And it's definitely gone more out of style than in, but all the same, today marks the 70th Anniversary of WWII, which commenced with Hitler's Germany invading Poland. Naturally there haven't been that many good jokes about it since then.
Bette Midler said about her marriage to a German: "at nights I dress up as Poland and let him invade me"
Then there's the 'Fawlty Towers' "Don't mention the war" gag that culminates in:
"You mentioned it first."
"You started it!"
"No, you started it"
"No, YOU started it when you invaded Polant in 1939!"
Then there's my favorite "Not the Nine O' Clock News" gag where they declared: "In 1982 Germany became the first nation to win the Eurovision Song Contest with a song about love and peace, having started two world wars."
In that spirit, I bring to you some interesting headlines.
This one's from the BBC.
This is Poland's take.
Relations between Poland and Russia are currently thorny, partly because of differing historical interpretations of events at the start of the war.
Mr Putin added that the pair should "rise above the problems of the past... and solve the problems of the future".
He went on to talk about trade and energy co-operation between the two.
Earlier, Mr Kaczynski and his prime minister Donald Tusk joined war veterans beside a monument to the heroes of Westerplatte at 0445 (0245 GMT).
The ceremony marked the exact time on 1 September 1939 when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire at point-blank range on the fort.
At the same time, the German Wehrmacht invaded Poland from east, west and south. The attacks triggered Britain and France's declaration of war against Germany two days later.
Poles, though, have long seen the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty, signed a week before war started, as the starting gun for the German invasion, says the BBC's Jonny Dymond in Gdansk.
It's just as John Cleese thundered. Putin for his part condemned the Nazi-Soviet Pact. I don't really know what that does for anybody today, but there you go. A gesture by the man who tranquilises tigers.
"Our duty is to remove the burden of distrust and prejudice left from the past in Polish-Russian relations," said Mr Putin in the article, which was also published on the Russian government website.
"Our duty... is to turn the page and start to write a new one."
Memories of the 1939 pact - in which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany essentially agreed to carve up Poland and the Baltic States between them - have long soured Moscow's relations with Poland and other east European states.
Within a month of the pact being signed, Soviet troops had invaded and occupied parts of eastern Poland.
"It is possible to condemn - and with good reason - the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact concluded in August 1939," wrote Mr Putin, referring to the two foreign ministers who signed the pact at the Kremlin.
It was clear today, he said, that any form of agreement with the Nazi regime was "unacceptable from the moral point of view and had no chance of being realised".
"But after all," he added, "a year earlier France and England signed a well-known agreement with Hitler in Munich, destroying all hope for the creation of a joint front for the fight against fascism."
Yes, yes, peace in our time and all that guff. What a load of Bollocks. It all rankles with somebody at some point in the story. WWII must be one of the most gripes-galore moments in human history, some of which are still being worked through in the Middle East. This next bit, caught my eye:
Mr Putin added that Russian people understood "all too well the acute emotions of Poles in connection with Katyn".
In 1940 Soviet secret police massacred more than 21,000 army officers and intellectuals on Stalin's direct orders in the Katyn forest near the city of Smolensk.
Moscow only took responsibility for the killings in 1990, having previously blamed the massacre on the Nazis.
That's very grand of him, I think, but I imagine Poles still think the Russians are assholes who sold them out to the Nazis and then fucked them up the ass. At least if not in that language, we find these sentiments:
Speaking at the ceremonies, Polish President Lech Kaczynski called the actions a "stab in the back."
"This blow came from Bolshevik Russia, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact," Kaczynski said.
That view, widely held in Poland and elsewhere in Europe, has produced fury in Moscow.
In a newspaper interview on August 31, Putin called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact "immoral." But he said Moscow had no choice but to sign the agreement to postpone war after Western powers concluded their own agreement with Germany. He said the 1938 Munich Agreement ended "all hope of creating a united front against fascism."
In Moscow on September 1, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lashed out against a recent resolution by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, equating Nazism and Stalinism, calling it "lies" and a "rewriting of history."
"Even during the Cold War no one ever tried to put the Nazi regime and Stalin's dictatorship on the same footing," he said. "It never occurred to anyone to equate the Nazi threat, which meant the enslavement and annihilation of entire nations, and the policy of the Soviet Union, which was the only force capable of standing up against the war machine of Hitler's Germany and in the end ensuring its defeat."
You know what? I don't think the Russians are ever going to get a pass out of the Poles on that one, just as the Japanese are never going to get a pass out of the Koreans and Chinese (and everybody else they fucked up), just as the Germans won't ever get a free pass from most of Europe (even though Hitler was Austrian - Austrians get an easier time of it, really), just as the Americans are never going to live down Vietnam, and England's never going to be let off the hook for her Colonial rule in India and Hong Kong, and so on.
There's a joke about a guy called Kosta who says, "I built all those ships in the bay. Do they call me Kosta the shipwright? No. I built all those houses on the hill. Do they call me Kosta the carpenter? No. I built all the tall spires in the town. Do they call me Kosta the architect? No. (pause) I fuck one goat!"
Well, I think these countries all fucked at least one goat, and that's the story of WWII. It's really not as edifying as all the heroic tales you see and hear and read. All those heroics are in the service of fucking metaphorical goats.
Speaking of fucking goats, you might be amused by this entry in the SMH today.
Opposition leaders have historically struggled to get on the front pages of newspapers.
Why else do you think they undertake listening tours, sit down with toddlers for cups of pretend tea, go on cabbage soup diets and go on Rove Live?
But in NSW, Barry O'Farrell's profile problem is a little more boutique.
He can't get on the front pages because he can't think of a human behaviour venal enough to displace the members of the Government.
Think about it.
What would O'Farrell have to do, exactly, to get a gallop in the media these days?
Intimacy with a goat probably wouldn't even do it.
Yup. WWII sure helped forge the world we live in today. Either that, or it's just that kind of day.
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