OU blog

Personal Blogs

Richard Walker

Vampire Precautions

Visible to anyone in the world

As a protection against vampires, try combining celery, grapes, apple, walnuts and mayonnaise. I call this "ward off" salad.

Permalink Add your comment
Share post
Richard Walker

The History of the One Line Joke (1LJ)

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Richard Walker, Thursday, 16 July 2020, 00:57

To be honest I couldn’t find much out when I decided to research early one liners. It's true maxims - pithy sayings - have a long history but they aren't usually jokes. I managed to find this 1869 example from Mark Twain, and I think it squeaks in as a one-liner in the modern sense.

“I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week to make it up.”

A little modernisation and Tim Vine could adopt that.

Mark Twain was famous for witticisms. Here’s a rather misanthropic one I came across, but it made me laugh.

“To create man was a fine and original idea but to add the sheep was a tautology.”

He didn’t care for President Theodore Roosevelt (eponym of the Teddy Bear) either. Listen to this.

“Mr. Roosevelt is the most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War – but the vast mass of the nation loves him, is frantically fond of him, even idolizes him. This is the simple truth. It sounds like a libel upon the intelligence of the human race, but it isn’t; there isn’t any way to libel the intelligence of the human race.” (September 13, 1907)”.

Ooh.






Permalink Add your comment
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 2318308