Let's do this interesting one: The funniest jokes from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival by Glen Levy | @glenjl | August 25, 2011 | + Tweet
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Street entertainers perform on the Royal Mile to promote their show during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on August 24, 2011 in Edinburgh, Scotland. This 65th Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the largest arts festival in the world.
There’s one thing we can safely say about these comedians: they’ll be here all week. Nick Helm has won the award for the best joke at the Edinburgh Fringe. This annual comedy event has provided an excellent springboard for turning promising sketch artists into established stars (actor and comedian Steve Coogan certainly enjoyed the boost to his profile that came from performing in Edinburgh in the 1990s). But while the ultimate prize for best show is what all the acts are really striving for, there is some serious pride at stake when it comes to being crowned as having the funniest one-liner. Digital TV channel Dave assembled a panel of ten comedy critics who have spent the last two weeks visiting venues across the city. Their top 30 funnies were then put to a vote among 3,000 comedy fans. The winning gag? “I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Helm doesn’t suffer from a lack of confidence either (which is good considering his line of work) and said: “I knew my joke was the funniest joke of all the other gags in 2011. Thanks to Dave and all the people who voted to prove me right” (List: Top 10 Late-Night Jokes).
Helm slayed last year’s winner, the infinitely more well-known comedian Tim Vine, who still came a respectable second in 2011 with this zinger: “Crime in multi-storey car parks. It’s wrong on so many levels.”
Because we’re nice (or cruel, depending on your perspective), here are the remaining entries in the top 10. (Via BBC)
3. Hannibal Buress: “People say, ‘I’m taking it one day at a time.’ You know what? So is everyone. That’s how time works.”
4. Tim Key: “Drive-thru McDonald's was more expensive than I thought... When you’ve hired a car…”
5. Matt Kirshen: “I played chess with a friend and he said, ‘let’s make this interesting.’ So we stopped playing chess.”
6. Sarah Millican: “My mom told me, don’t put anything in your mouth you wouldn’t want to swallow. So she got me eating broccoli, which felt like hypocrisy.”
7. Alan Sharp: “I was in a band we called Prevention, because we hoped people would say we were better than The Cure.”
8. Mark Watson: “Someone asked me recently, if I had to give up either food or sex, which would I choose. Neither! I don’t fall for that, wife.”
9. Andrew Lawrence: “I admire these phone-hacking people. I think they have a lot of patience. I can’t even be bothered to check my own voicemails.”
10. Deanne Smith: “My friend died doing what he loved… Heroin.”
Glen Levy is an executive producer at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @glenjl. You can also continue the conversation on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.
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