England football disaster provokes fastest-ever joke

Scientists monitoring the speed at which jokes are formulated and disseminated following national disasters believe that England's exit from Euro 2004 has broken the long-standing record.

The team listens in on mobile-phone traffic, emails and pub conversations in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events to discover how long it takes the shell-shocked British public to come up with a suitably witty analysis.

The project was established immediately after the massacre of British troops in Isandlwana, South Africa, in 1879. At that time, and in the absence of rapid international communications, it was a full three weeks before a raft of "What do you get if you cross a Zulu with a spear? Your fuc*king head chopped off" quips reached the UK's shores.

By the time of the Zeebrugge ferry tragedy in 1987, this had been reduced to just 53 minutes — the time it took for the news to travel to Dover and be converted into "What do a cross-channel ferry and a condom have in common? They're both roll-on, roll-off and full of dead seamen."

Last Thursday, however, a monitor in an Essex pub received an SMS message just 28 minutes after David Beckham's penalty sailed over the Portuguese bar. It read: "Victoria Beckham has broken the world gang-bang record... In 120 mins her shaven cun*t fuc*ked the whole country..."

"This is just tremendous," the visibly-impressed boffin later told The Rockall Times. I reckon if al-Qaeda ever puts a airliner into the Houses of Parliament we could get it down to 15 minutes. Or less." Asked whether he thought the joke had any humorous merit, he added: "I don't understand it, to be honest. I've never seen any proof that Posh 'goes Brazilian' down there, and why she would want to have sex with the entire country when she's got a talented, wealthy husband and two lovely kids is quite beyond me."