The funniest thing about last week's post was that it was unfunny, especially since the topic was humour.

So this week, I intend to repeat a few short examples of humour that I experienced in schools.
I recall that my Latin teacher, in 1960, was asked: "Sir, what was Julius Caesar like at parties?" 

A sneer from the teacher was followed by a detention for the boy who asked the question.  Kids have been using this cheeky device for a long time.  One of my pupils once asked me: "What did Richard III say to you about school uniform?" 

I was tempted to reply that he believed that cheeky boys should be smothered in their sleep, but it sounded too awful if you were unaware of the story of 'the princes in the Tower'.  Besides, Richard III has been maligned enough.  Instead I replied, coolly: "He'd never heard of such things and therefore had no comment to make."

Non-sequiturs, usually uttered naively, can be amusing as well as surreal.  In the middle of a fairly intense English lesson, when the students were so involved about the novel we were studying that their questions reached a high level of enquiry, one boy put his hand up and asked: "Sir, where did you buy that shirt?"

At the time I didn't find his diversionary question funny, but I did laugh afterwards.  Then I read that the comedian Greg Davies, during a brilliant drama lesson, when he was a teacher, was asked, out of nowhere: "Can you do the lambada?"  He said it took him ages to stop laughing.

I once asked a primary school boy what Florence Nightingale's moniker was, expecting him to say: "The Lady with the Lamp." Instead of which I got: "The woman with the light," as if she had been a cigarette-girl at the Balaclava Cinema.

One of the best 'howlers' I have ever heard of came from a P.E. teacher I knew in Sydney.  During basketball practice, a boy was severely winded when the ball hit him in the stomach.  The teacher explained to the lad that that he'd been hit in the solar plexus.  The next day, the boy's mother appeared at the school and demanded to know why a teacher told her son that he'd been hit in the sexual polar!