The Rotary Club of Anstruther’s meeting of November 1st welcomed Assistant Governor Harry Ledbitter who presented the club with an award in recognition of its efforts earlier in the year on behalf of polio relief; the award was accepted by Bill Henderson who was club president when various fund-raising events took place.
The meeting then turned to lighter matters as president John Wood introduced club member William Duncan whose talk was entitled ‘the best joke ever told’. William gave his audience a chance to come to their own conclusions by relaying quite a few jokes, most of which, perhaps surprisingly, turned out to be repeatable in polite company.
The inventiveness of John Bishop, Chic Murray, Clement Freud and others was on display, but, as William pointed out, jokes are funny only when told to the right listener, in the right place and in the right way. Then there are different genres of joke, for example ones told during wartime and ones which play on local and national stereotypes. And appropriate to the East Neuk there are jokes surrounding some people’s obsession with golf. There’s the one about a golfer halting his round as a funeral cortege passes by, explaining ‘she was a good wife to me’.
William claimed that the best jokes get told time and again, though you have to be careful as the worst jokes are the ones people have heard before. Finally William saluted the comedians themselves many of whom endure quite tortured personal lives for the sake of entertaining the rest of us. Both the remembering and then the successful telling of jokes, he pointed out, require practice and effort.
Club vice-president Derek Mathie proposed the vote of thanks to William for his hilarious talk (whose flavour is almost impossible to reproduce in a press release).
