"Don't worry Mom, the...[real]...jokes are coming" (B.H.)

Most of those C19th American "dry goods" (O.W.) struck me as similar to the standard fare of many currently popular American comedy shows, "sitcoms", and the like, in that for the most part I can see what the play on words, or allusion, or reference, or parody, is, but it's so obvious and banal that with a bit of revision it might be improved into something worthy of being included in a Christmas Cracker. For instance, this version is better than the American one cited:
"Ye've holes in baith yr socks"
"Whit? That cannae be; they're new!"
"How did ye get yr feet intae thaim, then?"

Characteristically, the following example of a play on words and meanings is less confrontational than the American one about the chimney, in which the youth seems to seize the opportunity to be needlessly unpleasant in a manner which would, a century later, arise in all triumphant splendour and spread like a malign web world-wide:
A well-to-do gentleman, leaving a hotel on the outskirts of a small Scottish village, passed by a youngster sitting at the roadside holding a short stick with a string attached, a bent pin tied to the end clearly visible through the two inches of muddy water in which he was "fishing". Indulgently, the wealthy visitor threw him a coin or two. Later - it was a small village - the tourist recognised the lad again.
"Well, Sonny," he said, "did you catch many fish today?"
"Naw... but Ah caught you".

I believe there's a Middle Eastern variant involving someone similarly "wise enough to play the fool", only his method involves carrying a net conspicuously into the desert. When the Sultan, Pasha, Vizier or whatever who has indulgently thrown the Village Idiot a shekel or two sees him later, there's not any net, and of course he mentions this.
"One does not need a net once one has caught the fish"

Ah, if you give someone a fish he will eat for a day. Teach him to fish instead, and you've just given up a good business opportunity.