The unwritten rules on telling jokes in England

I was sitting at a restaurant with my family on my visit home last year and I told a joke. My niece's reaction was: you look like you don't like this joke. And then I realised: I had learned to tell jokes the English way.

In Israel if you tell a joke, you start with saying: hey, this is really funny, wait till you hear this... and you're laughing whilst you tell it. In England that would not go down very well at all. In England the way to tell a joke is to keep a completely straight face, to pretend that what you're saying is not a joke at all, and leave it to your audience to work out that it's a joke. The best reaction is if they fall for it until the very end, and then you see this look on their face, you see them thinking about it, wondering, then coming to the conclusion that you weren't serious...

But of course the English are brought up not just learning how to tell a joke (deadpan, straight face) but also how to respond to a joke (deadpan, straight face). So don't expect them to roar with laughter. If you get a raised eyebrow and a half smile, you've done pretty well.

As for my niece's comment that I looked like I didn't like the joke I was telling - that's because it was what is called "a groaner". In Israel we call them bdichot keresh, keresh meaning a wooden board, but I've no idea why. But why here they're called groaners is pretty obvious, as the reaction you get from your audience is a groan, expressing the great suffering involved in hearing it. (Awful puns come under this category.) So when you're telling such jokes, the unwritten rules of English joke-telling say that you must look extremely apologetic whilst you tell them.

Thus we all play our part in the pretence that we don't really like these jokes, although of course if people didn't really like them they would have died out long ago (I mean the jokes, not the people). It's just that it's sort of beneath us to admit to liking groaners because they're not very sophisticated. That's my theory anyway.

So, have you heard the one about the frog? My pet frog is called Jumbo. Why Jumbo? Because he is not my newt.

Oh, and there's more... My pet newt is called Tiny. Why Tiny? Because he is my newt. Sorry...