Three Men in a Boat

I volunteered to canoe with the boisterous boys.  Rapscallions, they might have been called once.  But harmless enough.  Seven and half miles, three men in a boat, downstream, I grant you, but in the rain nevertheless.  There’s something slightly contradictory about water sports in the rain but my philosophical murmurings were rather lost on my wet ten year-old wards.  Let’s tell jokes instead, I ventured.  Now, hindsight is a wonderful thing.  Some might argue that suggesting to prepubescent boys that this was their chance to tell a non-parental adult some funnies, was a bad idea.  They might be right.  The first gag involved a discredited pop singer and children (no, not that one, the other one).  The second, an old lady, a rottweiler and some unmentionable act.  Both were slaughtered by a combination of incomprehension, explanation to peers, embarrassment and distracting paddling.  Still, it did present me with a dilemma: frown, tut-tut and disapprove, laugh along and risk the wrath of their parents, or just plead ignorance.  In the end it was easy - I’d already heard them and they weren’t funny the first time.