Emotionally devastating bumper fun special
Including a whole advent calendar's worth of jokes, two involving frankincense
Hello. It is December. This is the twelfth monthly instalment of Interesting Skull, a combination of magnificent jokes and ongoing internal collapse by me, Mike Rampton, writer and social chameleon: sometimes completely nondescript, sometimes verging on quite descript.
Holidays are coming. A great van taught me that. By the time you read this I’ll have welcomed in December with 45 minutes of Michael Bublé, 45 minutes of Idina Menzel, four minutes of an objectively bad but emotionally devastating Christian pop-punk song and three hours of lying in the foetal position weeping in horror at the passage of time. Feel free to join me!
‘Tis the season, so this is a bumper fun special — just like every issue of Sex On The Back Of A Car Magazine (Bonus publishing/unusual sexual practices joke: Switch Magazine has a sub called Dom)! Twenty-five festive jokes lay ahead, interspersed with the usual stuff: self-aggrandisement, despair, parenting, gratitude and villainy: that’s right, it’s an advent, radvent, sadvent, dadvent, gladvent, cadvent calendar. Read one of these to your loved ones every day until Christmas, and they’ll put you in a home!
1
I had an undertaker around for Christmas dinner and said, “What's your job like, and is there anything that you want poured over your turkey?”
He said, “Gravy.”
I said, “I'm going to have to ask you to clarify.”
2
“One of the actors from a fairly recent Bond film just told me her favourite way of referring to the kind of trees that are often used as Christmas trees.”
“Eva Green?”
“No, ‘conifer’ was the preferred term of Lea Seydoux.”
3
My friend Lee is from the Avatar planet. He said his father always wanted to visit Spain but never made it. So this Christmas, I'm going to Spain. For Lee's Na’vi dad.
4
I was recently decorating for Christmas, and realised some of the decorations had belonged to a former romantic partner. That really made me look inside and question my own sense of self. I was having an ex’s tinsel crisis.
5
“Can you tell me, in your view, what the best kind of Christmas tree is?”
“I can, a pine.”
“Yes, that's what I'm asking you to do.”
The year is drawing to a close, another one in which I’m not entirely sure what I do for a job but sure that whatever it is, it’s exhausting and was probably a bad move. Ideally this month I will finish a book I’ve been working on for a while, and possibly convince people to give the thumbs-up to another. My wife is doing a bunch of DIY on the house while experimenting with a three-day week (my wife’s name? Prime Minister Edward Heath) so I get to actually use a desk sometimes, like an adult, so that’s nice.
I found out the other day that the foreign rights to the big jazzy exciting book I am somehow still editing, There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question: 213 Weird and Wonderful Questions About the World, Expertly Answered! (Nosy Crow, 2024, please buy it, oh my god, it’s taking SO LONG), have been sold to Greece, so my main focus (besides congratulating myself on my Ted Heath gag) is working out a way to make the joke “What’s a translation into Greek urn?” make sense.
6
“When I was in Venezuela I enjoyed my favourite part of a Christmas dinner.”
“Caracas?”
“No, pigs in blankets are what I enjoyed in Montecito.”
7
“I sledded down a hill listening to my favourite Christmas song by a ‘70s glam rock band.”
“Slade?”
“Okay, fine, I sleighed down a hill listening to my favourite Christmas song by a ‘70s glam rock band. Wizzard!”
8
“I'm going to go and visit the star of the beloved festive classic Home Alone in order to make fun of the grouting in their corridor.”
“Mock hallway caulking?”
“No, Catherine O'Hara. The quality of the sealant in her vestibule is, well, sub-par.”
9
A friend presented me with a traditional German Christmas fruity bread.
I said, “Is this stollen?”
She said “No, I made it.”
10
“I can't believe you were the model who used to advertise sleighs.”
“I think you've been misled.”
“Oh, I thought you'd been Miss Sled.”
