benniesposito.com

[Colin Ramone]

Lovely to see this site up. Myself and Colin Simpson were thinking of doing something similar, delighted you've beaten us to it.

Thought it might be appropriate to start off with a thread, where we can all tell our favourite Bennie gags. To begin, Benni's twist on boring student humour:

"Hey, you know when you're flatsharing, and then the landlord comes round when you're out. And then he goes through your drawers, sniffing your underpants. I know about all that, cause I used to be a landlord"

[martin esposito]

hi colin
really pleased that you have found the site. thank you so much for leading the tributes on the chortle web site. anyway one of bennis gags that always makes me chuckle:

"my ex-girlfriend once said to me, ' i'm not overweight, i'm just big boned. ' by the way, can anyone tell me, whats the name of that 'big bone' that goes around a fat persons waist!"

will try to remember some more,

martin.

[GrahamP]

'So, I pulled - we were just getting down to business when I realised I didn't have a condom, ****! Luckily I'd been for a walk on Arbroath beach that day so I was able to peel one off the bottom of my shoe - the night was saved!

It wasn't great though, I mean you know how uncomfortable it is walking with sand in your shoes .........'

[Wee Sandy]

"She said,' Do you practise safe sex?' I said,' Practice is all I've done for the past six months and it dosen't get much ******' safer, I can tell you!'"

"She was a student. She studied micro-biology-well, she did that night."

"She had a german pet name for me-Herr Trigger."

"She had a lazy eye. I hate that phrase, 'lazy eye.' You don't go up to someone in a wheelchair and say "Hey, I see you have lazy legs.'"

The more I type the more I remember. Benni is an enormous loss.

Sandy.

[GrahamP]

Haha, great stuff Sandy.

Do you remember our fringe show in 1998 where our audience were all under 16 and we ended up playing to them on the steps outside Christies. Got told to clear off by an old lady shouting out a window, was like something from a Norman Wisdom movie!

'Don't you hate those people who don't drink, it's like 'no, don't mind about me, I'll just sitting in the corner, nursing an orange juice, messing up the round system'.
They're always the first to come up to you the next day and say 'do you know how drunk you were last night? Do you remember what you were saying? I'm like 'no, I was drunk, that's the whole point of it'. The only person who remembers it is this sober person, carrying the memories round like a ball and chain. I need the blank spots to punctuate my life!'

[simpfeld]

Here's some of my favourites not mentioned so far:

'I took an Easy Jet flight the other day, we all got on this bus to take us to the plane and it f*cking took off. It was a small plane, half way through the flight the pilot turned to me and said, Oi mate do you mind getting your knees out of my back.'

'When I first met my girlfriend I'm sorry to admit I prematurely ejaculated. It didn't half **** off everyone else in the cinema queue.'

''My girlfriend said, treat me like a princess. So I took her for a drive in my car and drove it into a pillar'

'On cable when they give you a ten minute preview of the porn channels. Who needs more than 10 minutes? They even give you a countdown in the corner of the screen to time your w*nk perfectly'

'My girlfriend put on weight so easily. She only has to look at a bar of chocolate and she'll ******* eat it'

There are a few I can only half remember. One about a abortion and a bucket in the corner of the room and was there not one about his ZX Spectrum downloading pornography. There was also the stuff about the Christian rave in the desert with Jesus.

Graham, do you have any video recordings of his gigs that you can grab some more gags from? Or even post clips onto this website when it gets going?

I honestly believe that his material is too good to be lost to the world and I'm really glad that we have somewhere to preserve it.

[GrahamP]

Great to see you on here Simpfeld!

I made several tapes of Benni over the years, including a showreel. The main Road From Dundee tapes, infact the only ones, lie in the hands of Glenn Millar, a local chap who filmed the show at the Rep. Would really love to see them, but it's over 4 years, don't know what's become of them, he kept saying he'd edit them onto a tape, still waiting.....

Ok, couple more, these are a few Benni B-sides and rarities -

'They've put satellite tv up in the estates in Dundee, made all the kerbs uneven. It's the 14 year olds I feel sorry for - really gets under their pram wheels'

I was moving in with a few gay guys, I didn't mind - until they asked me for a rough entry date. I was like 'steady on mate', then he wanted a deposit in his hand!

I've got a little tip for sex - always finger a girl after you've had sex - save the big one till last!

I got in a taxi the other day and the taxi driver said to me 'what do you do?', I said 'I'm an art student', he said 'aren't you art students just a bunch of lazy middle-class wankers pissing the taxpayers money up a wall'. I said 'no way, we're not all middle-class'.

You know when you're really drunk, don't you hate that, you're fumbling about with your keys - it's a bugger getting them in the ignition!

[delia]

hi graham, just saw your post on the tapes being with Glenn Miller, i'll see if i can get them. They would be fun/sad to watch, that was around the time i first became friends with Benni and you - grubby angels! Was really glad to find this site, was just looking at chortle to see the great picture of Benni in a wig and you in the phonebox.

