Have you heard the one about the comedian who decided that if we couldn’t beat the Germans at football he’d beat them at telling fast jokes?
After a year perfecting his delivery, Clive Greenaway, a professional Tommy Cooper impersonator from Poole in Dorset, has been awarded an official world record for telling 26 jokes in one minute.
Rattling through his repertoire, he made sure to pause to give his audience time to laugh in accordance with the rules laid down by Guinness World Records Greenaway, 59, took the record from Markus Weise, a German comic who had held it since 2012 with 21 jokes.
The English attempt on the record was prompted by a football commentator who pointed out before the last World Cup that not only were the Germans better at football, they were better at telling jokes.
Greenaway said yesterday: “We weren’t going to beat them at football but I knew I could take the record for telling the most number of jokes.” He wrote down 30 one-liners, mostly borrowed from his comic heroes Tommy Cooper and Les Dawson. The rules stated that they had to be delivered during a live show in front of Guinness judges and a timekeeper. His first attempt during a performance in Weymouth last June equalled the German’s record and two days later he beat it at Haverhill Arts Centre in Suffolk.
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“They had to be short jokes that had to have a trigger line and a punchline to them,” he said. “I started flat-out and kept that pace up. I left a gap for the audience to react before I started the next joke. I really enjoyed it although it was a bit of a blur.”
The reason it has taken so long to verify the record is because the video of the performance had to be scrutinised to ensure there was sufficient laughter after every joke. Greenaway admitted that he had an advantage over his German rival because the English language is ripe with puns. German has far fewer ambiguities because nouns are simply tacked together to avoid such confusion.
Much of the humour in Weise’s performance is lost in translation although some jokes appear to have crossed the language barrier such as: “What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back? A stick.”
This is not the first attempt at a world record by Greenway, a former driving instructor. Ten years ago he tried to get Guinness to acknowledge that he held the largest number of driving licences in the world, having passed his 25th test. He said: “I have a licence to drive everything from a motorcycle to a tank.”
The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority refused to confirm in writing to Guinness that he held more licenses than any other person because it would “breach data protection laws”.
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On the BBC’s One Show on Friday, Greenway told 28 jokes, but that was not an official record attempt and it will not be counted. Last year George Valentine, a former joke writer for Tommy Cooper, claimed to have managed 46 jokes in a minute telling “half-liners” such as the world’s shortest joke, Jimmy Carr’s “Venison, dear?”.
Guinness said: “This particular title is all about sharp and intelligent joke-telling. One of the key rules states that the jokes told must draw a reaction or laugh from the audience — so Clive’s achievement of 26 jokes in one minute is a fantastic effort and one that will take some beating.”
Heard the one about...?
English
My wife and I were happy — then we met.
My wife dresses to kill and cooks the same way.
My wife and I haven’t spoken in years — I don’t like to interrupt.
Pollen count — that’s a tough job.
I ate a ploughman’s lunch, he wasn’t happy.
I went to the paper shop but it had blown away.
So I went to the corner shop and bought three corners.
German
“Doctor, I have problems with my circulation.” “Well, go straight ahead instead.”
Last winter someone froze to death at a drive-in theatre. He wanted to see the film Closed in Winter.
“Doctor, where is the patient who was run over by a steamroller?” “In rooms five to ten.”
A skeleton visits the doctor. “You’re far too late,” says the doctor.
What do you do with a dog that has no legs? Drag it around the block.
Two cannibals are eating a clown and one says to the other: “This tastes funny.”
What is a Spaniard without a car? Carlos.