Thursday 31 January 2008

Beadle Jokes Reach ‘Epidemic Proportions’


Ten Thousand Jokes Cracked Every Minute, Say Experts


Following the death of 1980s unfunnyman Jeremy Beadle, jokes about him have reached an unprecedented level. Epidemioligist Matthew Ebbsfleet stated “Background levels of Beadle jokes normally run at about one joke per 100,000 households per year. But if Beadle jokes spread at the current rate, we estimate that 70-80% of UK households will have experienced some form of small-hand-based humour by the end of the month. And we simply don’t have the resources to stop it.”

Early investigations suggest that the first jape at the dead man’s expense was cracked in the North London hospital where he died, but quickly spread across the capital and further afield. According to Ebbsfleet “The problem is that the jokes are so easy to spread. A witty monologue or song is very cumbersome, and can take some time to be communicated from one person to another. But a one-liner, about life having dealt him a terrible hand for instance, can be spread in a moment in offices, public transport and even email.”

The three main factors in the spread of Beadle jokes are, according to Ebbsfleet:

1: Beadle was popular in the 1980s, meaning he is best-known by glib, sardonic thirtysomethings, all of whom have ready access to text messaging, Facebook, etc, making them prime carriers of Beadle jokes.
2: Existing Beadle humour. Beadle jokes have existed for years in the background, and an event like his death can be the trigger for them to suddenly surface in huge numbers.
3: Beadle’s disability. “Let’s face it, disabled people are funny.” said Ebbsfleet. “God help us when Stephen Hawkins dies because I think we’ll be totally overwhelmed.”

Ebbsfleet is calling on employers to temporarily add the word ‘Beadle’ to their firewall programs in an attempt to stem the flow, but in a bizarre twist Beadle’s death has helped physicists dealing in photon research.

Photons are sub-atomic particles that can, in the right circumstances, travel faster than the speed of light and therefore travel through time. A spokesman from the Knutsford Physics Laboratory stated “We have some evidence that, seconds before Beadle died, a taxi-driver in Fife was just about to start a joke about the handles on Beadle’s coffin being different sizes. Clearly this would be impossible unless news of his death had travelled at faster than light speeds and therefore through time. It may well be that photons are the universe’s way of communicating news of celebrity deaths.”

3 comments:

Cheezy said...

I was going to post the joke about Jeremy having a massive cock here, but I guess, after reading all that, that everyone's already heard it by now...

Tam said...

My friend Owen once had an horrific nightmare which involved being trapped in a barn, getting a hand-job from Beadle's stunted hand, with the Wurzels sitting in a circle, watching, saying "Ooh Arr, Ooh Arr..."

Anonymous said...

Photons are the individual components of light and the rest of the electromagentic radiation spectrum (radio, infra-red, UV, gamma etc.) and are well documented and studied, and cannot, by their very nature, exceed the speed of light as they ARE light itself. You must be thinking of tachyons, those are the theorietic (but quite likely) super-lightspeed particles that could feasibly travel through time.

Other than that, good work! Keep it up.