Every year at Adelaide Fringe and Festival time the searches for nutri grain nuts and bolts and ‘slow as a wet wig’ diminish in proportion to the number of searches for ‘jokes about Adelaide’ and ‘Adelaide jokes’. I suspect not all of these searches are by visiting comedians, but include a fair smattering of writers rewriting the first paragraph or two of presentations they made at Edinburgh or New York; buskers and other street performers; the odd critic who wishes to sound informed in their dispatches back home.
I do think that rather than internet searches you’d be better off getting into town a day earlier and spending the time wandering around and reading the local ‘news’papers, but since you’ve come to me for advice, let me provide it.
Unless you can find a way to tell said joke with stunning originality, we find the following really boring:
– weird disappearances and murders;
– the one way freeway;
– the balls (easier to make funny in original way than some other subjects, but tricky nonetheless);
– Mike Rann (surely he’s put even himself to sleep by now);
– the pandas;
– our own boringness.
I’d offer you some suggestions, but I’ve been away for two years, and when I left we were all still making jokes about Nicole Cornes and water restrictions. Having said that, I think the bogans at the Clipsal 500 are still fair game, but that’s just me.
Oh, I was imagining different jokes, alas.
I did student revues at Adelaide Uni. We tried to make jokes about Adelaide. Let me tell you, Adelaide is not funny.
We were reduced to:
Popeye
West Lakes
The Glenelg Tram
pink shorts (not actually all that funny, apart from saying the words “pink shorts”)
A Touch of Elegance
the pie cart
the Cleland Wildlife Reserve
the war between Humphrey Bear and Fat Cat (I actually knew the guy who made a living inside Fat Cat, BTW)
quarries
Have you noticed, in your walks along North Terrace, that bus number nine goes to Paradise, through St. Peters? That, sung to a Gershwin tune, was almost funny. Almost.
I am very sorry, honourable husband, I am unable to visit your blog. Is it a typepad one? For some reason, my IP doesn’t let me visit typepad blogs. It is most frustrating, as you sound most intriguing.
Thank you for your kind compliment.
Yes, it is a TypePad blog. I chose TypePad because it is reputed to be the Rolls-Royce of blogging platforms.
But what good is a Rolls-Royce if you can’t drive it to the shops for a pint of milk?
See ya when you’re surfing from abroad!
Something I find funny about people from Adelaide, but in a charming ‘I like you’ kind of way is how much they like Adelaide and will not hear a word against it. Because it is never done in an arrogant way like people from Melbourne or Sydney. More of a mystified tone of wondering why everyone else doesn’t love Adelaide as well.
Also, people from Queensland find it quite funny when people from Adelaide come to Canberra in summer and say ‘gosh, it’s so humid here!’. That’s hardly a mass- market joke, though, is it?
No, it doesn’t really have broad appeal. But who knows? Maybe someone will be appearing in front of an audience of people currently living in Canberra who once lived in Queensland and have since met a lot of people from Adelaide. You never know.
You forgot jokes about losing the Grand Prix.
I am, however, guilty of finding jokes about the poor overall quality of Adelaide’s drivers mildly amusing. Unless they include the phrase ‘elastic lanes’ and any attempt to communicate the concept of a group of people holding drivers licenses who have never learned for themselves, nor been informed by others, about the existence, necessity, laws governing and proper uses of indicators.
“It’s like they’ve never even HEARD of indictors! Never! Heard of! Ha! Indic- Ha Ha! Indicators! Ha ha ha!”
This is more your interstate visitor comedian/enne, rather than your pay-to-get-in performer.
Ps. BALLS!!!
ah, yes, the grand prix. Of course.
(and yes, balls is still funny, you are right)
Hey I just got back to Sydney after two days for work in Adelaide and I really don’t understand what it is about those pandas. I was given a Haigh’s chocoloate panda (yum) but I might have preferred a frog.
Also, my cab driver reckoned Adelaide drivers are more possessive of their lanes than people in Queensland who in my experience expect two kilometres notice of a lane change.
He also reckoned Adelaide was a 20 mintue town, except in rush hour when it was a 25 minute town.
boom boom.
More seriously I learnt about the marvellous Muriel Matters and feel inspired to hire a dirigible.
I had to google Muriel Matters. I just learnt something.
Oh, god, the pandas. Why. On my way to work I sometimes pass a building (I think it’s a fancy-car sales yard?) that has a big thing in the window that says ‘We PANDA to you!’ It never fails to make me groan and wish for death.
I would cautiously suggest that the best jokes about Adelaide are jokes about Melbourne? Ie, stealing our stuff, whatever. I also heard Adam Hills tell a good one involving Farmer’s Union Iced Coffee. The best bit was that it allowed us to boast that we got rid of our starbucks. Possibly something about Crows/Port, but football bored me silly so no help from me, there.