Dummy To Hand Russia Back To Ventriloquist

Global audiences were reduced to tears of laughter today by the familiar comedy antics of top ventriloquist Vladimir Putin and his hapless dummy, Little Dmitry, as they performed their hilarious slapstick routine, Pass The Russia.

Mr Vladimir's 'cold hands' gag always raises a laugh

A key part of the act is the in-joke of both ventriloquist and dummy speaking with exactly the same voice, and generations have enjoyed the long-running spectacle of the dummy pretending to exchange roles with ‘Mr Vladimir’ – who somehow always contrives to keep the neatly-wrapped parcel firmly within his grasp.

Audiences also fall off their chairs laughing at Mr Vladimir’s silly adventures, in which he entrusts Little Dmitry with the boring, everyday task of locking up all the other would-be entertainers while he pretends to be Action Man - wrestling bare-chested with children, horses, polar bears, tigers, even whales and dolphins, and generally making a fool of himself with his toy jets, mini-subs and racing cars.

“I want to thank you, Little Dmitry, for the positive reaction to the proposal for me to sit on your lap for a few years,” Mr Vladimir told his blank-faced dummy, to gales of helpless laughter. “For 143 million Russians, this is a great honour - and besides, I’m sick of pulling splinters out of my knee from your wooden bum.”

Nice, Short Booker Choices Selling Well

Sales of the entries shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker literary award are booming, according to booksellers, who point to the appealing narrowness of the books’ spines as the major attraction to readers.

That thin one on the bottom will do just fine, thanks

“This year, like the typical reader, we judges are all far, far too busy getting on with our gorgeous lives to read some overwritten cod-philosophical twaddle the size of a housebrick,” said ex-spy chief Dame Stella Rimington, before she was distracted by a bird flying past the window.

Bookmakers say that the award will almost certainly go to the author who has made the least demands on the panel’s easily-distracted minds, which makes Julian Barnes’ slender 146-page effort odds-on favourite to win.

“Like several other contenders this year, Barnes has shamelessly pinched half his plot from the undemanding murder-mystery genre, which is really all anyone can be bothered to read nowadays. That’s got to help,” explained a spokesman for Betfred whose job cruelly forces him to read all six shortlisted books from cover to cover. “Hopefully next year they’ll allow puzzle magazines and TV listing guides in. Then I can do the lot in an afternoon.”

World ‘Not Quite Fucked Yet,’ Cameron Reassures Canadians

Standing statesmanlike with his hands on his knees and naked from the waist down, David Cameron stoically warned Canada’s impassive parliamentarians that the entire Western world was “not quite fucked yet, but the pattern is clear.”

With global share prices in freefall as the unchecked forces of capitalism threw themselves into their final orgy of cannibalistic destruction – as predicted 144 years ago by some long-forgotten oddball with a beard - Britain’s PM issued a stark warning to the leaders of Europe and the United States in which he desperately urged them to discard a century of ill-considered legislation which prevents the remnants of Western industry from regarding you and your children solely as disposable raw materials to be exploited ruthlessly until death.

Western civilisation will be back after this break

With the G20 summit of the world’s former leading economies scheduled for November, the trouserless Mr Cameron expressed a touching hope that the impending sideways shafting by barbarians in suits would at least have the decency to wait until then before laying waste to a thousand years of Western civilisation.

“This is why it is so important for the United Nations to support the embryonic spread of democracy in the Arab world," he added. “Then, after the new Dark Age has reduced us to cooking dung in our mud huts and throwing sharp sticks at the tribe from the next hilltop, we may one day rise up and steal all that we forgot back off them like we did before.”

NASA: Plummeting Six-Ton Satellite Will Only Kill 2,250,000

Considerably fewer than 3m people will be crushed to pulp by fragments of the tumbling ARSE satellite when it crashes to earth later today, according to reassuring calculations issued by top NASA gamblers.

It's fairly possible that this might not happen

“Yes, folks, there’s just one chance in 3,200 that you will be flattened by a red-hot, refrigerator-sized chunk of ARSE!” beamed Dr Randy von Braun from a bunker deep under Texas. “With seven billion potential targets out there, our new supercalculators confidently predict that 6.9775 billion of you have absolutely nothing to fear.”

Dr von Braun helpfully explained that the actual toll might be affected by a small degree of statistical variance, according to whether the larger chunks of flaming wreckage hurtled into the sparsely-populated Southern Ocean or a nuclear reactor close to a major metropolis.

“Er… whoops, that should be 6.99775 billion,” he added sheepishly. “Hey, you’d think I’d have picked up something from that Math 101 refresher they sent me on after the Mars Orbiter went AWOL because I forgot you guys in Europe are metric, wouldn’t you? Live and learn – well, unless you die tonight, but it probably won’t happen. Trust me. No, really. I’m hardly ever wrong.”

