Old Spice and Brylcream

Have you heard the one about...?

Phil, Liverpool

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A very old aged pensioner is getting ready for a night on the town. Gets his best suit on, Old Spice and puts some Brylcreem in his hair. Gets himself ready and phones the cab to say 'take me down to the local disco bar'.

Walks into the disco bar, all lights and loud music, young people... spies this equally old woman sitting up at the bar, dressed up to the nines.

So he hobbles over to her and says 'you look wonderful darling, what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? Tell me - do I come here often?'

Marie says

'It's too the near truth that one!' Peter says, after delivering the punch line. With eyes cast down, he seems to be expressing the sadness as well as the humour that inevitably accompanies the ageing process – our own and others.

Jokes that deal with the trials of ageing, in particular memory loss, confusion, and physical deterioration, were prominent in the survey. And they have a long history. Ageing provides comic material for many jokes but this does not inevitably mean that people making such jokes are ridiculing the elderly or promoting ageist stereotypes.

Such jokes may provide a way of coping with ageing or with ageing relatives or with intimations of our own mortality or they may simply challenge taboos or conventions about how we discuss old age.

This joke plays on the young/old opposition on the seeming incongruity of a 'very old age pensioner' preparing for a night out on the town in a young disco bar. The references to Old Spice aftershave and Brylcream signify 'old fashioned'.

The old man introduces two conventional chat up lines in quick succession but the second is a comic flop as a mistaken pronoun 'sends up' memory loss.

Peter from London's joke features the oldest swinger in town