Home
Home

The Funniest Joke in the World

youtube.com

A sketch about a joke so funny that anyone who reads or hears it promptly dies from laughter. Ernest Scribbler, a writer, creates the lethal joke and immediately dies laughing after reading it. His mother finds him and reads the joke, dying instantly as well. The British military recognizes the joke's potential as a weapon and has it translated into German - one word at a time to protect the translators. The weaponized joke is deployed against the Germans in WWII with devastating effectiveness (over 60,000 times more powerful than Britain's great pre-war joke - a reference to Chamberlain's "Peace in our time" agreement). The Germans attempt to create their own joke but fail. The sketch is shot in a quasi-documentary style with voiceover narration and incorporates actual WWII footage. It concludes with the joke being banned at the Geneva Convention and buried in the Berkshire countryside under a monument "To the unknown Joke."

This man is Ernest Scribbler... writer of jokes. In a few moments, he will have written the funniest joke in the world... and, as a consequence, he will die... laughing.
It was obvious that this joke was lethal... no one could read it and live...
All through the winter of '43 we had translators working, in joke-proof conditions, to try and produce a German version of the joke. They worked on one word each for greater safety. One of them saw two words of the joke and spent several weeks in hospital.
Wenn ist das Nunstrück git und Slotermeyer? Ja!... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
It was a fantastic success. Over sixty thousand times as powerful as Britain's great pre-war joke...

PersonRole
Terry JonesWriter