Anyway, I used to sit in the kitchen and watch Dad having a wash when he came home from the dockyard. He would be stripped to the waist, his six-pack stomach on show (gained not from working out, but from hard labouring day after day), covered in lather, and singing his heart out as if he didn’t have a care in the world. And when he was finished washing he would tell me the latest jokes he had heard at the dockyard that day, although I’m sure he always left out the more risqué ones. The conversation would usually begin with Dad saying, “Want tae ken a joke?” When I nodded, he would always respond with, “Jock, the coalman”, and I would always laugh out of politeness. Then came the real jokes.
Which brings me to the Jesus Said connection. One of the jokes he told me was about a man who stopped him in the street and declared, “I’m the Son of God!” And when Dad asked him why he thought that, the man explained, “Well, when I went intae the pub the day, the barman stopped whit he wis daein’, looked at me and cried: Jesus Christ, it’s you again!”
Kinda funny, I suppose. But there was a better one which I still laugh at even today, because it reminds me very much of some folk I’ve come across in my life. It’s about the man who goes to the doctor complaining of piles. (By the way, it was only years later that I learned what piles actually were.) So the doctor gives the man some pills and says, “Put one of these in your back passage every night for a week.” A week later the man returns to the doctor and tells him, “I dinnae have a back passage. Just a wee lobby. And I did whit ye said and left a pill in the lobby every night for a week. But for aw the guid that did me, I’d have been as well stickin’ the pills up ma arse.”
Boom! Boom! as Basil Brush would say.🦊