Dusting off the ol' tux for a slice of Danish cheese
Including quite a rude joke about a detective and the words "parped" and "thruppences".
Hello. It is May 2025. This is the twenty-ninth monthly instalment of Interesting Skull, a newsletter of HANDSOME HILARITY, ATTRACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT, JOYFUL JOURNALISM and A DEEPLY CONCERNING LACK OF INCOME by me, absolute champ and future knight of the realm Mike Rampton. Expect at least ten actual, proper jokes, and some other words and stuff.
LOOK, LOOK, WHAT A NICE BOOK NEWS
May 22nd sees the release of Become A Genius In A Year, written by me, illustrated by Gareth Edwards and edited by Holly Tonks. I got mine in the post the other day and it’s a lot of fun, the kind of book I’d have devoured as a kid. Please buy it! Tell your friends to buy it! Ask your children’s school and local library to buy it!
It’s available from:
Apparently it’ll also be in hundreds of branches of Sainsbury’s — pop in for some Pringles, leave with a life-changing amount of knowledge.
For promo stuff around it, and school presentations and stuff, I’m planning on really playing up the persona of being the smartest man in the world. Big theatrical self-aggrandising and comedy arrogance, which absolutely won’t be undermined by the white-hot terror on my face and full-body shudders that happen whenever I speak in public. What fun it’ll be! Larks aplenty!
HA HA HA-LARIOUS BOOK NEWS
I have signed a contract to write a joke book, coming out in May 2026. In fact, there is a non-zero chance that it’ll come out the same day as another book I’m writing. They’re both due in August — also, I think, on the same day — and will both be really, really good.
Colossal success awaits. I am, of course, an excellent author, and extremely good with words, although I have to be honest: I find myself unable to describe the difficulty I’m having fitting two large sections of container truck together. I just can’t articulate it.
LAST-MINUTE JORTS NEWS
I wrote and scheduled this email, then cut the legs off two pairs of jeans to make some sick jorts. It was quite exciting. I do understand that there’s a difference between cutting the legs off some old jeans to make them into shorts and having a book published — one of them is something millions of people dream of doing, and the other is having a book published.
1
“Does anyone have any idea what happened to the kid from the film Mars Attacks!?”
“Lukas Haas?”
“That's great news, please ask Lukas what Natalie Portman's up to these days.”
2
“My bum keeps making noises like a contented cat.”
“As per usual?”
“No, it’s quite out of the ordinary.”
3
“I’d love to one day own some soft Danish cheese.”
“Havarti aspirations?”
“No, no, I’m not creative at all, my goals start and end with cheese ownership.”
I made a bit of a misjudgement in April, because I thought I’d be getting some money at the beginning of it. Not necessarily a huge amount, but the beginning of my royalties for There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question. March had fairly battered me, with last-minute edits, my first-ever live events and a few really knackering weekends, so I was ready to slow down for a bit, enjoy the Easter holidays and gather myself before launching into my next projects.
However, what I hadn’t realised — or, more likely, had been told but not understood properly because I’m a big div — was how long it takes to get paid for books. Royalties are paid twice a year, in April and October. The ones paid in April are for sales between July and December the previous year — Silly Question came out in October, so only about ten weeks of sales were covered, and while this came within a smidge of selling out my advance (which is great, as very few books sell out their advance, so it makes me a super duper champion) it wasn’t quite enough to nudge it over into actual “here’s some money, Mike” territory.
This means both that I won’t get any royalties until October, and that April was the lowest-earning month of my entire career. So that was quite a kick to the pyjama area! Quite, quite, quite a kick! Right in the pyjamas! I had a really lovely weekend with friends last week, and spent all of it moaning about money instead of doing what I should have been doing: showing off about being the best author in the world, saviour of all literature, king of books, better-looking than anyone realises because nobody ever looks at me, etc. Damn it all to absolute heck, and that’s swearing.
4
In Spain, plump Japanese men try to push one another out of a circle in order to win juice. It’s called zumo wrestling.
5
“That fictional detective’s grey tracksuit bottoms are leaving nothing to the imagination.”
“Dick Tracy?”
“Yes they are, and it’s not a great look on Hercule Poirot.”
6
“The blonde bits in George Michael’s hair looked great in that best-of compilation I watched.”
“Highlights reel?”
“I presume they were, yeah, I don’t think it could have been a wig.”
I used to work in offices where there would be a lot of running jokes. I work on my own now, and have done so for several years, but still have a lot of ongoing gags, even if they’re mainly to make myself laugh. What sometimes happens, though, is that I’ll get confused and talk to people as though they’re in on this light-hearted years-long riff.
