Pulling a Sicki

Dave Bromage on the website spreading jokes – and bigotry

I wrote a joke this week. I mean, I write a lot of jokes but, unlike many of my attempts at humour, this one got a bit of acclaim. The problem is, I'm not quite sure how I feel about it.

The joke in question, which I posted on Twitter, went as follows: ‘Driving home, I noticed I had a police car up my arse. Must have a word with my nephew about him leaving his Corgi toys lying around.’

Funny, heh? Well, even if you're not totally amused, there are 325 people on Sickipedia who say you're clearly a po-faced, humourless automaton. They loved it - voting for it in such numbers that it became the second hottest joke of the day. But should I be happy?

For the uninitiated, Sickipedia.org is a website cataloguing the world's most offensive jokes. There is something masterful about writing sick material and making it hilarious. Gary Delaney, Jim Jefferies and Frankie Boyle – to name but three – are kings of the genre. If you're not a fan of near-the-knuckle humour then you probably won't be a fan of any of these comics - but that says more about you than it does about them. This isn't a sleight on you by any means, it just suggests your moral code is vastly superior to those of us who enjoy a guilty guffaw at what have been dubbed 'wrong-liners'.

The problem, in my eyes, is that to turn 'sick and offensive' into 'sick and funny' takes real skill. And those who have spent any time on the open-mic comedy circuit will know that this particular talent is a rare commodity. There are a growing number of wannabes who think that shock value is enough. That the primary goal is to say something edgy rather than to say something funny. These people are morons.

Sadly, Sickipedia is the online manifestation of an open-mic night – only far, far worse. For while new-act shows will regularly feature noobs trivialising rape, denouncing gays, advocating misogynistic violence and revealing their darkest paedo secrets (all to deafening silence from the audience), these days the spectre of racism is, thankfully, absent. Yet with anonymity assured for Sickipedians sitting in front of their VDU, the site becomes a bigots' playground.

The ever-changing homepage will always showcase jokes featuring the word 'nigger' or 'Paki', with 99 per cent of them adhering to the offensive cliches of black people being criminals and Asians smelling. Even the most hardline BNP activists must be getting a little jaded at hearing the same hack topics. Is it too much to ask for a little originality amid the hatred?

So, yes, on a site where racists, rapists, paedophiles and gay-bashers reign supreme, a joke about having a toy car stuck up your poophole registers as a vanilla korma on the Sicki-scale.

What is a shame is that there is no equivalent website – certainly of the same size – for clean jokes, or at least ones that don't incite racial hatred. The good jokes on there are great but you have to sift through a lot of horrible sludge to find the comedy gold. Also, you often simply don't know where those great jokes have come from.

The omnipresent cloud of plagiarism hangs over the site like an Eyjafjallajokull fart. I didn't post the police-car joke on Sickipedia, someone else did. I was fortunate that whoever deemed the gag worthy of spreading to a larger audience than my 189 Twitter followers also had the good grace to credit me as the joke's creator.

But this wouldn't have been possible a few months ago, before Sickipedia founder Rob Manuel finally acquiesced to calls for him to put a message on the site encouraging contributors to post the name of the original author along with the joke. His climbdown came after a long, drawn-out battle of wills with Gary Delaney, who found that his entire set of one-liners was being posted online by a bunch of chancers, hoping to gain the acclaim for his genius.

As it stands, virtually every joke @garydelaney posts on Twitter ends up on Sickipedia within minutes and, more often than not flies high on their joke leaderboard. At least these days he is getting the credit he deserves for most of them, even if it means he probably won't be able to use the gags live, as their impact is diluted by being in the public domain.

Yet Sickipedia pilfering is still rife. There are scores of jokes I know from other comics being peddled without any namecheck. Tom Webb, Alex Maple, Steve Day... you're victims of joke identity theft.

Another thing that vexed me though was the fact that my original joke had been ever-so-slightly sub-edited. What irked even more was that it almost improved it. The new version read: ‘Driving home, I noticed I had a police car right up my arse. Must have a word with my nephew about leaving his toys lying around.’

The word 'Corgi' was removed - a tweak that I thought perhaps worked better. But inserting the word 'right' adds nothing in my opinion and taking out 'him' before 'leaving' leaves the gag grammatically compromised. And yes I am a pedant - that's my job.

But, overall, am I pleased my joke - one of my babies - got so many thumbs-up? (Stop snickering, Sickipedians!)

Ultimately, yes, I am delighted. I don't think you get into stand-up without it being a means to feed some of your narcissistic tendencies. Any adulation is gratefully grabbed by me like golden tickets by a contestant in the Crystal Dome. My concern is that my colleagues, who tell me jokes off Sickipedia as if they are their own concoctions (and thus become second-tier joke thieves, often plagiarising the plagiarists) will regale me with this great joke they've got about having a police car up their arse.

Then they'll wink and say: ‘You can have that one.’