New Patrick Swayze joke in the works

After the tragic death of Patrick Swayze, comedians are scrambling to celebrate the actor’s life by coming up with a joke for the occasion.

A team from Harvard has been working on a joke for several months. They announced that they were very close to completing a joke.

“Swayze was in the movie Ghost,” said Dr Elmer Stubrick, from the university’s prestigious College of Humor. “We believe this will serve as the basis for an excellent joke, given that, in the movie, he played a dead man, and he is now dead in reality.”

Stubrick said his team was weeks, and perhaps days from condensing their work into a joke that is “very funny indeed”. He declined to comment on the content of the joke, but other sources suggested that it may involve an imaginary sequel to Ghost, which can begin shooting now that Swayze is deceased.

Expert humorist Carrot Top agreed that this would be a strong joke. “Its humor derives from the fact that, in reality, a dead actor would be unable to perform in a film.”

However, the Harvard team faces fierce competition from Japan’s Comedy Research Institute, which is said to be working on a joke with a similar theme. Institute chair Hideo Tanagawa said that the Japanese joke, developed iwth the help of the newest generation of robotic comedians, revolved around the idea that the film Ghost could be rereleased in documentary form.

Carrot Top said that the Japanese joke may pose a strong challenge to the American team.

“It juxtaposes the tragedy of Swayze’s death as a reality suitable for documentary coverage with the innately fictional and otherworldly concepts explored in the original Ghost film. The clash of these disparate concepts could be used to create considerable mirth.”

The teams had faced a third challenger from the London School of Economics, whose joke was scheduled for completion by August 2009, which would have been well timed for Swayze’s death. The joke was believed to be based around the idea that Swayze’s “dirty dancing” would be much dirtier if he was covered in earth from the grave.

“It sounds like it should be funny,” said an unnamed former contributor, “but they’ve had a terrible time trying to come up with a wording that actually makes anyone laugh. Most of the so-called jokes were just morbid and grotesque. And they spent months coming up with Grey’s Anatomy jokes, before someone pointed out that the star was Patrick Dempsey, not Patrick Swayze.”

The delays, cost overruns and problems with supplies of ambiguous words have pushed the estimated completion date for the British joke to the winter of 2010.

“Even if it was a funny joke, this team’s contribution will arrive too late to be useful to the world of comedy,” said Carrot Top.