Slips to roll up and push into a cracker, whether you are making them from scratch or refilling the ones that come out of the loft every year. Each slip is 96mm by 25mm, the strip a shop cracker already holds, with the question in bold and the answer on the line under it. Twenty to a sheet of A4. What do you call a greedy elf? Elfish. Why does Santa go down the chimney? Because it soots him.
Sized to the slip a cracker holds
The paper strip inside a shop cracker runs to about 100mm, and these are 96mm by 25mm, which is the same thing in the hand. Rolled along the long edge a slip sits in the tube beside the hat and the gift without needing a second fold.
The slip size does not change with the paper. On A4 the block of slips is centred with a 9mm margin round the outside and on US Letter 12mm, so the outer cut line stays well inside the strip of paper a home printer will actually put ink on.
The line under the heading on the sheet says to cut along the dashed lines and roll one slip into each cracker, which is the whole job. Nothing is folded and nothing is glued.
Twenty to an A4 sheet, eighteen to US Letter
A4 takes ten rows of two, so twenty slips to a sheet. US Letter is the shorter page, takes nine rows and holds eighteen. The count above the page follows whichever paper is chosen: ten, twenty or forty on A4, and nine, eighteen or thirty six on US Letter.
Those values are half a sheet or whole sheets on purpose. A count that does not divide into the paper leaves a last sheet with cut lines along the top and nothing beneath them, which is both awkward to cut and wasteful. Changing the paper moves the count to the nearest value the new paper offers.
A box of twelve crackers therefore wants the twenty. The eight spare cover the ones that go on the floor, and the ones somebody reads out before anybody has pulled anything.
Why cracker jokes are the shortest ones
The cracker form is fixed: one short question, one pun, one groan. Fifty two are written to it here and the setups are the tightest anywhere on the site. What do you call an old snowman? Water. What do elves do after school? Gnome-work.
Short is a layout requirement as much as a comic one. The question is set at 8.4pt and the answer at 7.8pt, which keeps both on a single line for almost every joke. A setup that wrapped would lose its timing, read out by somebody in a paper hat at the end of a meal.
Several appear in the family set in a slightly longer form. An old snowman is water on a slip and a puddle on a card, which is the difference between a joke read in two seconds and one somebody has time to look at.
Questions
- How many cracker jokes fit on one sheet?
- Twenty on A4, in ten rows of two, and eighteen on US Letter. The count offers ten, twenty or forty on A4 and nine, eighteen or thirty six on US Letter, which is half a sheet or whole sheets.
- What size are the printable cracker joke slips?
- Each one is 96mm by 25mm, the same on both paper sizes. That is the strip a shop cracker already holds, so it rolls along its long edge and drops into the tube without a second fold.
- Can I use these to refill crackers I already have?
- Yes, and it is the easier of the two jobs. Take the old slip out, roll a new one the same way and push it back down the tube. Nothing on the slip assumes the cracker is homemade.
- How many Christmas cracker jokes are there to choose from?
- Fifty two in the cracker set. A sheet of twenty draws from those and Shuffle draws again, so filling two boxes of crackers does not put the same joke on two tables.
- Are these cracker jokes suitable for children?
- They are written clean and none of them carries a second meaning, so a child can read theirs out. The Which jokes control on this page also swaps the slips for the shorter children set.