[JOTD] Joke of the day

[Karlston]

Police in Rotterdam seized a contraband shipment of 56 drums of petrol today.

 

The street value was estimated as over 1 million Euro.

 

It was hidden inside a shipment of cocaine.

[ducky88]

Most seniors never get enough exercise. In His wisdom God decreed that seniors would become forgetful so they would have to search for their glasses, keys and other things and thus doing more walking. And God looked down and saw that it was good.
Then God saw there was another need. In His wisdom He made seniors lose coordination so they would drop things requiring them to bend, reach & stretch.

And God looked down and saw that it was good.
Then God considered the function of bladders and decided seniors would have additional calls of nature requiring more trips to the bathroom, thus providing more exercise.

God looked down and saw that it was good.
So if you find as you age, you are getting up and down more, remember it's God's will. It is all in your best interest even though you mutter under your breath.

[aum]

A man was having marital problems. So he went to his shrink.

 

The shrink says, "When you get home, throw down your briefcase, run to her, embrace her, take off her clothes, and yours, and make mad passionate love to her."

 

In two weeks he was back in the shrink's office.

 

The shrink asked "How did it go?"

 

He said, "She didn't have anything to say, but her bridge club got a kick out of it."

 

[Karlston]

[ducky88]

Nine Important Facts To Remember As We Grow Older:

#9  Death is the number 1 killer in the world.
#8  Life is sexually transmitted.
#7  Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
#6  Men have 2 motivations: hunger and hanky panky, and they can't tell them apart. If you see a gleam in his eyes, make him a sandwich.
#5  Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach a person to use the Internet and they won't bother you for weeks, months, maybe years - unless you give them your email address.
#4  Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in the hospital, dying of nothing.
#3  All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.
#2  In the 60's, people took LSD to make the world weird. Now the world is weird, and people take Prozac to make it normal.
#1  Life is like a jar of jalapeno peppers. What you do today may be a burning issue tomorrow.

[aum]

A man lay sprawled across three entire seats in a theater.

 

When the usher came by and noticed this, he whispered to the man, "Sorry, sir, but you're only allowed one seat."

 

The man groaned but didn't budge. The usher became impatient.

 

"Sir," the usher said, "if you don't get up from there I'm going to have to call the manager."

 

Again, the man just groaned, which infuriated the usher who turned and marched briskly back up the aisle in search of his manager. In a few moments, both the usher and the manager returned and stood over the man. Together the two of them tried repeatedly to move him, but with no success. Finally, they summoned the police.

 

The cop surveyed the situation briefly then asked, "All right buddy, what's your name?" "Sam," the man moaned. "Where ya from, Sam?" the cop asked.

 

And with pain in his voice, Sam replied, "The balcony."

[Karlston]

It's really sad to see so much poverty these days.

 

Many friends and neighbours are so poor they are forced to buy electric cars because they can't afford petrol anymore.

[ducky88]

A painter by the name of Murphy, while not a brilliant scholar, was a gifted portrait artist.
Over a short number of years, his fame grew and soon people from all over Ireland were coming to the town of Miltown Malbay, in County Clare, to get him to paint their likenesses.
One day, a beautiful young English woman arrived at his house in a stretch limo and asked if he would paint her in the nude. This being the first time anyone had made such a request he was a bit perturbed, particularly when the woman told him that money was no object; in fact, and she was willing to pay up to £10,000.
Not wanting to get into any marital strife, he asked her to wait while he went into the house to confer with Mary, his wife. They talked much about the Rightness and Wrongness of it. It was hard to make the decision but finally his wife agreed, on one condition.
In a few minutes he returned.
"T'would be me pleasure to paint yer portrait, missus," he said "The wife says it's okay. "I'll paint you in the nude all
right; but I have to at least leave me socks on, so I have a place to wipe my brushes.

[aum]

Good: You give the birds and bees talk to your daughter.

Bad: She keeps interrupting.

Worse: With corrections.

 

[aum]

A family had twin boys whose only resemblance to each other was their looks. If one felt it was too hot, the other thought it was too cold. If one said the TV was too loud, the other claimed the volume needed to be turned up. Opposite in every way, one was an eternal optimist, the other a doom & gloom pessimist. Just to see what would happen,on the twins' birthday their father loaded the pessimist's room with every imaginable toy and game. The optimist's room he loaded with horse manure.

