Hello, and happy new year. Welcome to Interesting Skull. I am seeing this as a monthly collection of ten or so rough-ass jokes/vignettes, interspersed with plugs (when I have things to plug) and thoughts that are too incomplete to attempt to monetise. It might be good?
1
“I ate a can of tuna while my friend, the Swedish actor Mr Lundgren, got trapped in a bank vault.”
“Dolph in safe?”
“I’m not sure, I hope so, but it was from Lidl and I couldn’t read the label.”
2
What does Mowgli do when he wants to get his ears pierced?
Looks for a — Claire’s Accessories!
3
A down-on-his-luck farmer said to me, “I’ve just been chewing some cud.”
I said, “Like a cow?”
He said, “I’d love one, for I am a down-on-his-luck farmer (hence this cud).”
No, I don’t quite get that third one either. I spent the holidays in New York. A lot of writers have made a lot of money examining the differences between British and American people, so whenever I visit the States I think maybe I can get in on that. After this visit, the only thing I have to add to the conversation is this: Americans can’t say “Robin Hood” properly. They say it like it’s one word, like ‘womanhood’, as though it refers to the condition of being a robin rather than a kind of forest-dwelling vigilante. It’s infuriating. Other than that, I have nothing. The ‘wry transatlantic observation’ millions will continue to evade me.
4
My wife and I asked a voyeur what a pirate's second-in-command was called.
He said, "First mate."
I said, "I don’t think either of us are particularly comfortable doing that in front of you. Might just look it up on the internet instead. You've been no help."
5
“I got attacked by a monster while visiting a public school.”
“Eton?”
“No, just attacked. At Harrow.”
6
I believe God created the world in six days, and did it all in Zagreb. I am a Croatianist.
I turn 40 this year, a very odd thought. I am fairly happy with my life (other than, obviously, all the ways in which I am savagely unhappy with it), but would probably have hoped to acquire a bit more wisdom or money or something by this point. I’m mildly concerned about losing my mind a bit when it happens and having a gnarly mid-life crisis. The vast majority of incredibly stressful events in my life have been shared with at least one other person, so having a birthday-based breakdown will be a new one for me. It’s a bit like that scene in Street Fighter where Raul Julia, as M Bison, says, “For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.”
Or, now that I come to write that down, maybe it isn’t like that at all. There’ll be a Tuesday that means more to me than to other people, I guess? Maybe that’s just what a birthday is.
7
There’s a new theme park in Hollywood where you can see famous movie locations drawn with only one neverending line. It’s called Unicursal Studios.
8
“I used to work in a tall building in London and received a spike in the mail.”
“Centre Point?”
“Yes, I was. While working at the Shard.”
9
“Caught in a crisis, I asked the star of the Mighty Ducks films to review objects.”
“Emilio rate things?”
“No, if anything events were exacerbated by Joshua Jackson’s judgements.”
Ideally I’ll use this platform for a bit of self-promotion, as I’ve stopped doing other social media, but I don’t have much to promote at the moment. I’m coming towards the finish line of a book that will be out in 2024, which remains ages away. A reasonable amount of my recent writing was Christmassy enough to be quite, quite irritating to read in January (although I liked this piece for the i about crap cracker jokes). And this year, so far, I’ve done staggeringly little.
But there’s some fun stuff on the horizon — by the next Interesting Skull (I’m going for a first-Friday-of-the-month thing) I’ll have started contributing to at least one new site, and hope springs eternal that a long-gestating book project will finally get signed off.
I remain very much available for work.
10
"I hang suet-based seed snacks out in the trees for the birds so much that the neighbours have given me a nickname."
"Fat balls?"
"No, they call me Friendly Mike the Bird-Lover. Why... why would they call me that other name?"