Just fifteen more! I was talking to my daughter the other day about how people didn’t want to hear disgusting things while eating dinner, and that farting and burping and stuff while sat around the dinner table wasn’t nice. I said, “Sometimes it feels like every conversation we have turns into ‘I farted out a poo that smelled like wee’”.
She was frozen, overwhelmed with hilarity, silently shaking, unable to make the sound of laughter, her mouth doing its best but it all just being too funny for normal functions to work. It was amazing. It was like the spinny wheel a computer does when everything is just a bit too much. It was, by some margin, the best thing I have ever seen.
Then a few days later, I asked my wife what the time was, and my daughter interrupted to say it was “vomit past wee”. Then when she managed to be able to speak again, she said, “It would be funny if, when I said that, you said it as well, and then we farted.” She followed this up that evening with a song that went, “Poos, wees, farts, toilets, vomit, toenails and poo! And, most importantly… warm bottoms!”
28 years old, she is. She keeps starting days by saying, “And Dad…” as though there hadn’t just been a twelve-hour hiatus in conversation while she slept. I love it. It makes it feel like everything we do is one ongoing chat, which I hope never ends.
11
“Why would I trust you to suggest gift ideas for Jesus? You don't even have the nous to mark a postage stamp as used.”
“Franking sense?”
“I take it all back, that’s a great idea, he’ll love it.”
12
“We'll never know who Pete from Fall Out Boy’s daughter's favourite Christmas king is.”
“Wentz’s lass?”
“It might be, we can only speculate.”
13
A starship captain said to me, “I’m just going to do my diary, then let's eat something festive.”
I said, “Yule log?”
They said, “Yes, and then let's eat something festive.”
14
“The Spanish word for Christmas is ‘navidald’.
“No L.”
“No, that’s French.”
15
Chris Rea's full name is Christmas Really Wouldn't Be The Same Without My Hit Song About Driving.
60% of the way there! Hey, talking of driving, Chris, I now have a driving licence. It’s taken ages and cost a fortune, but now I get to drive a rickety two-decade-old car around rural Cambridgeshire. One day I’ll be able to do it casually, but at the moment every journey involves constantly grunting and making horribly stressed monster noises, then getting out of the car incredibly hungry and frenzied. It’s currently a very intense experience, and driving isn’t supposed to be intense, it’s supposed to be in cars.
16
“I've just eaten one of Santa’s reindeer cooked on a vertical rotisserie.”
“A doner kebab?”
“No, a Blitzen shawarma.”
17
“I used to listen to White Christmas singer Bing Crosby’s collaborations with other great songwriters while working my job on a train.”
“Cole Porter?”
“No, I cleaned the bathrooms. While listening to his collaborations with Irving Berlin.”
18
“Why is your corridor covered in items commemorating the time that you said Netscape Navigator would last forever?”
“I’ve decked the halls with browser folly.”
19
“I've just asked the first ever Director General of the BBC what he thinks of my Christmas decorations.”
“Laud wreath?”
“That’s the guy. He was quite mean about my lights.”
20
“Certain kinds of Christmas trees give me a tickly throat, often resulting in spluttering.”
“Fir cough?”
“I'm telling you about my festive respiratory issues. Please don’t be so dismissive.”
You’re doing great, we’re on the home stretch now and I chose to spare you the joke about thinking a pioneering industrial metal band from Birningham were actually from Sanaa, with the punchline “Godflesh, Yemeni gentlemen”, because it was incomprehensible.
I’ve started a new hard-to-describe work thing, where I help creative agencies turn busy, in-demand directors’ visions for ads into slick presentations. It’s quite fun, while very difficult to explain and occasionally confusing and stressful. If you see a Heineken ad with Gareth Bale in it, I, well, I didn’t work on that, but I did work on a PowerPoint document that was used at some point during the commissioning process. So if anyone wants my autograph, do get in touch. Two hundred quid on PayPal ought to do it.
