Right clearly two things have happened. Either there is an evil conspiracy to steal the intelligence out of people's brains, starting with one very specific group, or we have grown to love the complete lack of intelligence shown by one group and this has brought about their success and drawn other lackfull cretins to its shiny moneymaking reputation.
I'm talking about birthday cards. Now I know that this is uninspired source of droll stand ups everywhere. But I'm not here to spout "what is the deal with birthday cards?!". Ok, well maybe a little, but my source of muse on this little ditty is hatred. As I stood in a Tesco's queue with a handful of baguettes and pasta meals (yes they make good cold lunch snacks when combined), I heard an unexplainably attractive girl speak to her equally good looking "just friends" guy pal. "Oh cards! I need one because its xxxx's birthday" (no I'm not censoring my quotes, I just can't remember the conversation at this point. Personally if I could remember the person's full name then I'd put it here, just on the off chance that they read this and also got a god awful card recently so that they can now stand up from their computer and shout "Oh yeah! I hated that card!").
So the girl (who now I think about it, I can only remember what her hair looked like, and combined it with her posh/Southampton accent to create a photo fit in my head), started flitting through the cards and announcing each one of them to anyone who cared to have their ears open in the vicinity (hello).
It was actually rather joyous. Each card she picked up she began to read aloud with a sense of "this is going to be great!" obviously forgetting any and every card she'd read before this. And on each of the 3 occasions of card readings she opened the card and announced the punch line. Twice she stopped saying the punch line halfway through because it was at best crass and at worse VD related. The other was just crap. Unworthy even of Christmas cracker publishing.
"wow that's awful" I thought at the end of it. Elsewhere in the world wherever there is an audience to comedy, it is given the highest critique, reviews are given of books and stand-up performances and hecklers are even to be expected. But not here, not in this arena of humanity denying crap. Perhaps a little "how's my joke telling" should be put on the back with the writer's 24hr home phone number on it. That should make them pick up their game.
But perhaps I'm shooting fish in a barrel here. Perhaps like haiku, it is an incredibly difficult field to work in. And so FINALLY I get to my point. I believe that in the next 60 seconds (and no i have put 0 thought in to this) I will come up with humorous comedy cards..... ready ....go!
completely blank cards with "I don't really know you" on the inside.
cards made out of a £5 note
cards which don’t open, and can't be stood up
cards with a link to a funny youtube clip on it
a card with all the numbers of your birthday written in a row with "christ you're old" on it.
a card that turns into a hat
a card with two jokes that reads differently depending on which way you hold it up
cards with a shot in it
cards with built in fireworks
edible cards
....wow, that actually hurt. I think the hardest thing was to try not to think of the god awful tat and doing something very similar. I think the first one started that way, the "christ your old" thing is rather time honoured. Perhaps offensiveness would have been a better route to go down (lets hope next year you won't need a card type ones).
Definitely by the end I think I was on to something. A card and a match. Step back and watch the card launch in to the sky and explode into confetti. Awesome.
