A couple of years ago I got a short-lived, but reasonably lucrative gig writing jokes for a mobile phone company.  I know this sounds amazingly glamorous, but in reality meant a lot of staring out of windows, eating biscuits and creating puns so bad they physically hurt to put into words on the screen.

The constraints were simple, the joke had to be of twitter-esque length in characters (a bit less, actually), and not be too rude.  Sounds easy eh?  It wasn’t.  Mostly it was making up horrible puns, or tweaking old jokes into a usable format.  I soon realised however that they weren’t interested in quality, they wanted groaners.

Well, I was clearing out an old email box the other day and found many of my submissions.  It made me wince.  Did people really pay for this?  Yes, yes they did.  I can only imagine the disappointment of the customer who had paid 50p or a pound only to have one of my one-liners sent to them by return.  Consider this an open apology to everyone who ever paid for one.

So, for reasons of catharsis, and because so much time has gone by that I think it’s OK to put them here now, please find some of the worst jokes I have ever written.  Do not judge me. Please.

• My Grandma suffered a massive seizure yesterday.  I didn’t know she could even LIFT that much Heroin.
• A puppy born without an anus is taken to the vet.  “Can you help?”  The Vet replies, “I’ll give it a crack.”
• I like to win at cards, which is why I only play Snap with stutterers.
• Which Sith Lord always crosses rivers at their shallowest point? Darth Wader.
• My girlfriend wants to retrain as a steamroller driver.  I’m not going to stand in her way.
• When I was younger I used to collect Panini stickers.  I had them all except the ham and cheese melt.
• Gary Lineker described England’s last match as a game of two halves. Personally, I found it a game of eight pints
• I’ve got this mate who keep putting laxatives in my drinks.  With friends like that, who needs enemas.
• A necrophiliac was caught trying to dispose of the evidence to passing strangers.  It was a dead giveaway.
• People who say “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”, have clearly never arm-wrestled a stroke victim.
• My Dad is an Imperialist.  He hates people who still use feet and inches.
• My girlfriend suggested using toys in the bedroom, the sex is still rubbish, but now I’m much better at Scalextric.
• When it says test your smoke alarm regularly, they don’t mean with a series of small domestic fires.  Firemen don’t like that.
• My nephew wants a pirate outfit for Xmas.  He can dress up all he likes, he’s never going to look Somalian.
• A man in a big car is said to be making up for a tiny penis, so what should we make of a woman driving a Mini?
• A guy was interested in my car.  I told him it did 100 mpg and never broke down.  He didn’t buy it.
• Being fat sounds so negative.  I prefer to look at it positively, being immune to Anorexia.
• Why say “turn a blind eye”?  Surely it’s the GOOD eye you should turn. The blind one can look wherever it wants.

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The human body is a wonderful device.  It has all sorts of clever ways of telling you when something is wrong with it.  It can make you sick, it can make you pass out, it can even make it feel like your heart is about to leap from your chest in the search of a few fleeting moments of rest.  Which is how I felt as her words were shouted at me.

“Okay, that’s it for the warm-up, now we can get started!”

This was my third circuit training class since a friend convinced me it would be a good way to keep fit during the summer with little or no football available.  You know, when you write it down like that, it seems like a perfectly sensible, even logical argument, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, ten minutes in, unable to breathe and with the early signs of a cramp developing in my left buttock, it seemed so completely illogical a statement that it would probably drive Dr Spock to self-harm.

From this point on, my thoughts turn merely to damage limitation.  You simply can not leave a circuit training class without looking like a wimp, and although my puce-faced appearance probably already classified me as such, I was going to try and retain what little dignity I had remaining.

I worked my way to the back-left corner of the room in the hope of being out of sight of the female instructor, as she began detailing the next thirty minutes of “military style fitness training.”  However, it is difficult to ‘hide’ when the walls on three sides are covered by floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

Being shouted at by a woman to ‘work harder’ and ‘put some effort in’ is deeply unpleasant if you’re not sporting an erection.  It’s not all that pleasant if you do have one, but at least it’s probably being made up for with other things.

Fifteen minutes in and I genuinely thought there was a danger I might die.  Twenty-five minutes in and I began to fear I might not.

The final fifteen minutes or so are something of a haze.  I have read that the mind can sometimes block memories of particularly traumatic experiences, and I am pretty sure that this is what happened here.  Though I am quite sure that I am the first person to ever suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from a circuit training class.

“Good work, did you enjoy that?” asked the instructor as I staggered from the studio.

“Yes, see you next week,” I lied.

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