The Funniest Joke in the World

"The Funniest Joke in the World" is the title most frequently used for written references to a Monty Python's Flying Circus comedy sketch, which is also known by two other phrases that appear within it, "Joke Warfare" and "Killer Joke", the latter being the most commonly spoken title used to refer to it. The premise of the sketch is that the joke is so funny that anyone who reads or hears it promptly dies from laughter.

The sketch appeared in the first episode of the television show Monty Python's Flying Circus ("Whither Canada"), first shown on 5 October 1969.

The joke in the sketch is made of a series of meaningless, German-sounding nonce words, and so does not have an English translation.

The sketch is framed in a documentary style, and opens with Ernest Scribbler (Michael Palin), a British "writer of jokes", creating the funniest joke in the world only to die laughing. His mother (Eric Idle) finds what she believes to be a suicide note, then reads it and immediately dies. A brave Scotland Yard inspector (Graham Chapman) attempts to retrieve the joke, with the playing of very sombre music on gramophone records and the chanting of laments by fellow policemen to create a depressing mood. The inspector leaves the flat with the joke but also dies from laughter.

The British Army wish to determine "the military potential of the Killer Joke." They test the joke on a rifleman (Terry Jones), who snickers and falls dead on the range. They then translate it into German, with each translator working on only one word of the joke so as not to be killed (one of them saw two words and was hospitalised). The German translation is used for the first time on 8 July 1944 in the Ardennes, causing German soldiers to fall down dead from laughter:

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