space-cake's uninteresting anecdotes
this page is devoted to all those people who have to hear uninteresting anecdotes with crap punchlines and large quantities of irrelevant details. please email me your own uninteresting anecdotes or those that have been told you. the ideal U.A. has a long and pointless introduction, usually involving someone's mate's mate or "this guy from work." they usually don't exist anyway. the story procedes with intricate fine detail, and the punchline will not be in any way noticeable from the rest of the tale, because it is destined to be really boring. the entertainment should always be extended past the punchline to further disguise the merits of the story, there should be no moral or useful information contained in any UA.
here are some to start us off:
LLOYD:
"I was going home and this bloke said something quickly at me and i didn't get what he was saying 'cause he said
it in french and he said it again and i understood this time because he said it slower and what i understood was
that he required a cigarette. That's not important though. straight after i told him i didn't have a fag, right, his
mates came through the doorway and one of them is quite fit and looks like some bird i know but can't quite
place, d'you know what i mean?, and she looks at me and i look and then look away and look back and she's still
staring & i realize how very fit she is. this is the important bit as my girlfriend told me that her mum had talked
to some woman and she knew some bird from my hometown who was going to toulouse. there's like three
universities here and fuck knows how many other colleges and shit, but i'm still looking all over the place for this
bird. so i think "this is her", and she walks past me and i go to my room and mix on my not technics decks until
kash came round."
KASH:
"Right lads, when i was going to university on the 192 and had to get the 191 in picadilly which was always late
and it was also raining that day as per bloody usual, there was a woman who got on and sat next to me. she
talked for ages and ages and i was worried about my exam that day so i got off one stop before my usual stop. i
began walking to the exam and at this point it stopped raining, so i was a little happier but then bumped into a
mate and he said that the exam was not until the next day. so i went back home relieved but pissed off and i
bumped into the same woman on the same bus and i was close to suicide and the next day she was wearing a
brown coat."
JENNY:
"When i was in mcdonalds once they made me clean the shake machine and i took it all apart and forgot how it
went back together again. i rammed these two bits together but they weren't the right bits so they totally
jammed together and we couldn't get them apart at all and we pulled and pulled and, like, the whole crew of
this, like, huge mcdonalds was trying to get these two crappy shake machine components apart, then finally i
chucked it on the floor and it came apart. but the shake machine didn't work the next day anyway so they never
made me clean it again."
SPACE-CAKE:
"I was absolutely wasted one day and i was walking through town and there was this bloke selling the big issue
and he said "big issue, big issue, next week's toilet tissue" and i thought that was funny so i bought it. then later i
read it and it was rubbish so i threw it away at work. it was lying around for a about a day, or maybe only about
half a day because i was working a split shift that day and it was nice so i went for a walk, and someone else must
have read it. the man still stands there selling the big issue and now i don't buy it because i know it is usually
rubbish."
COMMENTS: Lloyd makes imaginative use of different tenses in his piece, and his subject matter certainly
holds no interest for the reader. i also like the way he interconnects people and places in an exaggerated,
awkward style. tremendous.
kash uses his work to focus in on public transport. one would be forgiven for thinking he had that ultimate edge
over other anecdoters by being a trainspotter, but this is not, in fact, the case. understated and supremely simple,
kash is surely a stickler for detail that would put anyone to sleep. his other works include the argos collection, a
marvellous example of the "bloke from work" style.
jenny again draws from her experiences employed in the worlds biggest exploiter of the low paid, and keeps us
uninthralled with her interminable prose. one aspect of her work that always stands out is the way in which she
seems to cram an entire anecdote into one sentence.