Rob Manuel

Chatting to a friend today:

Me: When does a sick joke go too far?

Him: Well, I’m Jewish and I’m not keen on holocaust jokes.

Me: My wife is half Jewish and she doesn’t mind me doing the ‘farting, holding her head under the bed covers and saying “gassing the jews” gag.’

Him: My family died. It depends on who’s saying them.

Me: My son is quarter-Jewish, I reckon that just means 25% less presents at Christmas.

Him: Actually, I’ve got a sick joke. I’ve been doing it for 15 years. It gets worse with each telling.

Me: Is this the aristocrats joke?

Him: Nah. It’s my mate right. Friends for ever. But his mum is fat. Really fat.

Me: Fat is funny.

Him: The joke is basically his dad saying, (does gruff voice) “Go up stairs and fuck yer mum.”

Me: Ha.

Him: So the Dad died right, and we’re at the funeral and the joke became, “I am a ghost. Dig up my grave. Get one of my bones and go upstairs and fuck your mum.”

Me: Each time more detail.

Him: Yeah. And we were caught at the funeral. Bloke in front of us heard us and turned round with a “did I really here that?” look. And my mate, to his eternal credit waits for him to turn around and says, “Yes. You really heard that.”

Me: So no limits then?

Him: Well, you find your own line.

Me: Right. I’ll try a joke on you. What looks like an elephant and fucks spades?

Him: Dunno.

Me: Dawn French. Is that racist?

Him: Well I’m laughing.

Me: There’s the theory that being equally offensive to everyone makes everything ok. But feels a bit of a cop-out to me.

Him: Like I said, you find your own line.

Picture this. It’s the year 2000 and I’m working as a webby person at some agency and I’m fucking miserable. I’m so bored of bashing out websites for corporate clients, I spent most of my time pretending to work, but secretly cooking-up evil plots to fill the internet with weird crap.

Then a small monkey tells me there’s a pop-gossip newsletter called Popbitch, sounds fun, so I sign up.

The first newsletter pops into my inbox and there’s a joke. The joke makes me laugh so much that I forward it to my mates going, “I got this from Popbitch. Great joke.”

But it doesn’t end there. I send fan mail to the site and offer a few thoughts on why I like it. A dialogue opens with the mysterious person who signs their emails “Popbtich xx.”

Eventually the mystery reveals as I’m invited for a drink and it turns out it’s a bloke called Neil who, when not revealing the foulest gossip known to man, is running a project for a magazine company on “interesting things to do on the internet.”

He asks me to work for his department and help think up the future. Of course we all got sacked but B3ta came from it.

And the joke that changed my life?

My dog’s got no nose. How does it smell? Like Daniella Westbrook.

Oooh. How exciting, my inbox is pinging like a broken lift:

“Hi there, I love B3ta, and usefully work in Waterstones. I would totally stock anything to do with B3ta (like that Law of the Playground one, and the Nicey and Wifey one). I am certain as a till point book we would sell plenty.”

Till point book?

This is a new term to me, I imagine it means those books that are placed by the till for impulse purchasing. A bit like sweets in supermarkets.

Fantastic stuff.

I wonder if we can make the book smell like freshly-baked bread?

Picture the scene: It’s 1996 and I’m playing on the interweb and I find to my astonishment a complete copy of the KLF’s How To Have A Number 1 The Easy Way. Being a huge fan of their music and their odd arty stunts, I print it off and read it at home.

It blows my tiny mind. Possibly the most inspirational book I’ve ever read. I immediately start screaming at friends, “Let’s make a number 1 record. I know how to do it.”

Fast forward 5 years and the author Bill Drummond republishes the book and it’s available to buy on Amazon.

I buy it. Why? I love it. I want to own it. And I want to re-read it in a form that’s easier to manage than 80 pages of A4.

Do I have a point? Yep. I reckon the main buyers of the sick joke book will be buying it as a present. “Uncle Bill likes foul jokes. This will work for Christmas.”

But how does Uncle Bill’s nephew know that this book is the one to buy? Well, maybe he’s already read it, for free, on the interweb.

Other examples of ‘free as advertising’:

* Oprah Winfrey gives away cars to every member of the studio audience. This was covered round-the-world in every newspaper you can imagine. The cost of placing advertisng in these publications would greatly outweigh the cost of the cars.

* Nizlopi gave away their JCB video for download on the website. After being emailed round the world, they get a UK top 10 hit.

