G eorge Pointon sent the tweets without really thinking. He only had a modest 400-odd followers, most of them friends. That term-time Wednesday morning, he’d asked his Year 1s to share their best jokes for the class.
“And what they were saying,” he explains, “was just so funny, I wanted to document it somewhere, so I wouldn’t forget.” During his lunch break he posted a thread , setting out what each child had offered, alongside brutally blunt reviews, for the enjoyment of his mates: Mikey: What did the cow say to the road? – He had a cow and then the farmer didn’t even know what to do. What a fucking shit show from Mikey.
No laughs. No real punchline. He walked up with a grin the size of the Cheshire cat, thinking he was Johnny Big Spuds.
Trainwreck. 1/10 Jack: What did the toilet say? – Poo. Poo joke.
Too easy. The class erupted in fits of laughter, however I found it cheap, lazy and crass. He’ll probably end up enjoying Mrs Brown’s Boys .
Bang average. 5/10 “It went viral,” Pointon says now, three years later. Across platforms, we’re talking millions of views.
“We were just after the second Covid lockdown, March 2021. Everyone had been bombarded with bad news. This thread broke up timelines, I think.
An injection of fun and positivity. It blew up from there.” The next morning, slightly alarmed, he popped into the headteacher’s office.
This was his first year working in education and “accidental-school-based-social-media-stardom” hadn’.