Who wants to be a cracker joke writer?

‘Can you smell carrots?’

Now, as Christmas cracker jokes go, I think that’s a pretty good one.

They’re not really jokes, though, are they? Not in the traditional sense, anyway. The gags included in crackers are seen more as riddles – well, they are in my house, anyway – and something that should be solved. I can only imagine that a joke-writer’s remit is to elicit a groan rather than a belly laugh.

I was idly thinking about all of this on Christmas Day and as I was clearing up the festive paraphernalia from the table, I flicked through the cracker jokes – some of which we had neglected to read (How does Jack Frost get to work? On his ice-icle) and it got me thinking: how do you get the job of writing these jokes? And then I thought, how does anyone get their jobs?

Think about it. The majority of people in life are surely employed doing something that they never intended. This isn’t a personal gripe about my own circumstances- I love being a journalist and my initial dream of playing football for Tottenham Hotspur is fading with each passing year – but more a question of how exactly our lives pan out.

It’s too easy to have a pop at people working in finance, especially when their clever ways with tax and offshore bank accounts are responsible for keeping this beautiful Island so relatively flush in economy, but I’ve always found it a bit of an odd thing to want to go in to. While you can imagine children telling their parents that they want to be astronauts, firemen or racing drivers, it’s harder to think that many youngsters are doodling pictures of themselves as trust fund administrators.

I never had a solid plan. I remember being out and about with my mother when I was about eight years old and bumping into one of her friends, Alan, an avuncular chap with a friendly smile. He leaned down, politely, and said: ‘So, what do you want to be when you’re older?’

‘Dunno,’ I said, rank with apathy.

‘But what will you do to earn money when you’re an adult?” he continued.

‘Dunno.’

There was a brief, embarrassed silence before he bade my mother farewell and walked away, possibly wondering how she had produced a son of such eloquence.

‘Why did you say that?,’ my mother hissed, as soon as he was out of earshot. ‘What do you think Alan’s going to think of you now?’

‘Dunno.’

But I really didn’t know. And I still don’t, really. It’s not just me – my entire generation, and the current 20-somethings, are just awful at knowing these things. We have all been told that we are ‘special’ and that we should ‘follow our dreams’. You can probably partly blame programmes like The X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent – shows that made youngsters across the country think that they were all destined for instant fame and riches, as long as they ‘never stopped believing in themselves’. The feeling pervades that unless we are really ‘winning’ at life then you are somehow doing it wrong.

But the cold reality of it is that there can’t be many people who are genuinely in a job that they love and would not change for anything. And that’s how it should be.

If everyone was a pop singer or a film star there would be no one to fix your washing machine or change your locks or keep the roads clean.

We had a lad in for work experience a few months ago and I asked him one day if he wanted to be a journalist.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Definitely. But just for a year or two, probably. I don’t want to ever be tied down to one thing. I want to move round the world and do all kinds of jobs, changing careers every year or so.’

He’s not alone in having these bizarre aspirations (best of luck to them, too – and the employers that take them on) but it’s a terrifying indictment of how the younger generation view the world.

Then there’s the 21st-century dream of working for yourself or running your own business. Whenever there is a recession, start-ups always flourish, as people are forced to diversify and find new revenue streams, but again – there is only so much room for individual companies.

Maybe the best route is to pick one of those amazing jobs that anyone could probably do – like a cracker joke writer – but it’s still the kind of thing that would make you the centre of attention at a dinner party. That’s how I tend to judge people’s careers, you see – by how much I want to know about it if I am sitting next to them in a social situation. Plant me next to a voiceover artist, a stuntman, a crime scene expert, an archeologist or a glass blower and I’ll grill them for an hour before making the bold and rash decision to quit my job and start training to be an voiceover artist, a stuntman, a crime scene expert, an archeologist or a glass blower.

It might be the Christmas sherry, it may be the general festive goodwill and it probably is the fact that I love puns, but I’ve decided to become a writer of cracker jokes.

Here’s my first effort:

Who is Father Christmas’s favourite Jerseyman?

Graeme Le Snow.