2011-74-Endgame-_1_

It was, in all respects, another typical Covid evening. We’d finished our regulation bottle of Chianti, yet again postponed our online Italian lesson, and decided that not one of the films on television merited a moment of our time. Three vacant hours lay between us and bedtime.

Not so long ago, on a strikingly similar evening, we’d tried to fill the impasse by recalling our respective teenage years. What was our favourite music? Our hopes for the future? Our unforgettable moments? It successfully passed the time until my partner Sally tired of talking about her love of Carole King and began speaking rather too energetically about the teenage affair she’d enjoyed with Geoff. Geoff somebody or other. I forget the surname.

“I can see him now,” she told me. “Very tall for his age. And very athletic. And surprisingly sensitive. We used to read poetry to each other. Shelley and Keats and Wordsworth.” If only I could have matched this with an adolescent romance of my own. But as soon as I recognised that my messy attempts to get off with Sheila Wilson during the dance at Brownmoor Youth Club were hardly comparable to her spiritual liaison with the “surprisingly sensitive” Geoff, I knew it was time to abandon past lives as a topic to fill the long Covid evenings.

And then, a few weeks ago, when we’d both decided that we’d lost the plot of Killing Eve, I came up with a casual suggestion. “What’s your favourite joke?” I asked her. At first she didn’t want to play. “Jokes are so terribly male, so horribly macho,” she protested. “Lots of hairy men standing around in a pub, downing pints and shrieking with laughter about cocks and tits.”

“Aren’t there any feminist jokes?” I wondered.

“Mmm. Well, there is the very special advice about how to get rid of the snails in your garden.”

“Go on.”

“You just tell them that you love them madly and want to have their baby and you won’t see them for dust.”

‘“Any more?”

“There’s the Dolly Parton one.”

“Go on.”

“Somebody asked her how long it took to do her hair and she said, ‘I don’t know. I’m never there.’ Your turn.”

I settled back on the sofa. My turn. Good. I’ve been collecting jokes since I was seven years old. My battered diary from that period even lists some of my childhood favourites. “Which nation uses the most cold cream?” Answer: The Japanese (the chappy knees). “What is brown, hairy and wears sunglasses?” Answer: A coconut on holiday. Boom boom.

Something a little more mature was called for. A riddle. “What does a dyslexic, agnostic, insomniac do at night?”

“I give up.”

“He stays up wondering if there is a dog.”

“That’s a typical man joke. Very clever. Very ‘look at me’. Not as funny as the story about the vicar’s wife who gazes lovingly at a dress in a shop window. Guiltily she goes in and tries it on. It’s gorgeous. ‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ she murmurs to herself. A second later she’s alarmed to hear a whispered reply. ‘It looks all right from here,’ says the hidden voice.”

We’ve now been at it, hammer and tongs, giggle and chuckle, for over three weeks. It doesn’t always work. Some of my partner’s feminist gags have become a tad too polemical. “How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? None. You don’t need light bulbs when you have a glass ceiling.” “Why did God invent men? Because vibrators can’t mow the lawn.”

Occasionally we find one with mutual appeal. It’s usually the daftest ones. Like the story of a man doing some woodwork in his garden. His neighbour, looking over the fence, hears a hacking noise coming from the man’s bedroom. “Is that your wife coughin’?” he shouts. “Her coffin?” says the man in the garden. “No! I’m just mending the dog kennel.”

It would, of course, be appropriate to end this rather sentimental story of how to escape hours of boredom with an actual Covid joke. But I fear you’d have to wait two weeks to see if you got it.

This article is from the New Humanist winter 2020 edition. Subscribe today.