The first comedy gig i saw Benni do, he went under the name of Duncan Donuts, it was in the Stand but i never again saw him appear under that name - was it one he used much when he started comedy?

Delia

[GrahamP]

Hi Delia - Duncan Donuts, that's going back, was when Benni thought his comedy was getting a bit nob-gag orientated and he wasn't really representing his intelligence, decided to effect a Jekyll and Hyde split - Duncan told the smutty stuff, Ben Darcy would do the smart stuff.

Think the experiment ended after a gig in Aberdeen when some bloke said to him 'you were funny, but that bloke Duncan Donuts was brilliant, if you had a couple of jokes like his you'd have a great act'.

And here are a couple more jokes -

A men's mag gave away a map of a girls' *****, what are you supposed to do with that? 'I've got my wallet, keys, map of a girls ***** - can't go wrong'. Refer to it while you're under the sheets, 'mmm, this is great - is it supposed to be this tight, oops, got it upside down'.
And from certain angles, it resembled the Tay Estuary, Perth as the clitoris, Dundee as the you-know-what and yes, Arbroath is still a shithole!

They sell drink for next to nothing in the students union - then they throw you out for being drunk! It's like going up to someone in a restaurant and saying 'you look a bit full, you've got to leave'.

Would be great if you could get those tapes. Speak later.

[graham]

" I read in a magazine you should tell your girlfriend what you want her to do I bed. Next time we were having sex I said to her..I want you to lose weight"

will post more when I remember them....he had so many great gags

[GrahamP]

'It's quite a trendy thing to give cities slogans nowadays, sweep all the domestic problems under the carpet, give it a nice, snappy sounding slogan. We've got 'Dundee, City of Discovery' - but it's rubbish, it doesn't say anything about Dundee. Other cities have much better slogans, we should have something like theirs. You have 'Glasgows Miles Better', we could have that in Dundee, 'Welcome to Dundee - Glasgows Miles Better', or 'Greenock's on the Go', we could have 'Dundee's on the dole'. But what really sums up Dundee to me is something my old mate Mike said to me, 'Benni, he said, if you cannae get it in Dundee you might as well have it cut off', why don't we just use that? 'Welcome to Dundee - where if you cannae get if you might as well have it cut off'. Council paid 200k for our slogan, Mike would have done it for a couple of pints and a packet of fags.'

[Wayne Taylor]

GrahamP, I just remembered that I still have the master copies of the backing music / voices I did for you for RFD! I think I also might still have an 'alternative' version of Mr Hasslehoff's 'Wings of Tenderness' Benni asked me to do for... some reason.... Can't remember if I finished it, or if he used it though... I might stick 'em on the site at some point, but the RFD backing track is a little disjointed without real filling in the gaps...

W

[Wee Sandy]

The first gig I did with Benni was a benefit for the Liverpool Dockers organised by June Broon. I think it was Benni's first gig. That's when we met. Turns out he had seen me in a play at The Rep several years earlier. We got drunk ( could happen) and became firm friends.

Our second gig together was at The Laughing Carrot in Aberdeen. We're talking 97/98 here. Benni and I were in support to Joyce Falconers one-woman musical, a sort of semi stand-up/ monologue peice about a Torry Quine. That's where Scunner the Seagull came from. Scunner was a character puppet in Joyce's show, being one of the "coorser" seagulls terrorising Torry Bay. I do remember Benni video taped the gig. I hope that's still lying around somewhere.

BTW, I belive Duncan Donuts also went under the name of Spunkin' Duncan and was a big Dundee fan, hat and scarf and all.

Sandy.

[GrahamP]

Benni certainly loved Scunner the Seagull, I remember him cooking plum tomatoes after nights out, sporadically being seized by Scunner and plunging his hand into the pot.

(On Dundee planes) 'It was a bumpy ride, I asked for a whisky to calm my nerves, the steward said 'sorry, the pilot's just had the last one'.'

[simpfeld]

I remember Duncan Donut well, he was one of the first acts I ever saw at The Stand long before my first gig. I went twith work people, everyone thought Benni was the best on the night. He did stuff about changing rooms and how Handy Andy was obsessed with MDF

'I'll just rip out this Adam Fireplace and bung up a bit of MDF'

Can't remember if it was Duncan or Benni who did that gag. It was during this period that Benni was coming on as Duncan Donut and half way through would take off the hat and glasses and become Benni. I asked him about this a while later and he said it was kind of a mask, that he felt more comfortable coming on as Duncan and becoming Benni later.

Scunner I never saw, I just remember Benni squawking and talking about Scunner all night when he'd had a few beers (I think it was a night during the fringe, do you remember Graham?). It had become a fun obsession of that day, Scunner could say the insulting things Benni couldn't. It was, as usual, with Benni , very funny.

A couple more gags:

'Sex is too complicated nowadays. When I was young it was just milk, milk, lemonade and round the back chocolate's made. That's all you needed to know'' (with actions)

'The Discovery, a boat designed to handle some of the harshest environments known to man, and it's been to the South Pole'