Facebook Addicts Refuse To Contemplate Switching To Google+

PM Tells National Trust Not To Worry, His Planning Reforms Will Only Disfigure Labour Strongholds

Responding to fears expressed by the National Trust about the effect his drastic axing of planning laws may have on Britain’s verdant countryside, prime minister David Cameron was quick to explain that only urban areas full of Labour voters would have hideous monstrosities built right outside their windows.

Build what you like, but just on the red bits

“Both as prime minister, as a rural constituency MP and as an individual with a particularly magnificent view of Oxfordshire from the master bedroom, I have always believed that our beautiful British landscape is a national treasure,” insisted Mr Cameron. “Our socialist-run cities, on the other hand, are ghastly shitholes which couldn’t possibly look any worse than they do already. I’d have thought that the average urban sink-dweller would fall on his knees to thank the council planners for allowing a new glue factory to obscure the godawful sight of gangs setting fire to the local takeaway every evening.”

Mr Cameron reiterated the madness of expecting his friends in the construction industry to wade through more than 1,000 pages of bureaucratic pettifoggery, promising to replace Britain’s bloated planning guidelines with just five words: “Is it a Labour constituency?”

Medical Profession Strangely Reluctant To Demand Immediate Ban On Cars

Lug this little lot onto a bus full of peasants? Not bloody likely

There have been no calls from the usual medically-qualified killjoys for the government to outlaw cars, following the publication in the British Medical Journal of yet more irrefutable proof that the poisons belched out by their hideously inefficient internal combustion engines are going to kill you.

“This large-scale study shows conclusively that your risk of having a heart attack goes up temporarily, for around six hours, after breathing in higher levels of vehicle exhaust,” warned Prof Malcolm Strangelove of the British Heart Attack Foundation. “We know that vehicle exhaust fumes can have a major effect on your heart health, possibly because it can 'thicken' the blood to make it more likely to clot, putting you at higher risk of a heart attack.”

“On the other hand, old boy, I think you’ll find a Porsche Cayenne is absolutely essential when it comes to flinging a caddy full of golf clubs in the back and tearing off to the links for an agreeable afternoon with my colleagues,” he explained.

"According to my spreadsheet, being exposed to a spell of medium-level rather than low-level pollution would raise heart attack risk by 5%. It looks like it brings heart attack forward by a few hours. These are cardiac events that probably would have happened anyway," co-author Dr Markus Fremdliebe added, leaning on his slightly muddy BMW X5 after a heroic effort to improve his handicap. “Let’s face it, anyone who lives right next to a busy road is probably just some waddling 40-a-day council-estate gutbucket who richly deserves all that’s coming to them.”

Seeing A Cigarette Gives You Cancer, Scowl Experts

Sir John Mills spent his life trying to murder your kids

The merest sight of a cigarette in a movie is all it takes to give teenagers horrid cancery death, according to new research imagined by professional scolds at Bristol University.

“We asked millions of teens in the Bristol area if they had ever seen some evil, twisted bastard like Sir John Mills, Lord Attenborough or Cary Grant blatantly smoking on film, and they went into spluttering convulsions - which can only indicate the final, agonising stages of horrid cancery death,” frowned lead harridan Dr Mildred Strangelove. “Apart, that is, from one healthy young lady whose parents belong to an obscurely medieval religious sect which forbids all forms of entertainment. She asked Jesus to have mercy on our corrupt souls before her Godfearing father locked her in the cellar for a month for the sin of speaking to the damned. But she’ll live to a hundred, thanks to her family’s admirable moral strictures.”

“The government must immediately put an 18 rating on any film found to contain gratuitous smoking,” she hissed. “And the same goes for any so-called ‘entertainment’ involving fat people or visually-fatal foods, i.e. everything except salad or bran.”

Trains Fantastically Good Value To Taxpayers, Claim Operators, As Long As They Only Pay Tax In France, Holland Or Germany

Britain’s cash-crammed train operators hit back at transport secretary Philip Hammond’s description of Britain’s trains as “rich men’s toys”, claiming that the services they run offered excellent value for the taxpayer, albeit only if the taxpayer in question should happen to be domiciled in France, the Netherlands or Germany for tax purposes.

It's fast, and it's full of happy taxpayers

“Monsieur ‘ammond, ‘e should look in ‘is underpants isn’t it, as your fonny liddle English saying ‘as it,” said a bloated Gallic spokesman for the Association of Train Exploiting Companies, as a waiter carefully lowered an after-eight mint covered in gold leaf into his gaping maw.

“Ze taxpayers of France, ‘olland and Germany, zey pay ‘ardly anyzing at all to subsidise zair glorious state-run ‘igh-speed rail systems,” he added, pausing only to vomit gallons of paté de foie gras into a platinum bucket. “Not since ze SNCF, NED and ze Deutsche Bahn came up wiz ze, ‘ow you say, ‘wizard wheeze’ of renting ze creaking buckets of rust off ze banks, sending zem on zair wobbly way along ze rickety British tracks, zen ‘itting ze ridiculous British commuters wiz zair silly bowler ‘ats an’ zair peculiar Times crosswords for all ze eye-watering fare increases an’ ‘uge government subsidies zey could get away wiz.”

