All in the telling

I like Jewish jokes. I begin every conversation with the literary editor of The Spectator with one or two, do the same with the judge across the road, and tell my newest joke to the lifeguards at the local swimming pool. The key to a good one is gentle self-mockery. But I dislike reading jokes and listening to them from non-Jews, who invariably tell them badly.

But if you like Jewish jokes written down, dozens and dozens of them, and you think Michael Winner a witty fellow, then this is the book for you. Better skip the introduction, though, because in it Winner reveals what he thinks is really funny. ‘Some of the funniest stories I have heard,’ he writes, were in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. They were about ‘people having their legs shot off, defecating all over their cells and knee-capping each other’.

He admits this is not ‘great material for jokes’, but because those were stressful times the jokes were ‘unbelievably funny’. One day, also in Northern Ireland, Winner turned up for a lecture at an empty theatre: ‘It was like a bad day at Hiroshima.’

He tells a long story set in a hotel where he was lounging outside with a friend,  exchanging insults with a ranting Jew. My eyes immediately glazed. But Winner ‘thought that was all pretty funny’. He was making a movie in Austria where an English stuntman accidently drove a German second world war car into a crowd and broke someone’s arm and leg. ‘“Oh well”, I said, “that’s one back for the six million”.’ He told this to a journalist, who published it. ‘I’ve never had so many letters of congratulation for anything I ever said.’

I found many of the jokes in this collection tedious or vulgar.