Skip to content

Joke booth: Old Spice and Brylcream

Featuring Video

Peter from London's joke features the oldest swinger in town

01 Jun
2007

 

 

Watch

You need the Flash Player (version 7 or higher) to view this clip - download Flash. http://media.open2.net/lennysbritain/124.flv The Open University

Read

A very old aged pensioner is getting ready for a night on the town. Gets his best suit on, Old Spice and puts some Brylcreem in his hair. Gets himself ready and phones the cab to say 'take me down to the local disco bar'.

Walks into the disco bar, all lights and loud music, young people... spies this equally old woman sitting up at the bar, dressed up to the nines.

So he hobbles over to her and says 'you look wonderful darling, what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? Tell me - do I come here often?'

 

Marie Gillespie Marie Gillespie Marie says

'It's too the near truth that one!' Peter says, after delivering the punch line. With eyes cast down, he seems to be expressing the sadness as well as the humour that inevitably accompanies the ageing process – our own and others.

Jokes that deal with the trials of ageing, in particular memory loss, confusion, and physical deterioration, were prominent in the survey. And they have a long history. Ageing provides comic material for many jokes but this does not inevitably mean that people making such jokes are ridiculing the elderly or promoting ageist stereotypes.

Such jokes may provide a way of coping with ageing or with ageing relatives or with intimations of our own mortality or they may simply challenge taboos or conventions about how we discuss old age.

This joke plays on the young/old opposition on the seeming incongruity of a 'very old age pensioner' preparing for a night out on the town in a young disco bar. The references to Old Spice aftershave and Brylcream signify 'old fashioned'.

The old man introduces two conventional chat up lines in quick succession but the second is a comic flop as a mistaken pronoun 'sends up' memory loss.

Rate and share this page:

You haven't rated. Average rating 4.5 out of 5, based on 2 ratings

Share this page:

.

More like this

Comments

Be the first to post a comment.

Login or Register to post comments

Article Information

Publication details

Copyright information
• Body text - Copyrighted: The Open University
• Video - Copyrighted: The Open University
• Image 'Marie Gillespie' - Copyrighted: Marie Gillespie

Article Feeds

If you enjoyed this, why not follow a feed to find out when we have new things like it? Choose an RSS feed from the list below. (Don't know what to do with RSS feeds?)
Remember, you can also make your own, personal feed by combining tags from around OpenLearn.

About OpenLearn

Hide

Explore

Try

Study

OU Courses

OpenLearn Now

Hide
Dickens: Want some more? Copyrighted Image iStock

Delve into the world of Dickens on his bicentenary.

Tag Clouds

Hide

My Cloud

Discover the latest about your passions - Sign In or Register and start a personal tag cloud.

What are Tag Clouds?
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/sites/all/themes/ole/flash/tagcloud.swf

Creative Commons License Except for third party materials and otherwise stated, content on this site is made available
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence

/openlearn/sites/all/themes/ole/