Beloved comedian Peter Kay – the guy best known for Car Share and that gag about hobnobs – kicked off his first London show at a highly-anticipated comeback tour last week. It’s the 49-year-old’s first tour in over a decade and he’s a man in high demand: Tickets for the tour sold out in minutes, before new dates were added last week and disappeared within an hour.
Kay does a genre of comedy that hasn’t seemed to tire among fans – something about nostalgia-heavy quips delivered in a deadpan Northern voice seems to transcend the divisions that have formed in a lot of modern comedy. His last tour back in the 2010s broke the Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest-selling of all time. On Friday, he finished his show by revealing he’d donate a massive £14,0000, a pound for each audience member, to a children’s charity. He’s the all-rounder who just keeps on giving, somehow without pissing that many people off or needing to bring questionable billionaires onstage.
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So as much as it is the season for a belly laugh – now’s also the time also for the dad jokes; the proper groan-worthy kinds that make you wince before you’ve finished scraping them out of the Poundland cracker where they belong. VICE photographer Jake Lewis visited the excited fans at Kay’s opening London gig to ask them for their best one-liners to see if they live up to the nation’s favourite comic. (Hint: Not even close.)
“What does someone with 12 boobs sound like? Funny doesn’t tit.” — Rebecca Whitehouse, 31
“I tried catching fog the other day… Mist.” — Josh Box, 26
“What do you call a donkey with 3 legs? Wonky.” — Victoria, 38
“What do you call a man with no arms and no legs, who can swim the English Channel? Clever Dick.” — Wendy Barnett, 60
“Did you hear about the explosion at the cheese factory? All that was left was de Brie.” – Charlie, 25
“John and Mary were having a really bad time in their relationship. One of John’s friends came over to the house. He knocks on the door and asks if John is in. Mary said, ‘Oh, he’s down by the shed doing some work on the farm equipment. So he heads down there to find John with his underpants down dancing in front of a tractor. When he asked John what he was doing, he replied: ‘Well, we did some couples therapy and the therapist recommended I do something sexy to a tractor’.” — Morgan, 26
“Man walked into a bar – ouch.” — Daniel Broderick, 20
“Knock knock!
Who’s there?
Europe.
Europe who?
You’re a poo.” — Hannah, 27
“My girlfriend keeps telling me she’s going to leave me. She said I’m obsessed with tennis and that I’m too old. I told her, ‘I’m only 30, love!’” –Tomas O’Neil, 29
“What happens if you cross a sixth sense with the Titanic? I see dead people.” — Gary Lee-Hudson, 42