If you’re pulling a Christmas cracker today look out for this now famous but fairly puzzling ‘joke’ –
Q: What kind of cough medicine does Dracula take?
A: Con medicine
Apart from the fact that the joke is more suited to Hallowe’en (I wonder when someone will invent Hallowe’en crackers!) ‘con medicine’ doesn’t make any sense as an answer. Over the years lots of people found this joke in their cracker then posted a photograph on social media asking if anyone got the joke and could explain it.
An explanation from Andrew Taylor seems to have solved the mystery. The answer is probably coffin medicine (though even then it’s still not a particularly great joke, in keeping with the traditions of Christmas cracker jokes). Where has the ‘ffi‘ gone though? Read Andrew’s 2018 blog post ‘Con Medicine‘ to find out how a typographical quirk in the way some fonts / typefaces display those letters probably resulted in a simple error in printing.
Perhaps the error has been fixed and no-one will find it in their crackers this year!
EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.
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