Culled from a private mailing list:
A dairy farmer goes out to his field one winter’s morning and discovers all of his cows frozen solid. As far as the eye can see there are cows,
motionless as statues. It had been a very cold night, but he was amazed that anything like this could happen.
The realisation of the situation then dawned on him. With his entire livestock gone, how could he make ends meet? How could he feed his wife and kids? How could he pay the mortgage? He sat with his head in his hands, trying to come to terms with impending poverty.
Just then, an elderly woman walked by, “What’s up, chuck?” asked the old lady, in a broad Yorkshire accent. The farmer gestured toward the frozen cows and explained his predicament. The old woman smiled knowingly, walked over to the nearest cow and placed her hand on its nose. After a few seconds the cow began to twitch and was soon back to normal, chewing the cud and going moo, like cows do. One by one the old woman defrosted the cows until the whole field was full of healthy animals. The farmer was delighted, and asked the woman what she wanted as a repayment for her deed. She thanked him, but his declined his
offer and walked off across the field.
A passer-by who had witnessed the whole thing approached the farmer. “You know who that was don’t you?” He asked.
“No” said the farmer. “Who?”
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“That was Thora Hird.”
Thora would rhyme with Cora, Dora, and so on, right? And Thaw rhymes with caw (but not car), law, and paw.
In my dialect, the first group has an R sound, and the second group doesn’t. The first group has an O sound very similar to that of code or lobe; the second group has the same A sound as father.
Correct. Not only does the joke rely on knowing the actress, but it also depends on the speaker pronouncing “thor” to rhyme with “thaw”, and using the non-rhotic intrusive R. This is a vocal habit (“error”, says I), of several different accents in the UK, but particularly in the London region, that adds an R where there is none to link two syllables that end and begin with a vowel, respectively. Q.v. English people saying “dror-ring” instead of “drawing”.
