10 April 2009

When does a joke become so multilayered as to stop being funny?

So, this evening I'm going to a hen party.

I know, there are at least two obvious things wrong with that sentence, being that I'm no hen and that today is Good Friday and hardly a party day, but even so.

I was invited a couple of months ago, by the sister of the bride, and I frowned and typed a hasty reply, asking in what universe I constituted a hen. In the bride's apparently, as I was on the list of people to invite. So off to my phone I went, there to dash off a text querying this certain error. Why had I been invited?

'Since you'd be entertaining,' came the reply, 'There'll be lots of single frauleins. I'll be upset that you're not here.'

Well, not wanting to upset one of my dearest friends and indeed my birthday buddy, and still determined to comply assiduously with all rules of fast and abstinence, I shall be heading out in a few minutes.

And I shall be doing so, I might add, while contemplating the timely comedy potential of the phrase 'the cock crew', which strikes me as a multilayered pun magnificently suited to a man at a hen party on Good Friday. 'Cock' as in male hen, rooster, even penis, and 'crew' as in noun meaning a gang or group and as the verb 'crow' in the past tense. It works in so many ways. Nobody else finds it funny, though.

Doctor M? Surely you?

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