Hope you enjoyed this week’s edition of my Monday First Drafts challenge, in which I take an idea from my big list of cricket ideas and spend a few hours working on a first draft prototype.
I’ve moved this behind-the-scenes discussion to the end of the newsletter, so people who just want to read the jokes can read the jokes without getting bogged down by my musings on the subject matter.
Post-Mortem on Last Week’s First Draft
Last week, I worked on
a Mr Men version of Sandpapergate. I still think it’s a funny idea, but probably not anything I can use going forward. A one-off piece of nonsense.
Prospects for a more polished version: Highly unlikely. Come on. How much mileage is there in Mr Men parodies of cricket?
This Week’s First Draft
The Idea
This obviously sprang from Ollie Robinson’s recently discovered tweets. I was trying to think of a joke that I could make about them that didn’t wander too heavily into the unfunny areas of young men saying sexist and racist and otherwise generally unpleasant things.
At some point it occurred to me that the other kind of jokes that people might be offended by are jokes that are simply unfunny. More specifically, dad jokes. And then, to maximise the comedic contrast, who would we be most devastated to find wielding dad jokes? The very funny Jimmy Neesham, of course.
The piece wrote itself after that. Well, it didn’t write itself. I sweated a little over where to put the ‘dad jokes = dud jokes’ New Zealand accent bit (I also originally had ‘dead jokes’, because ‘dead’ is truer to the Kiwi accent). At one point, I attributed the quote to Neesham himself, playing with it being another dad joke he slipped up with in his apology. But that didn’t really make sense to the structure of the piece, so I eventually switched it to one of his (former) fans.
And then, finally, I was quite pleased with the last paragraph punchline. The idea that New Zealand would reinstate a player for telling dad jokes seemed just about perfect to me, and a neat reversal to the ECB’s response to Robinson.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed the piece.
Subscribe to see what I throw up next Monday. (And follow
@JimmyNeesh on Twitter.)