El Salvador!

So, today I left a couple of jokes on a variation in the Tinderbox cafe in the Union Square mall. It's actually a very decent coffee place and you get to watch people coming and going from the train station and around the mall from the tables on the balcony. It's a really good position and the coffee is good. If you ever arrive at Aberdeen station and want a coffee I urge you to bypass the Lemon Tree Cafe, Peckham's, pass the Costa and head up the escalator to Tinderbox. There are at least three other coffee shops in there but no bookshop. Tragic, isn't it?

I just had a search for a Tinderbox website and came across The Coffee Story blog about Aberdeen coffee places. I'm so glad, this is going to make finding coffee places a little bit easier and I see Stephanie agrees with me about Tinderbox.

So, on to today's joke(s):

Did you hear about the illiterate pimp?

What a terrible indictment of a failing society.

This is a joke in tribute to John Thomson's character Bernard Righton.

For young readers Thomson's act may not seem particularly brilliant or cutting edge in light of the availability of great comedy today but at the time the memory of the TV show The Comedians was still very fresh, comedy did not tend to look inwards and relied on a hackneyed routine of telling the same jokes as one another about the same one dimensional stereotypes.

The coming of alternative comedy brought with it the spectre of poe-faced, earnest removal of comedy as some people appointed themselves arbiters of taste and political ideal. What Thomson did was to mock both sides with a brilliantly observed caricature of a politically re-educated club comedian. Something later done by Al Murray though I worry that many of Murray's current audience may not spot the irony.

More Thomson:

And now, for those of you traditional minded readers, here's the 'jokey' version of the joke:

Did you hear (again) about the illiterate pimp?

He had a warehouse full of hoes.

I can see you rolling your eyes, you know.

I really ought to not put this stuff in with proper comedy.

I left both sticks together on the table and hadn't gone ten feet before someone sat down and I could tell at a glance that I had utterly wasted those two sticks, there is no chance whatsoever that they were a) going to enjoy those jokes and b) ever going to read a blog like this.

Ah, well.

I picked up a new pen up at the University yesterday so today's joke was written with a Mitsubishi Uni Pin 0.05 pen, it coped fairly well but was thrown a little by the grain if I didn't have a very firm grip on the stick.