Christmas Factiod #1: Why Christmas Cracker Jokes Are Awful

Hello y'all and welcome to December.

Yes its true, after four months of advertising Christmas is nearly upon us and that means we can look forward to annual screenings of The Sound Of Music, the trumpet voluntary (after eating the sprouts), silly party hats, staff parties, shops full of people who look like they escaped from Night Of The Living Dead and endless rounds of relatives.

Most years we Pixies look forward to Christmas with a due sense of dread until the final few days when we can relax and actually enjoy ourselves - we also have a long tradition of a post on Christmas Day: however, this year I also thought I would try and drudge up some facts about the yuletide season and share them with you: facts that you can, or not as the case may be, then share with your uncles, aunts and outspoken grandparents in the vital few seconds before you fall asleep (usually just as the national anthem plays for the Queen's Speech)

So fact number one: Why Christmas Cracker Jokes are Awful

You know the drill - you pass out the crackers and there's always the "merry" members of the family (for merry, read drunk) who think its fun, and the less merry ones who look like they'd rather have their spleens ripped out than wear the resulting paper hat (ie - ME) - and there's a disappointing toy, a cheap paper hat and a joke (unless you buy The Harrods crackers, when you can have diamond rings etc)

It is then customary to tell the jokes along the lines of the below:

What do you call a blind reindeer?
No eye deer.
What do you call a man with brown paper trousers?
Russell.
What's furry and minty?
A polo bear.
What do you get when you cross a lion with a snowman?
Frostbite.

Cue much groaning and looks of pain at the terrible, terrible jokes

But what you probably didn't realize is that cracker jokes are deliberately bad.  Oh yes, you probably thought that it was just that someone, somewhere couldn't put in the effort to write a decent joke - but the truth is that they find the most pun-worthy, groan-able jokes they can and stuff them in.

Why?  Well, it's simple.

If you tell a group of people a joke there is always a chance that some of the people in the room will find it funny, whilst the other will not.  What you now have is a situation where the room is divided into two: the people who laughed and the people who didn't

HOWEVER: if the joke is deliberately bad then EVERYONE in the room is united against the joke creator, who of course is not present (unless you work for a joke writing/cracker agency)

Result: family unity and harmony - minus the usual argument that's been rolling on since Aunt Matilda said something hurtful back in 1841

DFTP would like to thank the televisual programme QI (Quite Interesting) for the above factoid.  The programme claims to be "if not right, then at least interesting"