So there’s not a lot of work to link to. I did do one nice one for the i paper this week on man flu, that was pretty good. I put in a line about “terrific penises” that I knew would get removed, and quite sensibly did, but it really made me laugh when I was writing it, and I feel like you have to try these things.
Inevitably, I’ll write a bunch of Christmassy stuff, because I’m extraordinarily good at Christmas stuff and in high demand for it, which would be a more effective boast if it wasn’t basically saying that for eleven-twelfths of the year I am unemployable. But nobody will want to read Christmas stuff in the January edition of Interesting Skull, so here are a few Festive Freelance Favourites from Christmases past:
a nice piece about Christmas cracker jokes for the i. I talked to the expert for so, so long and felt dreadful about how little was used.
a nice piece about a bad Christmas song that makes me cry for Kerrang!, as also linked right at the beginning of this newsletter. Odds are, as you read this, I am shuddering on the ground with a very sad face.
a nice piece answering the age-old Christmas question: Jingle Bells, Batman smells... but of what? for MEL. When I first found myself freelance (not, obviously, by choice) “What does Batman smell like?” was one of the first ideas I wrote down, and it’s so clearly such a terrible idea that I just sort of looked at it in despair for a while, wondering what jobs I could retrain for. Then about eight years went by before I realised the festive connection that meant, actually, it was great and I was destined to be an enormous immortal success.
a nice piece investigating the endless rewatchability of Die Hard, for Mental Floss. And if you like Die Hard, this one for MEL about all the other movies that have aped its formula is also, you know what, really great, I’m really great.
a nice piece about Christmas cards being rubbish for Shortlist. This was one of the first things I did for Shortlist, and I got invited on the radio to talk about it, which was fun. Then I wrote a thing for them about drinking in airports, and I got invited onto a different radio show and was ready to have a nice time and the guy was — excuse my French — a massive right-wing tosser who berated me for being a drunken thug (?). Radio may not be my medium, despite my face.
21
“While watching a festive ballet by Tchaikovsky I sat abruptly on some confectionery.”
“Nutcracker Suite?”
“No, but my bum melted a chocolate bar… as I watched Swan Lake”
22
People were unimpressed on Christmas morning when I gave them my posh, expensive, fancily-wrapped gifts: murdered male infants aged two and under.
That’s the last time I do my Christmas shopping in Herod’s.
23
“By what method can I persuade people into telling me how to make a snowman’s nose and arm?”
“Carrot and stick?”
“I know how to make a snowman, what interests me are the methods by which I might encourage people to share information with me. Perhaps some kind of reward/punishment system is the way forward.”
24
I recently met the three wise men. I said to the first one, “Wow, you’re dressed so ostentatiously, covered in precious metals!”
He said, “Yeah, I'm a gold guy.”
I said to the second one, “You smell terrific! What a wonderful aroma you have emanating from you!”
He said, “Yeah, I'm a frankincense fellow.”
I said to the third one, “Oh, you've got a big fish's tail instead of legs!”
He said, “Yeah, I’m a merman.”
25
It isn't mentioned in A Christmas Carol, but Tiny Tim was a huge fan of violent films. I said to him once, “What do you think of films where someone gets stabbed right through them?”
He said, “I love an impaley one.”
I said, “What do you think of films where someone gets completely set on fire?”
He said, “Praise be to a burny one.”
I said, “Do you like films where somebody has bits of themselves cut off?”
He said “God bless a severy one!”
God bless a severy one, indeed. Good lord, well done if you made it all the way through. Twenty-five jokes is so, so many jokes. Believe it or not, there were plenty that didn’t make the cut. One about a “crow isthmus spirit”, one about a weigh-in arranger, one about a guy named Harper Harold Angel Singh…
Thanks for reading this. I am far too proud of it for something read by so few people, but in a few bestsellers’ time it’ll be huge and all collected into book form and stuff, and you can say you were there at the beginning. You’ll all see my power. You’ll all see my power. You’ll all see my power. You’ll all see my power. Tell me I’m good! HAVE A LOVELY MONTH AND CHRISTMAS
