Cracker jokes, and secret adults business

MY daughter has asked for my help.

She makes her own bon-bons (crackers where I come from – I’ve heard ‘em go crack but I’ve never heard ‘em go bon) and she wants me to supply the jokes.

Perhaps you think I should be flattered?

But in our family cracker jokes have a reputation for their diabolical badness.

Their nauseating imbecility is rivalled only by Daddy jokes.

Daddy jokes are the dreadful little gags told by fathers at the tea table, particularly when your best friend from school, or the new girlfriend you are trying to impress, happens to walk into the trap.

One drops one’s amusing little pearl into the conversation across the pie and chips, the best friend/girlfriend forces up a dry and uncertain laugh, or a chip, and next morning there’s strychnine in your tea.

I don’t deserve this. My jokes aren’t that bad. And more to the point, they are not designed to establish my position as one of the world’s great comic wits.

They are designed to reassure my children I really am the mildly pathetic dolt they are already convinced I am.

Children need this. Who says children want to believe grown-ups are in control, or that we’re smarter than they are?

I mean, look around you.

No, don’t look around you; close your eyes — stick a pin in a map. Anywhere you land — Middle East, Zimbabwe, United States, East Timor, the Queensland Government — there is living proof we are no fitter to run a country than we are a baby show.

And we’re no fitter to run a baby show than… well, a baby.

But this is Secret Adults Business. My kids don’t need to know my jokes are bad on purpose. They just need the excuse to groan when I tell ‘em.

But even my worst joke is better than a cracker joke.

Which is why I’d like your help. I need eight cracker jokes by Tuesday.

Seven actually. I already have this one:

I say, I say; my wife went to the West Indies for her holidays.

Jamaica?

No, the Bahamas.

I swear this is not mine. I am only repeating it (which is probably a capital offence, too).

So… send me your jokes. Puns — that lowest form of wit — are acceptable but smut, except in its mildest form, is not. These are Christmas crackers, for heaven’s sake.

There are no prizes, but the best of them (or the worst of them — it depends on your point of view) will receive due tribute in this column next week.

Under an assumed name, if you prefer.