best joke from the Hitchhiker's "trilogy"?
 

Mine is calling the end of the universe a "gnab gib."

Oh, man, it's been too long since I read the books. I enjoyed all of them but the last one. As one of my old friends said of it, "He lost his sense of humor."

You can listen to the radio shows here.

After #4, I quit paying attention even as I read them. I think it was because the stupid joke in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish about whether Dent had a sex life irritated me. I don't know whether Adams lost his humor so much as he grew lazy. Because that's what toilet humor and blue humor are: lazy. Put it this way: After Life, the Universe and Everything the series was a gnab gib.

I have read that, when the original radio series aired, Addams would often be revising the script of an episode while it was airing.

I tried listening to radio episode of Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective once, and didn't make it halfway through.

Not so much a joke as a funny scene, where Zaphoid is being executed by the machine that shows him how insignificant he is to the universe and he walks away unharmed with the total conviction that the is the center of the universe.

I've always appreciated https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/123...logize-for-the ;)
It explains a lot :)

I'm sure there are many others, but it's been a while since I heard/saw/read any of the story.

It's not a quote , but the scene were Marvin the Paranoid Robot who literally has a "brain the size of a planet" has been waiting for the other characters to arrive for ten's of millions of years and has been put to work as a car valet menially parking cars at a parking lot for the entire duration.

re biker-rat; which reminds me of the soon following scene
:)

the one that I remember frequently – and I wonder why – is when, on Magrathea, Marvin and Arthur are left alone and Marvin interviews Arthur about his planet. Roughly: “Are there oceans?” – “Yes, great wide beautiful oceans” – “I hate oceans”.

SEP camouflage: The spaceship becomes “Someone Else's Problem”.

I only saw a few of the early tv programs. But you need a team, or a maniac to keep that up. Presuming Douglas Adams was neither, I'm not surprised the quality went down.

I remember the PBS series. There were so many good jokes that it is hard to pick one.

Arthur Dent's house being demolished at the same time that the Vogons are demolishing the earth. The bum carrying the "end is near" sign turned out to be right.

Deep Thought being a parody of powerful computers. "The answer is 42".

Disaster Zone being a parody of rock bands.

Marvin the Paranoid Android was created by the "Sirius Cybernetic Corporation" (word play on "serious").

The earth was built by commission.

The infinite improbability drive.

The guide was a remarkably accurate prediction of technology three decades later.
Ed

The best one I saw along those lines was a cartoon of an angry student type guy holding a sign saying "God is dead!" As he held this, he was slowly being squashed into the concrete by a 50 ft (15 Metre) forefinger :D.

42!

Yeah that was good, unlike the subsequent question the next generation computer worked out. Of course, Douglas Adams hadn't accounted for the rapid progress in Electronics.

The discussion between these stressed mice, when they had to figure out a question that could be answered by “42”. And the one they finally retained was “How many roads must a man walk down?”.

And much later, when I saw that famous interview of Bob Dylan I had to laugh twice about his answer to "How many folk singers are there in the US". Not 42, but anyway...