I'm not one of those PC fanatics - just a person with a conscience which annoyingly comes into play at some of the most inconvenient moments, such as when I feel like repeating a joke I've heard but then I realise that actually this joke gets a laugh at the expense of a whole load of people who have done nothing to deserve it. For instance a friend recently texted me a very funny joke about Mick and Paddy - well, it is funny, but it perpetuates the lie that Irish people are stupid, and do I really want to do that? Same goes for blondes, etc.
I found myself thinking about Jewish humour and how back home we used to tell jokes about people being stupid and of course they weren't racist, were they, we just told jokes about the people of Chelm, which was a mythical place where stupid people lived, right?
Wrong. I've just looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out that Chelm was a real town in eastern Poland which in Jewish humour became the legendary capital of foolishness.
So what do we do? Can we invent a fictional place with some fictional characters so that we can tell jokes about foolishness without perpetuating stupid prejudice? Perhaps we could invent a land called Foolland, where the Foolish live?
Here's my feeble attempt at telling a joke without treading on anyone's toes. Let's see if it works.
Daft and Brush are walking home after a night out and pass the bus garage. 'Let's just steal a bus,' says Daft, not wanting to walk, and offers to keep watch. Twenty minutes later he looks in to find Brush in a flap, 'I can't find a number 7!
''You idiot,' says Daft, 'just take a number 9 and we'll walk from the roundabout.'
