Cringe at the Fringe: are these really the ten funniest jokes from Edinburgh?

According to a poll, the funniest one-liner at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe was a joke about a vacuum cleaner: ‘I’ve decided to sell my hoover… well, it was just collecting dust’. Tim Vine, the man responsible for this curious bit of word play, said he was surprised to have won the coveted award. Presumably he hadn’t seen the rest of the top ten jokes, which ranged from cliché (‘I wanted to do a show about feminism. But my husband wouldn’t let me’) to stereotyping (‘Scotland had oil, but it’s running out thanks to all that deep frying’) and risky (‘Always leave them wanting more, my uncle used to say to me. Which is why he lost his job in disaster relief’). A rum lot, I thought, but then I was somewhere between defrosting a chicken and deleting my emails when I read them. Maybe if I’d heard each gag performed as part of a set in sunny Edinburgh I’d have been chortling with the rest of them.