ED2011 News

Stand-up’s Dad wrote winning joke

By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 26 August 2011

Stand-up Nick Helm has told the BBC that his dad wrote the joke that digital telly channel Dave has declared the best at the Festival.

Dave published their top ten jokes from the 2011 Fringe on Thursday morning, declaring this Helm gag the best: “I needed a password eight characters long, so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves”.

Commenting on his win, Helm told the Beeb: “They come and pick a joke. I didn’t know I was in the running. They said to me: ‘By the way, you have won best joke’ and I said ‘Oh really what was the joke?’ When they told me I said: ‘That’s the one my dad wrote'”.

He added: “My dad has beaten Tim Vine. He e-mailed it to me and I rewrote it, but it is my dad’s joke. That’s a proper dad joke. My dad is chuffed. He’s getting half the award money”.

Vine, always the go-to man for quality Fringe gags, came second in this year’s jokes poll with my personal favourite: “Crime in multi-storey car parks, that is wrong on so many different levels”. Meanwhile Paul Daniels took the worse gag prize for “I said to a fella ‘Is there a B&Q in Henley?’ He said ‘No, there’s an H, an E, an N an L and a Y'”. But don’t worry, perhaps it was accompanied by a killer trick.

The other eight jokes picked out, honoured and revealed by Dave, thereby simultaneously celebrating and ruining the winning comedians’ shows, were as follows:

Hannibal Buress: “People say ‘I’m taking it one day at a time’. You know what? So is everybody. That’s how time works”.

Tim Key: “Drive-Thru McDonalds was more expensive than I thought… once you’ve hired the car…”

Matt Kirshen: “I was playing chess with my friend and he said, ‘Let’s make this interesting’. So we stopped playing chess”.

Sarah Millican: “My mother told me, you don’t have to put anything in your mouth you don’t want to. Then she made me eat broccoli, which felt like double standards”.

Alan Sharp: “I was in a band which we called The Prevention, because we hoped people would say we were better than The Cure”.

Mark Watson: “Someone asked me recently – what would I rather give up, food or sex. Neither! I’m not falling for that one again, wife”.

Andrew Lawrence: “I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can’t even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails”.

DeAnne Smith: “My friend died doing what he loved … Heroin”.

Helm’s show ‘Dare To Dream’ is on at the Pleasance Courtyard until Monday.