The Dullest Blog: Comedy ramblings to inspire the dullest moments of your week

We're getting all festival special for the Dullest Blog this month, with a new collection of comedic ramblings now up every day this August. You'll be inspired

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In Ireland, we find a reason to hold more than 400 festivals a year. A cursory glance at the website of the Association of Irish Festival Events reveals many reasons for plastic glasses. For example Trim in Co. Meath will next year play host to the National Haymaking Festival which presumably coincides with the While The Sun Shines Jamboree

Such organisational imagination not a new phenomenon. Some years ago, a local festival near where I lived in County Cork held an event where a number of teams raced through the village pushing hospital beds. The stroke of genius which set this run-of-the-mill race apart was that each bed contained a pig. The key to winning the race was to have two people running on either side of the bed, preventing the pig from escaping. Although pigs have been domesticated for thousands of years, nothing in Pig’s previous experience of Man would have prepared any hog for being forced to sit on a moving gurney wearing a knitted hat, while a red-faced crowd bellowed out encouragement; so the pig quite often tried to escape. If the pig did abscond i.e. if the swine flew, disqualification was immediate.

Duran Duran’s ‘Girls on Film’ must have made a comeback that summer because, as the puzzled and increasingly restive pigs rolled past, people of all ages spontaneously broke into a chorus of “Pigs on Beds, Pigs on Beds?”

Regrettably, we will not likely see man, pig and trolley joined in combat to an electronic pop-rock soundtrack again. The Pigs on Bed event was a once-off. Ireland’s growing population and deteriorating health service has since meant that such a frivulous use of hospital beds is now considered in poor taste.

Colm is making his Edinburgh Fringe debut in ‘Hindsight’ at the Gilded Balloon Teviot from August 5th to August 30th. http://www.gildedballoon.co.uk www.colmoregan.com