Scottish Jokes

After the plumber had installed her new washing
machine, a farmer’s wife offered him the usual, and he
accepted. He watched carefully as she poured out a very
modest quantity into the glass. ‘It’s ten years old, you know,’ she said, sensing unspoken criticism.
‘Aye, and small for its age,’ said the plumber.

A grocer in Inverness, a good churchgoer, had a licence to distil whisky, ‘for consumption on the premises only’.
Feeling that this cramped his trade, he was in the habit of selling jugs of whisky at the back door, and did very well out of it. The practice was well known, and one day the minister felt obliged to speak to him about it.
‘You are breaking the law, after all,’ he said.
He was given a long, serious look in reply.
‘But I never approved of that law,’ said the grocer.
And that was the end of the matter.

As a Christmas present one year, the laird gave Macphail,
the gamekeeper, a deerstalker. Macphail was most
appreciative, and wore the hat every day. When it was
particularly cold and windy, he pulled the flaps down to
keep his ears warm. Then one day the laird noticed he was not wearing the hat.
‘Where’s the hat?’ he asked.
‘I’ve given up wearing it, since the accident,’ said
Macphail.
‘Accident? I didn’t know you had had an accident.’
‘Oh, yes. A man offered me a nip of whisky, and I had
the earfiaps down and never heard him.’

At Banchory on the River Dee, one of the local characters was ‘Boaty’, whose trade was to take anglers out on the river and guide them to the best pools. One of the perks of the job was to share in tots of the whisky, from the flasks which the visitors invariably carried, whenever a fish was taken. One day, however, Boaty had a client who kept the whisky to himself, and this despite the fact that two good salmon lay in the bottom of the boat. After a while, Boaty began to pull for the shore, made fast, and began with calm deliberation to remove his gear. ‘I say!’ cried his client, ‘what’s going on? The day isn’t half over.’ ‘Them that drinks by themselves, fishes by themselves,’ said Boaty.

In the days when a landlord controlled the ‘living’ and
could choose the parish minister, it was said of Lord
Stormont, whose land covered several Perthshire parishes, that he only asked one question about a prospective minister: ‘Is he good-natured in his drink?’ If the answer was yes, the minister got the job.

‘You know, whisky is a very bad thing,’ said the district
nurse to old Hector. ‘Well, bad whisky is a very bad thing,’ agreed Hector.

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