My story started:

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away…

Does that sound familiar? Well, I was a powerful warrior representing the powers of darkness, but I started to wonder what was the point of almost unlimited evil power if it failed to lead me to a higher standard of living? I always seemed to be hanging out in badly decorated spaceships listening to peers babble on about tedious political discourses. Even our all-powerful space station had some serious health and safety issues, not to mention the fact that it also proved not to be very all-powerful.

I therefore climbed into my spaceship and jetted off to explore other galaxies so I could introduce them to my own brand of goalless evil. On my journey, I had the company of one small droid. I needed this robot to operate my spaceship (for all my great power, I’m embarrassingly bad at manually driving spaceships). I regret not better checking the robot’s personality before leaving. This was no Marvin from Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. On the contrary, this irritating little Bot had been programmed with a sense of humour!

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So, while I was trying to meditate on how to make a life of wanton wickedness lead to a comfortable and safe standard of living, that cheeky robot kept cracking silly jokes. How annoying!

It started in the morning when I stepped out of the bathroom following my ablutions. Still wiping the foamy space soap saturated shower water from my eyes with a towel, I nearly tripped over the robot. It bleeped and said:

How do you get clean in outer space?          Take a meteor shower!

It then went into the bathroom I had just vacated to clean up and exclaimed in a ridiculous 1980’s robotic voice effect:

Beep! Beep! No way! Guess what I just found in the spaceship’s toilet?         The Captain’s log!

That set me up in a bad mood, and when a bad guy is in a bad mood, it is BAD! I stomped about the spaceship in a bit of a tantrum smashing random stuff but unbeknown to me, things were going to get worse.

A little later, when we stopped at a small interstellar cafe, the robot turned to me and said:

Why don’t aliens ever eat clowns for breakfast?          They taste really funny!

What a ridiculous joke! I grimaced but the droid continued unpeturbed:

What does the queen alien drink every morning?          Gravi-tea!

Another ridiculous pun!

Things rapidly became even more annoying when practical jokes were added to the silly robot’s repertoire of space-themed puns. Inspired by its feeble ‘gravi-tea’ pun, the droid somehow managed to switch off the artifical gravity in the cafe and as it floated past, it quipped:

On what do you put your tea and snacks in space?       A flying saucer!

To add to my misery, some daft alien who had been quietly reading a book looked up and said, “I’m reading a book about anti-gravity… it’s impossible to put down!” Its three heads chortled with great mirth at its joke and its dumpy little body quivered like jelly. I was considering using my sinister dark powers to punish that alien for its nonsense, but the galactic barista interrupted my thoughts with a jesting jibe at the alien: “What’s E.T. short for? Because he’s got short legs! Ahahaha!”

I had to get out of there! I decided my effort would be best applied to turning the artificial gravity back on. My silly tin can of a service robot then used its tiny robo-thrusters to position itself above me so the moment I managed to turn the artificial gravity back on, we fell to the ground with a bump and it blurted out the immature pun:

Oh! I’ve landed on Uranus!

It followed this pun with another on the same theme:

Hey, that reminds me, what do you call a mechanical bottom?        A robutt!

Its shrill electrical bleep of laughter was even more annoying than its juvenile jokes so I strongly criticised the robot’s behaviour. Unbelieveably, the robot returned with some lip and retorted:

Ha, how does one make a robot more human like?           Artificial Stupidity!

The extra annoying thing about that particular joke is that I’m not even human. I mean, look at my avatar! Do I look human? The robot then babbled something incoherent about a great man called Shakespeare who apparently wrote awesome comedy about bottom jokes, concluding that I therefore ought to learn to appreciate them.

You should follow the example of the stars around us and keep going to school…

…to become brighter!

At this point, I just had to throw the irritating piece of junk into the airlock and blast it out into space. Unfortunately, this meant that I had to drive my own spaceship and, as I reported above, I am woefully bad at that! I heard the crash of an asteroid smashing into the spaceship and was cursing my bad luck when that robot suddenly appeared outside the windscreen, clinging to the ship by some mechanical arm that had extended from its body.

How does our solar system hold its pants up?           With an asteroid belt!

That terrible electronic canned laughter! Oh, I was incensed! But I was also mindful of the fact that I was cruising through an asteroid field with no skill at cosmic driving, so I reluctantly invited the robot back into my spaceship. I tried to force a guarantee that there would be no more jokes, but to no avail.

The robot took us safely through the asteroid field and we were in a new solar system. I did not have high hopes. The reviews for this place weren’t very good. It only had one star! But, hey, that wasn’t Sirius! Oh, no! What disaster! The robot’s dreadful punning seems to be contagious. Even I’m doing it now!

We passed Uranus with surprisingly few puns, then Jupiter and Saturn, and the relatively small red planet with the little green Martians. Then the robot pointed to a lifeless grey circle of rock floating near a strange green-blue planet. It was the moon.

We can’t book a room to stay on the moon… It’s full!

I groaned and facepalmed myself, but the robot was relentless.

Why didn’t the aliens like the restaurant on the moon?       Because there was no atmosphere!

Why does nobody trust the man on the moon?        He has a dark side!

How does the man on the moon cut his hair?         Eclipse it!

I couldn’t take any more! This time I shut myself in the airlock and blasted myself out into space. Well, actually I blasted myself into the orbit of that strange blue-green planet. I waved to that hot mooncake eating goddess Chang E and her weirdly immortal rabbit as I zipped by the moon and circled the planet below a couple of times before being dragged down into its atmosphere. It was very, very hot! It’s lucky that I am a very powerful being or I believe I would’ve been incinerated in much the same way as my clothes. I hurtled down towards the earth.

Thus, I arrived on this planet in an undignified heap, naked at the bottom of a large crater. I was and still remain in a bad mood, but at least this place has semi-intelligent life and it can’t be worse than spending time couped up inside a spaceship with an annoying robot that fancies itself a comedian! Life lesson learned: Don’t go on a long voyage with a robot without carefully checking its Genuine People Personality (Adams, 1978) software first!

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