There was a period where I thought it was really funny to send people who commission me for freelance work emails made to look like I was responding half-heartedly to an amazing offer they’d made. Like, I’d write, “Fine, I’ll do it I guess” and then underneath that, do the whole “On Friday May 2nd, Dave wrote” part and then something like, “Mike, we need someone to spend two weeks in a five-star resort in the Maldives — 200 words, £6,500 — and they’re insisting you’re at least slightly drunk for all of it”. Just seemed more fun than a basic hello, and people enjoyed it.
Then I did it once to an editor I don’t know that well, and he freaked out that he’d been hacked, and I was absolutely mortified. To me it was the twentieth version of a gag I loved doing; to him it was a worrying security breach. Awful. Entirely avoidable.
Another was, any time there’s been an interview opportunity with an attractive famous person, I’d joke about dusting off my tuxedo. It’s just funny as an image to me, turning up to interview Avril Lavigne while ill-advisedly dressed like a ventriloquist’s dummy. But it’s a funnier rubbish gag if you’ve known me for years than if I’m Freelance Contributor Number 22. It’s just confusing then. People are like, “Why does this pitch about Electro from Gladiators mention ‘dusting off the ol’ tux’ three times?”
I did finally manage to monetise my love of Gladiators for the i paper, and managed — just about — to not come across as distressingly horny, which is a genuine concern when writing about stuff like that. If you’ve seen that show (which is genuinely incredible), it almost seems creepier not to point out how good-looking they all are.
I always like it when TV shows acknowledge how attractive their casts are. Friends did it occasionally, where an outside character would come in and marvel at how implausibly beautiful everyone was. The Good Place and Community both had a lot of fun with it. The X-Files — a show which gets a lot of credit for helping women realise they were attracted to women, and not enough for helping boys realise they were attracted to women — did it brilliantly, particularly in Darin Morgan’s episodes. As a viewer it’s great fun, but it’s got to be odd to be in that writers’ room and pitch it. There’s probably a quite bad rom-com to be written based on a shy, indoorsy comedy writer working up the courage to say, “What if we did a joke about how beautiful you are?”
Awww. I’d watch that. I’d cry at that. Someone pay me one million pounds to write that THIS INSTANT.
7
“I’m wearing a t-shirt with a motif popular with fans of rock music to an event commemorating my favourite character from The X-Files.”
“Scully?”
“That’s certainly how you could describe the t-shirt I’m wearing to talk about how much I like FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner, yes.”
8
“I’m dressing fancy to watch a language lesson on YouTube, inspired by The White Lotus.”
“Thai clip?”
“No, but I’m sporting a cummerbund while I watch these Italian lessons.”
9
“The person who makes clothes for the biggest pop star in the world just broke wind.”
“Tailor’s whiffed?”
“No, it is Beyoncé whose costume designer just parped.”
APRIL IN NUMBERS
Read several great spooky books which have made me think the spooky book I’m trying to write might suck. Did some very cold outdoor swimming. Drank 300 cans of Estrella. Rode a bike around Spanish paddy fields and had a whale of a time. Did my tax return and got very depressed. Cashed a cheque (!!!) in the most beautiful bank in the country. Ate, if I’m totally honest with myself, too many eggs. Got a three-star review from someone who thought my book weighed too much. Watched Slay Duggee perform in a brewery while not only entirely sober, but not even on the 0% stuff because they’d (unacceptably) run out. Had a lovely time watching Histon F.C., wishing both that they had a better nickname (“The Stutes” — absolutely rubbish) and a kit that complemented my colouring a little more. Wrote a 14-verse poem about pooing that might make me the richest stinker in the land, the very land I tell you!
COOL ACTIONS FOR COOL PEOPLE TO COOLLY TAKE
Buy my books, you scoundrels! I think but don’t actually know, that if you buy them from my exciting store on Bookshop.org that I get a couple of chunky thruppences.
Or, if unconvinced by that, There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question is on Amazon UK, Waterstones and Nosy Crow.
You can pre-order the US version, retitled There Are No Silly Questions, from Amazon US, Bookshop.org (I will make Bookshop.org happen) or Target.
Pre-order Become A Genius In A Year, out on May 22nd, from Amazon UK, Waterstones or HarperCollins.
Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, Strava or BlueSky. And please tell people about Interesting Skull, I work hard on it and dooooooon’t have a lot of subscribers.
If you work at a media outlet and would like me to write for you, or have a platform I can promote my nonsense on, please get in touch. Same if you’re giving a caravan away. I’d really like a caravan!
Next issue: June 6th.
10
CURRENT READING
I Didn’t Realise It Was As Bad As It Is by Bea O’Problem
Insist On Voting by D. Mandy Lections
We Can Also Use It For Badminton! by Wally Ballnet
Slipping In Bird Poo Then Getting Pecked by Avery Mishap
Dental Crowns by Captain Gold