* Arctic Monkeys. Ah bollocks. I’ve done them already. Er.. I vaugely remember Shaggy having a hit after the song being widely traded on the P2P networks.

Anyway. All this hinges on the premise that “what you are giving away is something that people want.”

It hinges on you believing and trusting in your product. And I believe in sick jokes. Rah.

I’ve been pacing about thinking “what do I do in a book shop?”

And I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that I judge books by their cover – and sometimes even their spine.

In my local bookshop (Owl, Kentish Town), they sell approximately a million billion titles, and on visiting the shop my behaviour is always the same: stare about blankly looking for something to catch my eye. A sick joke book would catch my attention – I love foul humour.

Basically I’ve got one thought: stick the words ‘sick jokes’ in the biggest possible letters on the cover – so even a short-sighted mole could read the title from the other side of the shop.

OK – that’s a pretty rough version of the idea, but it gets my point across, but there’s no question the only person for the job is the lovely and talented Denise Wilton.

Some other thoughts on the cover whilst I’m here:

* I’ve picked black on white for high contrast issues (and that I don’t have a colour printer), maybe sparkling pink and gold would be better?

* Sick Jokes. Big letters. BIG LETTERS. Not the B3ta bit – simply as although I like to think of B3ta being more internationally known brand than McDonalds, something is clueing me into the idea that the phrase ‘Sick Jokes’ is more likely to get random people to pick it up in a bookshop.

* When I pick up a book, I look at the cover and then read the blurb on the back. Fuck having blurb. Make it jokes. Why? Well, what’s the point of describing a joke when you can tell it? No ambiguity.

Talking to a friend last night he asked, “How many jokes does a joke book have?”

Me: 500 – that’s a nice round number.

Him: I read the 1001 joke book as a child. It didn’t have 1001 jokes. I know. I counted them.

Me: Were you that kid on Blue Peter who counted the perforations in a Tetley teabag?

Him: No. But I know him.

Me: Doesn’t matter how many jokes. It’s the fish that John West reject that make them the best.

Anyway, on that whimsey there’s the other “I don’t know” – as my email inbox has just pinged with a message from ‘Dave aka Evil Prof Pixel Masher’ who says, “You’ve asked for joke illustrations to be sent to you at 300dpi, but with no reference to *what size*?”

I tell him that I want the book “ordinary paperback sized” as I figure that’s a good size for taking to the toilet for a dump.

He does some spooky design-maths tells me that’s 1650px X 2550px. Which is pretty fucking huge.

Ok – where to begin? The beginning? Right…

I do web stuff for a living. Hence I get to sit in a lot of meetings where people throw phrases about like “pan media content” – when I’m not going glassy-eyed I guess they’re on about the illusive goal of creating stuff for TV that also works as a website, or the other-way round.

It always sucks. People see the pound signs before they see that square TV ideas don’t always fit into round internet holes.

I see things differently – I see the internet as a vast machine that can be put to work finding stuff for other media. That’s not to dismiss websites that work only for a internet audience, but we’re seeing so much web stuff pouring into other media these days that it fuggles the mind. You want examples? Ok.

* Arctic Monkeys – a Britsh rock group that found an audience via fans trading their MP3s on filesharing aps. And on putting the songs out using conventional media – straight to the top of the charts with the highest selling debut UK album ever.

* Nicecupofteaandasitdown – UK website that reviews biscuits (run by the very lovely Nicey and Wifey), they get a book deal and end up on Richard & Judy.

* Kittenwar.com – all over the papers last week because they gave the picture editors something that they could sell papers with: cute photos of cats.

Ok. So that’s the plan: use the internet to both generate the very content and to get a book into the shops.

If this fails, it will be a public failure.

Stuff I’ve done today

* Opened a challenge on the b3ta website to ask people to make illustrations.

* Written up an overview of the idea

* Told people about the idea via the b3ta board.

* Bought the domain name www.sickjokebook.com with the idea of starting this very blog you’re reading right now. I figure documenting the process will make the whole thing a little more interesting for you internet peoples.

* Gone for a walk to pick up my son from the child minder, and cooked some pasta for my wife. (Tagliatelli with pesto, mascarpone, mushroom and red onion. Cook mushrooms and onions then chuck everything over the pasta and mixy mixy. Lovely stuff.)

From idea to publishing. I shall tell the story here. Woo.