Did you hear the one about... oh I'm sorry. I didn't know you were deaf.

A sea-urchin, a porcupine and a prickly pear walk into a bar.

The porcupine orders a round of drinks.

The barman looks at them suspiciously, then pulls a large wax Stetson from his duffel-bag. "I think I know what kind of drink you boys are after!"

"That's because I just gave your our order."

***

I wrote the above on Friday afternoon. It's now Monday morning, and I'm not really sure where I was going with it.

I'm pretty sure it was never meant to have a punchline. The prickly element was just a red herring.

The Prickly Element is also the title of an unreleased sci-fi film about a stubbly hedgehog (not to be confused with Humperdink the Asthmatic Hedgehog). It has terrible adolescent dialogue, unrealistic characters, and is as shallow as a Petri dish. It is thus much, much better than The Fifth Element.

I'm good at writing the beginnings of jokes, but rubbish at punchlines. And that's really quite a big shortcoming. The punchline makes a joke a joke. Without a punchline, a joke is just the strange ramblings of a tedious fool.

I need to find someone who just does punchlines. He would have the same problem. Punchlines on their own don't constitute jokes. If you were to wander around shouting: "To get to the other side!" or "He had no body to go with!" or "A stick!", people would avoid you.

But with my powers of joke-beginnings, and their knowledge of joke-endings, we could combine into a glorious whole, like a pantomime-Jimmy Carr.