“Ze glorious taxpayers of France, ‘olland an’ Germany ‘ave never ‘ad it so good,” he added, before exploding. “Zo shot op an’ cough op ze £120 for ze peak-time return from Birming’am to Euston, you stupeed liddle rosbif.”

Vince Cable In Tragically Deluded Appeal To Shareholders’ Sense Of Decency And Fair Play

After much puffing on his best ‘ideas pipe’, everybody’s favourite uncle, Vince Cable, has formed the opinion that the best restraint on the inflation-busting jamboree that is executive pay and bonuses would be to let corporate shareholders rule on the matter.

Mr Cable gets all of his best ideas in here

Dear old uncle Vince emerged from his potting shed to tell his numerous LibDem nephews and nieces that the faceless financial institutions which hold the vast majority of corporate shares are really very sober and responsible indeed, and would certainly never be silly enough to fall for short-term dividend largesse thrown their way by cynical, irresponsible boardroom directors during their brief stopovers in the never-ending game of musical chairs which characterises Britain’s system of corporate management.

“Good heavens, just imagine what would happen if, solely in order to boost their bonuses before jumping ship to another comfy chair elsewhere, the senior management of some unprofitable business decided to pay their shareholders one nice, fat dividend out of essential capital reserves – or worse, simply borrowed the money from a bank!” beamed uncle Vince. “Why, the firm would probably go bust within a matter of years! By then, any shareholders who hadn’t sold their shares in that company at a tidy profit - which would be based solely on the apparent financial health indicated by that handsome dividend – would really have egg all over their faces, wouldn’t they?”

“Just imagine if every business behaved like that!” he went on contentedly. “I should imagine that, before long, the entire financial world would collapse in tatters. My goodness, and where would we all be then, eh?”

‘Go Back To Your Constituencies And Prepare To Be Out Of The Government’

The Liberal Democrats’ president, Tim Fallout, today rallied his party’s surviving MPs with the resounding promise that its widely-hated alliance with the Conservatives would cease at the next election, mainly because they would all be losing their deposits.

The LibDems are great survivors

“We are like cockroaches after a nuclear war,” he told stony-faced delegates at the party’s Birmingham conference. “And to be cockroaches after a nuclear war, obviously the most important thing is to be cockroaches in the first place – vile, scuttling pests which are hated by everyone and deserve to be stamped on. And I think we ought to congratulate ourselves on how quickly we’ve achieved this, in the light of our near-total extermination in May’s local elections. So hey, all we need now is nuclear war!”

Elsewhere at the conference, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg swiftly quashed rumours that he would be standing down as leader of the Lib Dems after just one term in order to take up an appointment as a European Commissioner.

“European Commissioner, my arse,” he sobbed into his espresso macchiato. “By then I’ll be bloody lucky if I get a job as a commissionaire at one of the casinos back home in Monaco.”

Lib Dems Desperate To Book Russell Howard Or Tim Vine For Next Conference

Although hopes remain high that Nick Clegg’s closing promises will have delegates falling off their seats with mirth, this year there have been few belly laughs at what is traditionally the most hilarious gig of the party conference season.

After children’s minister Sarah Teeth failed dismally to crack so much as a smile with her ill-advised effort at stand-up comedy at the Liberal Democrats’ sombre conference in Birmingham today, party officials assured hatchet-faced delegates that they would take whatever steps were necessary to guarantee a fun-packed roster of jocular ministers for next year’s headline event.

“Ideally we’d kick one of our time-expired westcountry MPs upstairs and parachute Eddie Izzard into a safe Cornish seat,” said a red-faced conference booking agent. “But he defected to New Labour in disgust years ago and anyway, we lost half our safe Cornish seats at the last election. I think we’re just going to have to take a leaf out of David Cameron’s book by elevating people we like to the House of Lords, then giving them ministerial portfolios.”

It's like Mr Potato Head reproduced, only not as funny

“George Osborne line dancing… hell’s teeth,” he sobbed as he shuffled away.

Comedians with any sort of interest in politics have been remarkably swift to claim an extraordinary number of international tours which happen to coincide with next year’s conference dates, however.

Already the field of potential LibDem lords has narrowed to a mere handful of apolitical comics, led by veteran pun factory Tim Vine, whose public profile could do with a boost, or possibly chirpy little Bristolian optimist Russell Howard, 12, as long as party whips can convince his mummy he will be safely tucked up in bed by nine every night.

“God help us, the way Britain’s stand-ups are all desperately claiming Las Vegas bookings on the same weekend next September, we could end up with the doomsday scenario of Michael McIntyre,” wept one loyal grass-roots activist. “Please, shoot me now.”