I’ve been spending a lot of time writing jokes recently. Have you heard the one about the next wave of Irish immigrants? Luckily, they’ll be coming by Ryanair so they’ll be indefinitely delayed.
Okay, it probably wouldn’t pass muster on Have I Got News For You, but it’s the best I can do. At this time of year I get asked to do a lot of after-dinner speaking and audiences don’t like it if you recycle old material. They want topical gags based on that day’s headlines.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ I told the patrons of the Oxford Society at their annual dinner at the House of Commons last week. ‘I had to fight my way through a bunch of sixth-formers at the visitors’ entrance. One of them was holding up a sign saying, “Nick Clegg’s a see you next Tuesday.” He’d spelt it right so he can’t have been at a comprehensive.’
That gag didn’t get the laugh I was expecting. (They often don’t.) The art of after-dinner speaking, I’ve discovered, is to sail close enough to the wind to give your audience a frisson of danger, but not so close that you end up offending them.
I came badly unstuck a couple of years ago with the following anecdote based on a real-life encounter with Gordon Ramsay. I was flying back from Los Angeles when I spotted the celebrity chef bent double over a stainless steel work surface looking as if he’d just prepared 350 in-flight meals. I marched up to him, tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘I hate to have to say this, Mr Ramsay, but both the chicken and the beef were an absolute disgrace.’ Luckily, he was fairly good-humoured about it. He called me a c***, but not a f***ing c***.
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