If you tell a joke, and people take it too seriously, it might end with someone getting offended and you having to apologize. Occasionally, someone will write you out of their will.
But there’s also a small chance that your listener will say, “Capital idea! Let’s try that.” Your dumb joke will be considered a legit suggestion, and there’s no going back now.
Massachusetts’ Voluntary Tax
In 2002, a group of concerned citizens submitted a suggestion to the Massachusetts legislature. At the time, the state had an income tax rate of 5.2 percent. But what if some people felt like paying more? Maybe forms could offer a little box, so some filers could pay 5.85 percent instead, which was the rate that had existed a couple years previously.
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This group wasn’t concerned with raising government revenues. The group was the Citizens for Limited Taxation and Government (CLTG), and they were making a sarcastic suggestion to mock Massachusetts’ tax system. A couple years before, people had voted to lower taxes a chunk and then the government overruled that, instead lowering it only a small amount. CLTG were now jokingly saying, “Well, clearly people want higher taxes then!”
The government took the suggestion well, and they added the optional higher rate on all tax forms.
Around a thousand people a year went on to pick the voluntary higher rate, presumably because they got confused. Even people who support higher taxes realize one person paying more helps solves nothing and only hurts themselves.
Inviting the Queen to a Wedding
John and Frances Canning weren’t going to have a big wedding. For their 2012 nuptials, they were just going to have a ceremony at Manchester’s Town Hall, and they invited 40 guests. Also, John invited Queen Elizabeth. “All the very best on the Jubilee,” he wrote in a letter (the wedding was coinciding with her Diamond Jubilee, the 60th anniversary of her ascending the throne), “and if you’ve got any spare minutes, we’re only next door.”
Obviously, the Queen wouldn’t actually make it, but the couple were surprised to receive an actual reply from one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting saying as much. Her Majesty couldn’t come, said the reply, but all the best to you. That was much more of a response than they could have hoped.
Except, then the day of the wedding came, and she showed up after all.
Hey, why not? Like the invitation said, she was in the neighborhood.
Sources don’t reveal whether Elizabeth exercised her privilege of prima nocta and claimed John for the night, but we assume she did, as she was the sovereign.
A Monkey Mayor
You’ve surely heard stories about small towns that have a dog or some other pet as their mayor. The town will probably be some unincorporated community where 3,000 people live, and the mayor will be ceremonial, with no power.
Hartlepool was a little different. Hartlepool had a population of 100,000, and in 2002, they created the office of the mayor for the first time. As this was a real position, the Labor Party fielded one candidate, the Conservatives fielded another and the Liberal Democrats offered up a third. A fourth candidate was a businessman. The fifth and final candidate was H’Angus the Monkey, the mascot of the team Hartlepool United F.C. He campaigned by offering free bananas to all students 10 and under.
There was a real human being behind H’Angus, named Stuart Drummond, but that barely seemed to increase the chance of his winning. Bookies placed the odds against him at 100 to 1. But he did win, beating the second-place candidate by 500 votes. Three years later, he won reelection, and four years after that, he won reelection again.
He’d probably still be mayor today, but in 2012, the town council managed to abolish the office of mayor and replace it with a council leader. The council was controlled by the Labour Party, who’d been behind that second-place candidate Drummond had beaten, but we’re sure that’s just coincidence.
The Discount Island
In 1978, Richard Branson wasn’t yet a billionaire. He was the founder of Virgin Records, not the man behind the Virgin Group conglomerate, and his fortune was estimated at around £5 million. So, when he heard that an actual Virgin Island was for sale, for £6 million, he figured he couldn’t quite afford it, no matter how appropriate it would be to own.
He put in a bid for £100,000. This wasn’t a serious bid, though it did allow him to impress a woman he had his eye on, Joan Templeman, because he could say he was trying to buy it. It didn’t impress his wife Kristen, and the two of them would divorce the following year, but it did win him Joan. She and Branson have now been married for 35 years.
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They got married on Necker Island, that island Branson had bid on. That’s because as ridiculous as that £100,000 offer was, no one else was offering anything, so the seller ended up selling it to Branson for not much more than that. Let that be a lesson to you all. We know a lot of our readers were planning on paying full price for private islands, but these can sometimes go for less than you’d think.
The Fat Vote
We didn’t go into this article specifically planning to profile jokes from England (and also from New England). It ended up being very English anyway because there just must be something about that dry style of humor that gets people responding to it like it’s sincere.
Consider one parliamentary session from 1679. The way voting worked back then, anyone who voted “aye” stood up and left, and then two officials designated as “tellers” counted them as they returned. Someone in this session joked that one lord who voted aye was so fat that he should count extra.
One teller, Lord Grey, went ahead and did count this guy extra, while the other teller, Lord Norris, was too distracted to notice. As a result, the act passed, 57 to 55, even though the total number of lords voting on it was just 107.
That act was the Habeas Corpus Act 1679, which gave prisoners the right to question their detention. If it had failed, the state would be able to imprison you for no reason even today, and you could do nothing about it.
Or, well, the countries of the world would have found other ways to enshrine habeas corpus into law, since that right had been floating around since the Magna Carta or earlier. But we shouldn’t let minor details get in the way of a joke.
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