A Few Jokes Jokes and humour from our contibutors.

“In retrospect, lighting the match was my big mistake. But I was only trying to retrieve the gerbil,” Eric Tomaszewski told bemused doctors in the Severe Burns Unit of Salt Lake City Hospital.

Tomaszewski and his homosexual partner Andrew “Kiki” Farnum had been admitted for emergency treatment after a felching session had gone seriously wrong. “I pushed a cardboard tube up his rectum and slipped Raggot, our gerbil, in,” he explained. As usual Kiki shouted out, “Armageddon,” our signal that he’d had enough.

I tried to retrieve Raggot but he wouldn’t come out again, so I peered into the tube and struck a match, to try to see him. I thought the light might attract him and he’d come forward to where I could get him out.

At a hushed press conference a hospital spokesman described what happened next. “The match ignited a pocket of intestinal gas and a flame shot out of the tubing, igniting Mr. Tomaszewski’s hair and severely burning his face. It also set fire to the gerbil’s fur and whiskers which in turn ignited a larger pocket of gas further up the intestine, propelling the rodent out like a cannonball.” “Tomaszewski suffered second degree burns and a broken nose from the impact of the gerbil, while Farnum suffered first and second degree burns to his anus and lower intestinal tract.