PR stunt arbitrarily names 'world's funniest gag'

A polling company is getting thousands of pounds of free publicity by recycling jokes from the likes of Tim Vine, Stewart Francis and Tommy Cooper.

OnePoll.com grabbed 50 gags from the internet and asked 3,600 people to vote on them, before circulating the unscientific list as ‘the 50 funniest gags of all time’.

The ‘story’ has already been picked up by media including MailOnline, which gets about 2.5million visitors a day.

The company claimed the best gag ever was: A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The bus driver says: ”Ugh, that’s the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen!” The woman walks to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to a man next to her: ”The driver just insulted me!” The man says: ”You go up there and tell him off. Go on, I’ll hold your monkey for you.”

In second place was a one-liner about a zoo with just one dog being a ‘shitzu’.

A spokesman for www.OnePoll.com, which chose the gags, said: ‘The majority of these jokes are clean and genuinely funny. It’s nice to see jokes from the greats like Tommy Cooper and Les Dawson are still up there and the ugly baby tale is a worthy winner.’

No writers have been directly credited for the 50 jokes in the list, which includes blonde, dyslexic and mother-in-law gags as well as puns.

Published: 21 Oct 2010