All right, stop! Collaborate and listen.

[venta]

Today's strange request, from the Venta's Strange Request Catalogue:

Tell me you favourite lolly-stick joke.

Please :)

Or your least favourite. Or merely one you remember but don't have any real opinion on.

To clarify: ideally I'd like actual, genuine lolly-stick jokes. Not some sort of post-modern, ironic take on the concept. And absolutely definitely not ones that sound a bit like lolly-stick jokes but are, in fact, funny.

(I take it there's on one here young enough to be saying "a what joke"? Although I guess there may be someone who was insufficiently based in the UK at the time.

When I was a kid, an ice lolly bought from the ice-cream van would have a joke printed on the stick. Usually it would be a question-and-answer style of joke, and the question would be on the visible, sticky-out end. Once you'd eaten the lolly, the answer would be revealed.

The jokes were always printed in pale, brownish ink, and looked like they'd been imprinted onto the stick with a John Bull printing outfit. The jokes were, univerally, terrible.

A few weeks ago, I bought the right sort of lolly from the ice-cream van in Kirtlington (stuff your expensive ices, cheap lemonade or cider lollies are where it's at) and was disappointed to find no joke. I'm not sure when jokes disappeared, but I think they were gone by the 90s.

As I finished my lemonade lolly, I said disugsutedly "my lolly-stick's got no joke". Pete observed that that sounded like the title of a song. We agreed that it would be a music-hall style number. I promised to write the song for him if he promised to sing it, which he did.

I have some ideas, but am being a little thwarted by my inability to remember many example jokes. Which is where you, my dears, come in...
)

Comments

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

They're coming back. And they definitely have been around in the last 5 years because smallclanger knows of their existence and has told me some. He is not an ice baby.

What lies quivering at the bottom of the sea?
A nervous wreck.

[venta.livejournal.com]

You may have your kudo today :)

I certainly haven't seen a joke on a stick since the 80s, but then I don't actually eat that many ice-lollies.

I remember commenting years ago that the likes of Magnum lollies should resume the tradition, but instead of a naff joke they should have an interesting pieces of trivia on them. You definitely wouldn't want a joke on a Magnum stick.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Oh.

What were the lollies that had plastic, er, sticks with seekrit c0dez stamped into them?

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think they were the ones that I mentally categorize as "the disgusting ones", so I don't know much about the seekrit c0dez :)

Disgusting == basically made of the same stuff which candy necklaces, etc, are made out of.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Q: What do you get if you cross a duck with a cow?
A: Cream Quackers!

<canned laughter>

(I leave it to your judgement whether this falls into the "best" or "worst" category...)

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

That doesn't sound like the title of a song to me, it sounds like the opening line of a joke:

"My lolly-stick's got no joke."
"How does it provide a low-quality short-form humour to the lolly eater?"
"Terrible!"

... though admittedly not one likely to split anyone's sides.

(I have been trading 'jokes' of this form with a friend for over a decade, with no sign of stopping.)

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

My dog suffers from synesthesia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia).
Then how does he smell?
Purple.

My wife's gone to the West Indies.
Trinidad?
No, Barbados.

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

In case anyone doesn't know what a John Bull printing outfit is, a decent description is here: http://www.skooldays.com/blog/john-bull-printing-outfit/

I cannot recall anything which I know for sure is a lolly joke. My memory is clouded by joke books, crackers and similar.

What's the difference between a hill and a pill?
One is hard to get up, the other is hard to get down.

By the way, one thing that intrigues me about a particular form of children's joke is that they seem to teach the principle of the spoonerism joke with clean jokes, so that later on when half the answer is missing, the older person can understand the joke.
(What are you on about, Ian?)
Q. What's the difference between a black cloud and a lion with a thorn in its paw?
A. One pours with rain, the other roars with pain.
there are other clean examples, just can't remember them or find them online. They enable you to understand jokes such as the following:
Q. What's the difference between a goat and a goldfish?
A. One mucks around in fountains...
Q. What's the difference between a shop steward and an economist?
A. One knows all the facts about the country...
etc.

[venta.livejournal.com]

when half the answer is missing

Wow! I think I have somehow only ever managed to hear one non-clean version of this joke. Which, if you're interested, was:

Q: What's the difference between a drummer and Radox?
A: Radox bucks your feet up...

I had no idea there was a whole family of them out there (though it should perhaps have been obvious). To the Googlemobile!

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

Q: What's the difference between a seamstress and a soprano?
A: One tucks up the frills...

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

Q. What's the difference between a market barker and a dachshund going uphill?
A. A barker bawls out his wares...

Q. What's the difference between a charismatic preacher and a nun in the bath?
A. One has hope in his soul...

Sorry, weren't we supposed to be doing chidren's lolly stick jokes?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Q. What's the difference between a market barker and a dachshund going uphill?
A. A barker bawls out his wares...

No fair! That one isn't a Spoonerism!

Although - if you aren't familiar with the works of one Mr Les Barker - I commend this to you: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDyL1TYaGeU&feature=fvwrel

Sorry, weren't we supposed to be doing chidren's lolly stick jokes?

I was hoping... but there don't seem to be many takers!

[ringbark.livejournal.com]

It *is* a Spoonerism. I refer the doubter to the words of the reverend gentleman himself: "O Lord, in whose hand is the king of hearts..." It is perfectly acceptable for a Spoonerism to be formed from entire words. Though Yakov Smirnoff does some of those too.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I remain unconvinced (and I've never heard that attributed to Spooner, either!)

Mind you, most of the things attributed to him he didn't say. I think there is one authenticated saying of his. And I've never heard Spoonerism applied to swapping words, just letters or syllables.

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

Q. What do you get if you cross an elephant with a kangaroo?

A. Big holes all over Australia

The above I KNOW was on a lolly stick. All the rest that spring to mind might equally have been from Christmas Crackers.

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

Query from a wrinkly: when did they become ice lollies, as opposed to iced lollies?

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Ooh, good question. This sounds like the same sort of elision whereby, more recently, 'boxed sets' of DVDs etc have become 'box sets'. There's probably a word for it.

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

...and I thought I was the only person in the world who cared. "Box sets" nearly takes the enamel off my teeth; it's nearly as bad as misuse of passive verbs.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

… nearly as bad as passive verbs being misused? :-)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Possibly also the cause of the "mash potato" I was noting grumpily the other day.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I don't remember ever thinking of them as anything other than "ice lollies". To me, "iced" means something is decorated with icing, not that it is frozen.

Children in Noel Streatfeild novels were forever eating "ices" - I never worked out whether that was lollies or ice cream.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Me too: they were lollies made out of ice, hence ice lollies. Not that I have any idea of what the word 'lolly' or rather 'lollipop' originally meant.

I'm guessing that the now-dominant like-a-cake meaning of 'iced' was secondary to, and by analogy with, the older meaning of 'covered with actual chunks of ice to keep it cool'. (Not that that guess is particularly helpful re this question.)

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

Ices because, when Streatfeild was writing, lollies weren't around and "an ice" was "U" whereas ice
cream" wasn't.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I think they were actually scorched into the stick with heated type, rather than it being brown ink.

I wonder if there's a museum of them somewhere.

(And I can't remember any jokes with sufficient confidence that they definitely were on a stick, rather than just like unto those…)