The Comedy Club

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has for 31years been renouned for launching the biggest stars of the UK comedy circuit and attracting the biggest names in comedy from across the world. Beneath all the media scramble, there is of course a thick seam of supreme joke writing and delivery which now has it’s own award crowning the Funniest Joke of The Fringe Award as sponsored by Dave.

Nick Helm takes home the spoils this year with over one quarter of the votes with 3,000. Helm commented: ‘I knew my joke was the funniest joke of all the other jokes in 2011. Thank you to Dave and all the people that voted for proving me right.’

The Top 10 funniest jokes were:
1. Nick Helm: ‘I needed a password with eight characters – so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.’
2. Tim Vine: ‘Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.’
3. Hannibal Buress: ‘People say, “I’m taking it one day at a time.” You know what? So is everybody. That’s how time works.
4. Tim Key: ‘Drive Thru McDonalds was more expensive than I thought… once you’ve hired the car…’
5. Matt Kirshen: ‘I was playing chess with my friend and he said, “Let’s make this interesting”. So we stopped playing chess.’
6. Sarah Millican: ‘My mother told me, you don’t have to put anything in your mouth you don’t want to. Then she made me eat broccoli, which felt like double standards.’
7. Alan Sharp: ‘I was in a band which we called The Prevention, because we hoped people would say we were better than The Cure.’
8. Mark Watson: ‘Someone asked me recently – what would I rather give up, food or sex. Neither! I’m not falling for that one again, wife.’
9. Andrew Lawrence: ‘I admire these phone hackers. 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.’

However there was also a runaway winner of the proverbial wooden spoon ‘Worst Joke’ award; this year going to Paul Daniels for his joke ‘I said to a fella, “Is there a B&Q in Henley” He said “No, there’s an H, an E, an N an L an E and a Y…’
- This probably got a laugh each night, but for all the wrong reasons!