The Vicar of Dibley is a British sitcom created by Richard Curtis and written for its lead actress, Dawn French, by Curtis and Paul Mayhew-Archer, with contributions from Kit Hesketh-Harvey. The Vicar of Dibley aired from 1994 to 2007. In 2004, it came third in Britain's Best Sitcom.

In May 2007, Richard Curtis received a BAFTA 'Academy Fellowship' award for his humanitarian pursuits as well as his creative work including The Vicar of Dibley.

The Vicar of Dibley is set in a fictional small Oxfordshire village called Dibley, which is assigned a female vicar following the 1992 changes in the Church of England that permitted the ordination of women.

The main character was an invention of Richard Curtis, but he and Dawn French extensively consulted Joy Carroll, one of the first female vicars, and garnered many character traits and much information.

Following the opening credits of each episode, there is usually a humorous depiction, eg. a woman knitting straight off the sheep. At the end of each episode, following the closing credits, Geraldine tells a joke to Alice — most of the time, the joke is rather off-colour.

Alice usually doesn't get the joke, but instead tries to interpret it literally and then explains to Geraldine why the premise is implausible. In the very first episode, Alice does not understand the joke, but pretends to, and 'laughs' unrealistically, not stopping until long after the joke dies down.

In the episode Love and Marriage, David is told the joke and understands it straight away, although Geraldine begins to explain the joke to David out of force of habit. In the 2005 episode Happy New Year, this joke was told at the beginning as the end of the episode focused on the Make Poverty History campaign.

In the final episode, the joke is explained to Alice by Harry, in an ironically complicated manner which the character's intelligence would suggest an inability to understand, allowing her to get the punchline for the first time.