Tag Archives: jokes about popular snacks

Have I Pot Noodles For You

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As a longtime fan of BBC comedy current affairs quiz Have I Got News For You, I feel qualified to say that last night’s show (sadly the last in the current series) was a minor classic. This was just as well, incidentally, as it restored my faith in a show which had disappointed me two weeks ago after a flurry of jokes at the expense of Prince Charles’s recent comment that he’s a fan of Leonard Cohen. This prompted me to dash off a slightly bonkers email to Hat Trick Productions, which for anybody who is bored enough can read at this thread on the Leonard Cohen Forum. (Needless to say I haven’t received a reply…)

Anyway, back to last night. I forget how it all started now but at some point a reference to Pot Noodles was made, which prompted an avalanche of puns on the famously nutrition-free instant snack, such as “Cambodian dictator flavour” Pol Pot Noodles, Snot Noodles “for when you have a cold”, Piss-Pot Noodles (forget the context), “cannabis smokers’ favourite” Pot Pot Noodles, “Tony Blair’s favourite flavour” John Prescott Noodles, “noodles you eat on a boat” Yacht Noodles, and so on and so forth for about 10 minutes. After the show was finished there was a clip of an out-take in which someone wondered aloud how long Pot Noodles have been going, to which guest host Jack Dee quipped “Since the Year Dot Noodles.”

Needless to say I woke up early this morning with assorted new Pot Noodle puns going around in my head: “pub gambling machine flavour noodles” Slot Noodles, “noodles favoured by American biographers” Donald Spoto Noodles, “the writer’s preferred flavour” Plot Noodles, “special Christmas edition” Santa’s Grotto Noodles, “noodles you eat on a flight to Moscow” Aeroflot Noodles, “one of a series based on biblical characters” Lot Noodles, “19th century romantic poem flavour” The Lady of Shalott Noodles, “King Arthur’s favourite” Camelot Noodles… I could go on, but instead I will open this up to Thoughtcat’s readers to contribute their own.

The decline of civilisation

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John Reid, leader of the House of Commons, is reported today to be under fire for saying of Iraq: “I believe there are weapons of mass destruction there. I know we haven’t found them yet, but because we haven’t found them yet no more means that there was not a threat than not finding the money stolen from the Great Train Robbery means that Ronnie Biggs was innocent.” This Prescottesque tongue-and-truth-twister is even worse than Jack “Short” Straw’s “rewriting of history” yesterday when he said “it’s not crucial” now to find the weapons. All this comes despite Tony Blair going on and on like a bloody scratched record for weeks before the war about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (the expression was of course used so much that he had to truncate it to “WMD”) being the pretext for military action, which we all knew was bullshit anyway. My respect for our politicans just gets lower – at the same rate, in fact, as their respect for the intelligence of the people they claim to represent disintegrates. How can people like Straw live with themselves? Why not just go and get an honest job like being a milkman or something? It might not pay as much but at least it’d be human.

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If you missed the BBC2 programme “The Nation’s Favourite Food” last night, think yourself lucky. My wife and I were watching it while we were eating… never again. This alleged top ten of the UK’s favourite “seduction” foods included strawberries in chocolate, and, of all things, prawns. They also interviewed an inarticulate 12-year-old DJ about champagne, filmed a bunch of sloane-rangerettes blowing up a kitchen in an attempt to make chocolate vodka cocktails, showed Melinda Messenger spitting out an oyster and, perhaps worst of all, filmed Peter Stringfellow. In his kitchen. Cooking a chicken casserole for his girlfriend. I mean, Jesus. It made us yearn for a Get It On bar.

For anyone who doesn’t watch TV or doesn’t live in the UK, this was just the latest TV show in recent weeks claiming to represent the UK’s favourite this-or-that as voted for by viewers. In the past few weeks alone we’ve had the UK’s top 100 film stars, the UK’s top 100 romantic films, the 100 worst people in the UK (all on Channel 4, it should be said), not to mention the soon-to-be-announced BBC Big Read, a poll of the UK’s favourite 100 books. I’m all for anything that encourages people to read, but even that’s a bit of a naff idea (especially as the number one will probably be something I haven’t read). Something else I haven’t read is Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man but this total lack of imagination on the part of TV programme-makers is the Last Straw and would seem to bear out the feeling that The End of Television is nigh. How many more cruddy TV shows can they make on the basis of things voted for by viewers? More importantly, when are TV companies going to realise that the results of these programmes don’t represent the views of the UK but instead just the views of the six people who voted? Plus, the only people who do vote in these things are people who don’t do anything except watch cruddy TV programmes all day. It’s like that exchange in Woody Allen’s Manhattan:

IKE: You’re going by the audience reaction to this? I mean, this is an audience that’s raised on television. Their standards have been systematically lowered over the years… these guys sit in front of their sets and the gamma rays eat the white cells of their brains out… I quit.

DICK: All right. Just relax. Take a lude.

IKE: All you guys do is drop ludes and take Percodans and angel dust! Naturally, the show seems funny.

Resigned to her fate

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So Clare Short’s finally resigned, huh? If there’s ever a modern-day equivalent of the fable of the boy [sic] who cried wolf, this has to be it. But what’s even more irritating than the fact that Short didn’t follow through her threats to resign before or during the war, when it would have had a tad more credibility, is that she does make some good points in this interview, such as describing Tony Blair as less Washington’s poodle than its “fig leaf”, adding, “Fig leaf number two is ‘blame the French’.”

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Shopping in Tesco’s today, I came across a shocking product, “Get it on”, which described itself as a “sex fruit and seed bar”. Sex, in Tesco’s?? Disgusted by the mere thought of it, I examined the label closely: The Food Doctor, which makes the bars and others in the range, claims that its combination of rye, pumpkin, hemp (hemp??! in Tesco’s??), banana, figs, mango and gingko biloba “support the flow of blood to the extremities… The rest is up to you.” Of course I popped two in my basket immediately (one for me, the other for my wife), covered them with a copy of the Guardian and proceeded warily to the till. I got home, we tore off our wrappers (of the bars, that is), and… well, sadly I have to report that it was less than erotic. In fact, half a mouthful and we were put off just about any kind of romantic activity for the rest of the evening…