That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

This bloke marches into the shop, I know, sounds a bit like god only knows, the poem I wrote last year about working at the Oxfam bookshop. But this was just yesterday.

So, this bloke marches into the shop. A regular customer, mad obviously, you don’t need to be mad to shop here but it helps, obsessed by the Black Death but, so what, it’s good to have a hobby.

After finding something to buy he approaches the counter and as I’m ringing it through the till he says to me there’s this gay man wants to join the army and he says to the recruiting officer, at which point I interrupt by saying I don’t want to hear this. But the customer continues, it’s OK, I’ve told this joke before to a gay man, so there’s this gay man wants to join the army and he says to the recruiting officer, and again I stop him by saying I don’t want to hear this.

For a start I’ve got an Oxfam lanyard hanging round my neck on rainbow flag coloured ribbon, the lanyard says Fighting Inequality With Pride. I might be gay, I might be ex-army, I might be gay ex-army, any of the half dozen other customers in the shop might fall into one of those three categories. None of that really matters though, if ever there was a time for telling homophobic jokes it’s not now, in 2026. And justifying offensive speech by testing it first on the object of the joke doesn’t cut it either, that’s like saying I’ve got a great anti-Semitic joke but it’s OK because I told it to a Jew first.

The customer left with a puzzled look on his face and his Lee Child book. Wrote a poem last year about Lee Child too.