The Funniest Joke of the Fringe award, now in its 14th year, is presented annually to a quip or one-liner deemed most hilarious by a panel of judges and a public vote. This year’s winner was comedian Lorna Rose Treen, who captured 44 per cent of the vote with this gem:
“I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah.”
Look, I can’t think of anything meaner than making fun of somebody for making a bad joke, but I’m going to grit my teeth and try my best.
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I’m not the first person to point this out – Twitter/X has been especially unkind to this year’s winner – but the joke barely makes sense. Cheetahs and zookeepers aren’t synonymous, they’re just two things that are occasionally in close proximity to one another. A better version of the joke might be something like “Why did the tiger lose at poker? Because he was playing with a cheetah”.
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To be fair to Treen, it’s not just her. Of the top 10 jokes that were shortlisted for the award, only one of them even really registers as a proper joke. William Stone’s “Nationwide must have looked pretty silly when they opened their first branch” is pretty clever, and has that sort of cool Mitch Hedberg quality that helps it rise above the others, which are essentially just a collection of lazy puns and twee observations. This one by Daniel Foxx is especially egregious: “My grandma describes herself as being in her ‘twilight years’ which I love because they’re great films”. That isn’t even a pun! That’s just word association!
Some of the top ten look fairly limp/low effort when written down, but the comedians delivery must really add so much. Oh and once your pun hits this list basically everyone will hear about it but forget your name, so if you tell it again they think you’re stealing :/
but the comedians delivery must really add so much.
I believe, it’s the way ya tell 'em.
I just think dad jokes are coming back in fashion with younger people now. There are podcasts that have whole sections based around dad jokes. Maybe the zoomers are finding unironically funny, maybe we do just need some simple lighthearted fun.
I’m not going to be lion, I’m all here for it, and I won’t be changing my spots.
The joke of the fringe is never really great in my opinion, but I’m not a massive one liner fan. Also it’s not representative of the fringe as literally every kind of comedy is there, a lot of which is great (got back from there recently).
It’s nice to see a female comic win but it’s not my favourite one liner (sounds like something you’d get in a cracker
The problem is giving an award to one-liners as they tend to come from carefully constructed stand-up and that’s often not the funniest (IMHO) and those jokes are hard to do - it’s no surprise that the award tended to go to Tim Vine who build his whole routine around this. Jimmy Carr is someone else who is good at carefully crafting a joke and he readily admits that he’s not intrinsically funny, he has just studied the art very hard (like Bob Monkhouse whose videos and notebooks are an invaluable archive) - my Dad didn’t rate Carr as a comedian but he couldn’t praise his book on comedy enough and used it as a source in his MA on the linguistics of comedy.
And here:
That joke won “best joke” at the annual joke festival. Just for reference, the Edinburgh Fringe is where Phoebe Waller-Bridge debuted Fleabag. It’s part of the reason we have The League of Gentlemen. Lily Savage got started there. How grim was this year’s lineup that we’re giving awards to something I’d downvote if I saw it in a Reddit thread?
He’s comparing apples to oranges - there are, presumably a lot of sketch shows doing the rounds but they’d tend not to have one-liners, relying on characters and situations as well as slower building jokes.
I got quite excited when the sky news article covering this came up in my rss feed. I was dissappointed.
