead logs. Completely empty tanks labelled ‘Poisonous sabre-toothed monkey-eating gila monster’ are invariably misleading but a great source of work for struggling fiction writers.

And even when there is an exotic species to view, their thunder is always stolen by the cheeky sparrow who hops into the cage for a morsel and then flies away before an adoring group of grannies.

The most popular exhibits (when visible) are the apes and monkeys. Because they are most like ourselves. Why not dispense with the expense (and cruelty) of importing these primates and simply have cages with mirrors in which we can gaze at ourselves? The obvious problem with this plan is the difficulty in capturing mirrors  from their natural habitat – tailor’s shops. Many a stealthy expedition into this stark wilderness has been scuppered by wild scissor and tape measure-wielding savages threatening to measure inside legs and deface perfectly good jackets with chalk.

People just don’t seem to enjoy animals at the zoo. Where do you see such joy and amazement as on a tube station platform with crowds transfixed by the mice running about on the rails? Perhaps London Zoo should collaborate with London Underground and proved a selection of more exotic animals to parade up and down the railway lines between trains.

And so, we return to the observation that we are merely animals observing eachother on trains. With the drawback that the truly enthusiastic wildlife fanatic will be regularly beaten up on the last train home to Epping on Saturday nights.

WOODY ALLEN’S fame for extracting humour from the serious side of life is well-known. And in many of his films, humour is noticeably absent as he mines the darkest recesses of the human psyche and relationships.

So, a return to his earlier work, at a time when he was writing and performing stand up comedy is extremely refreshing.

His unique viewpoint is the equivalent of surreal cartooning while often underlining many universal wisdoms. All this in an admirably economical use of language and cunningly crafted storylines.

Although the style is sometimes dictated by his Jewish/American heritage, the subject matter is too wide ranging to be contained within such a narrow definition. And the subject matter is diverse.

On psychic phenomena: “There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtrown and how late is it open?”

On compassion: ” Needleman…was capable of great compassion, and after witnessing a particularly horrible mine disaster once, he could not finish a second helping of waffles.”

Sex: “…I found myself in a state of waxy flexibility as the last piece of bikini underpants slid noiselessly to the floor around her ankles while I lapsed inexplicably into the Dutch National Anthem.”

Every paragraph contains extraordinary flights of imagination. One short story, The Kugelmass Episode could have been one of his screenplays. It concerns a professor, trapped in a loveless marriage, who discovers the existence of a machine which allows one to actually exist alongside the characters of any book in the machine at the same time. Hence, Kugelmass has an affair with Madame Bovary, prompting students across the country to wonder “…Who is this character on page 100? A bald Jew is kissing Madame Bovary?”

The flight of fancy ends with the hero accientally jettisoned into a copy of Remedial Spanish and being chased for the rest of his life by the word tener (‘to have’), “a large and hairy irregular verb”.

Essential study for humour writers to this day!

Back in Reformation times, the jesters and satirists otherwise known as Protestants made up the dance to mock the Roman Catholics’ communion rites. The myriad movements, twists and turns made by the catholic priests during the communion inspired the words: “You put your right foot in, your right foot out, you do the hokey cokey (from the latin: ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum’ – ‘For this is my body’) and you turn around. That’s what it’s all about…etc”

That’s not the funny bit.

Back in 1972 the Pope decided to completely reduce the number of movements at communion.
What we want to know is – did the Pope and his assistants make the changes because of the connection to a frivolous dance?

And is this where Robotics first took place?

AN ILL-JUDGED household tip on a TV home improvements show was blamed for the sudden wholesale destruction of thousands of the country’s toilets. Toilets in shops suffered a sudden retail destruction.

The programme’s suggested solution to nasty smells left in toilets was: “Simply light a match and those smells will disappear!”. The efficiency with which your toilet would disappear was not mentioned.

Cynthia Backdraft from Coventry described the scene on her return from the shops.

“I could see Alf’s trousers on a telegraph pole, his underpants on a nieghbour’s hedge and Alf on a rooftop further down the road. As he is a roofer, I didn’t think anything unusual had happened until I saw the hole in the wall.”