The end of a long-running spoof signpost to a nonexistent Welsh airport is a sad moment for our determinedly unsilly era
A joke is dying. It’s not funny. I mean the fact that it’s dying isn’t, not the joke itself. Whether or not that’s funny is a matter of personal taste. I’ll let you make up your own minds: it’s that there’s an international airport in, or just outside, the village of Llandegley in Powys. There isn’t really and so the joke is that there is and also that it has at least two terminals, two of which are called Terminal 1 and Terminal 3.
If you don’t think that’s funny, it may be my fault because I haven’t told it in the right way. The joke should be told, and for 20 years has been told, by a sign – a pretend sign. Or is it a real sign? It’s really there, unlike the airport. But it’s not directing people to anything real. Does that mean it’s not really a sign? Are signs that lie not signs? What are they then? Drawings? Is it art? Or fraud? This is the sort of philosophical question that comedy raises all the time.
