Ding dong merrily on hello there
including a surprising amount of press coverage and probably some kind of terrible joke where the punchline is, like, “Braid Biarritz, Colditz cider"
Hello. It is December 2024. This is the twenty-fourth monthly instalment of Interesting Skull, a newsletter of unsettlingly extraordinary jokes and monumentally tedious mainly-indoors life updates written by me, sleepy-faced perpetually-achey jaw-clenchy ne’er-do-much Mike Rampton.
I did two in-betweeny newsletters this month, one about driving and one about Christmas, which seems like either one or two too many. There’s sometimes nowhere else for thoughts to go — if I approached a real life person and said “I’ve been able to drive a car for a year now”, it wouldn’t lead to an interesting conversation, they’d do that thing where you use your tongue to push your bottom lip out and make an offensive noise to suggest mental subnormality.
Here are 25 Christmas jokes in video form, filmed in Barking between 2017 and 2020:
(If that isn’t enough Christmas hilarity for you, last year I sent out 25 Phat Xmas Laffs in this very newsletter, some of which were probably different.)
Christmas is the only time when I have completely correct strong opinions on music. Here are several objectively true statements about festive tunes.
The reason so many people shout the “It’s Chriiiiiiiistmas!” bit in the Slade song at the wrong time is that Slade put it in the wrong place. The bit where people shout it is where it should be.
Cold December Night by Michael Bublé — a man whose voice I don’t know whether to listen to or swim in — is a ten out of ten song despite featuring some of the worst non-rhymes of anything ever written. Household/careful? Laughter/captured? Unacceptable. And yet… flawless?
Snowman by Sia would be right up in the canon of total classics if it was easier to sing. It’s difficult. Not for her, she has a beautiful voice, but for me, Mike Rampton. Especially when driving, which is when I do my best singing. Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses (ten out of ten) is also very difficult to sing, but in a different way, so on that song it doesn’t matter, but it does on this one. The reasoning is deep and complicated, like me. Although less handsome!!!!!
Kelly Clarkson’s one and Ariana Grande’s one: both excellent. Weezer’s Christmas EP: a sad and sorry waste of time.
I’ve not yet done this year’s listen of the most upsetting Christmas song ever written — His Favourite Christmas Story by the objectively bad Christian pop-punk band City Lights. When I do, I have no doubt I’ll be a wreck. It’s not a good song, by any stretch of the imagination, and yet on multiple occasions has rendered me a gibbering, sobbing wreck. I wrote about it for Kerrang! a few years ago in a piece I don’t have time to read right now but is probably good because I did it.
I’ve been in some magazines due to the book I wrote, There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question, becoming a publishing phenomenon (it is currently sitting pretty at number 39 in Amazon’s “Cat, Dog & Animal Humour” category, which if I’m honest I don’t think it even belongs in).
I was interviewed for The Week Junior, who opted to print my face SO BIG, and the book was also very positively reviewed in The Phoenix.
I learned about both of them from friends who are also parents sending me pictures of their kids reading about me, which is kind of bonkers. Also bonkers: here it is in Castilian Spanish (as opposed to South American Spanish, previously featured), Croatian, Greek and Basque.
1
“Can I tell you what I’d do if I were a clumsy anaesthetist?”
“Knock yourself out!”
“Oh. Well. Yes.”
2
“Shall we discuss Ginger Spice’s actions or come up with a name for a magazine about traditional Australian instruments?”
“What did Geri do?”
“Great!”
3
“I've just seen a film staring Famke Janssen and a handsome Irishman. I was rather enchanted by Ms Janssen, I have to say.”
“Taken?”
“That's exactly how I felt with her while watching Goldeneye, yes.”
I am midway through — but not as midway through as I should be — writing Become A Genius In A Year, out next May. Somehow almost every book I write ends up involving many hundreds of separate ‘bits’: my poorly-received book of 501 kids’ games, my not-quite-bestseller (fineseller?) of 213 questions and answers, and now this one, 366 chunks of information of various types. What always happens with anything like this is:
Have six ideas and feel certain having hundreds more will be easy.
Write about forty, finding everything after about 25 pretty difficult, and become really tired.
Stop knowing what words mean and things are.
I’m deep into stage three at the moment, so that’s fun. But there have been two articles written about the endeavour — well, running the press release about it — so I have to do it now. If both BookBrunch and The Bookseller say that you’ve said they should say you’ve said you’ll do something, you have to.
4
“Any ideas on how I, a landowner, can raise funds to visit a decommissioned British nuclear site?”
“Sellafield?”
“Good idea, I can use the money for a trip to Dungeness.”
5
“My partner got in a race with a Victorian writer specialising in recipes and domestic management.”
“Mrs Beeton?”
“Yes, my wife ran a lot slower than Eliza Acton, author of Modern Cookery For Private Families (1845).”
6
I bought a plant that I thought would reflower every year but actually smelled like both genitals and an anus: I’d accidentally purchased a perineal.
I’m going to America for Christmas, visiting my wife’s family in upstate New York, which you really have to visit to understand how far away from New York it is. It’s pretty much the Scotland of New York. We’re flying (via Iceland) from an airport that claims to be in London but isn’t (Stansted) to an airport that claims to be in New York but isn’t (New York Stewart International Airport) — if you wanted to go from London to New York and found yourself doing Stansted to Stewart you’d be LIVID.
Last time I was in rural upstate New York, a wild mountain-man explained the rule about Champagne only being allowed to carry that name if it came from that region of France, and how there was a word for that. I said, “Appellation?” and he said, “Yes I am.”
7
“It says here that 15% of motorists are responsible for 72% of the rule-breakages on British roads.”
“Infractions?”
“Okay, um, three-twentieths of motorists are responsible for eight-elevenths of the rule-breakages on British roads.”
8
I was fascinated by the animal-human hybrids, and attempted to learn more about them from their creator, but he was too grumpy, sullen and miserable to tell me anything. And that was my adventure on... The Island Of Dr Morose.
9
I always presume everyone understands and likes Irish spelling. I suppose that’s pretty naiaimh of me.
November in numbers: Did, and won, one pub quiz. Dithered for too long about buying a celebratory kebab and missed my window. Had a big argument in a Christmas tree farm. Met Santa. Did one day on an ad pitch that, if it happens, I’ll absolutely show off about and exaggerate my part in. Woke up in the middle of the night, really excited, with the idea “A Christmas song that is all laser beam noises”, which isn’t as good an idea as it felt at the time. Saw two red pandas and a bunch of capybaras: great stuff. Watched all three Taken films and am yet to work out why.
Buy my book / PayPal me £5.30 for a pint of Kronenbourg / Follow me on Instagram / Enjoy my jokes on Blue Sky / Or just tell me I’m good!
Next issue: January 3rd. I’ll be in America, I think, so perhaps I’ll misspell a bunch of words and really struggle with the idea that other places and viewpoints exist! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha how will anyone notice the difference ha ha ha ha does anyone even read this, do I even exist, did I die many moons ago, I’m going to skip the bit at the end of the newsletter with book title jokes and I bet nobody even notices, I never asked to be born BYE BYE MERRY CHRISTMAS YOU ARE GREAT