 

That night the father passed by the pessimist's room and found him sitting amid his new gifts crying bitterly.

 

"Why are you crying?" the father asked.

 

"Because my friends will be jealous, I'll have to read the all these instructions before I can do anything with this stuff, I'll constantly need batteries, and my toys will eventually get broken." answered the pessimist twin.

 

Passing the optimist twin's room, the father found him dancing for joy in the pile of manure. "What are you so happy about?" he asked.

 

To which his optimist twin replied, "There's got to be a pony in here somewhere!"

 

 

[ducky88]

A man with a completely bald head and only one leg is invited to a Xmas
fancy dress party. He doesn't know what to wear to hide his head and
his wooden leg, so he writes to a fancy dress company to explain his problem.
A few days later he receives a parcel with a note:

Dear Sir,
Please find enclosed a Pirate's outfit. The spotted handkerchief will cover
your bald head and with your wooden leg you will be just right as a Pirate.
The man is offended that the outfit emphasizes his disability, so he writes
a letter of complaint. A week passes and he receives another parcel and note.

Dear Sir,
Sorry about the previous parcel. Please find enclosed a monk's habit.
The long robe will cover your wooden leg and with your bald head you will really
look the part. The man is really incandescent with rage now, because the
company has gone from emphasizing his wooden leg to drawing attention to his
bald head. So he writes a really strong letter of complaint. A few days later
he gets a very small parcel from the company with the accompanying letter:

Dear Sir,
Please find enclosed a tin of Golden Syrup. We suggest you pour the tin of
Golden Syrup over your bald head, let it harden, then stick your wooden leg
up your **** and go as a toffee apple.

[aum]

Once a man questioned his wife, "Would you have married me if my father hadn't left me any fortune?"

 

"Dear hubby, I'd have married you no matter who left you a fortune!" she replied softly.

 

[aum]

A guy goes into a bar and orders a beer. As he takes a sip of his beer, he hears a tiny little voice say: "Nice tie." He looks around but sees no one. He take another sip of his beer and hears: "A nice shirt, too." Again he looks around and sees no one.

 

He signals the bartender over, and hesitantly explains that he's hearing voices talking to him.

 

"Of course," smiles the bartender. "It's the peanuts -- they're complimentary."

 

[aum]

What do you call a person that speaks 3 languages?

 

"Trilingual"

 

What do you call a person that speaks 2 languages?

 

"Bilingual"

 

What do you call a person that speaks 1 language?

 

"American"

 

[aum]

A Dutchman was explaining the red, white and blue Netherlands flag to an American.

 

"Our flag is symbolic of our taxes. We get red when we talk about them, white when we get our tax bills, and blue after we pay them."

 

The American nodded. "It's the same in the USA only we see stars too!"

[aum]

A well-worn one dollar bill and a similarly distressed twenty dollar bill arrived at a Federal Reserve Bank to be retired. As they moved along the conveyor belt to be burned, they struck up a conversation.

 

The twenty dollar bill reminisced about its travels all over the county. "I've had a pretty good life," the twenty proclaimed.

 

"Why I've been to Las Vegas and Atlantic City, the finest restaurants in New York, performances on Broadway, and even a cruise to the Caribbean.""Wow!" said the one dollar bill. "You've really had an exciting life!"

 

"So tell me," says the twenty, "where have you been throughout your lifetime?"

The one dollar bill replies, "Oh, I've been to the Methodist Church, the Baptist Church, the Lutheran Church ."

 

The twenty dollar bill interrupts, "What's a church?"

[Karlston]

[aum]

The jokes that have made people laugh for thousands of years

 

 

The phrase "the old ones are the best ones" might not always be true. But some of the oldest jokes in history are still in use today. What makes a good joke? It’s worth going back a few thousand years to find out.

 

After months spent poring over medieval texts for her PhD, Martha Bayless made a surprising discovery. She was looking at some of the earliest jokes written in Latin by Catholic scholars (some in excess of 1,000 years old). Few had ever been translated into English before, yet many were still funny – and some even made her laugh out loud.

 

Shortly after, while waiting for her train, Bayless was reading a copy of Truly Tasteless Jokes 3 – a popular joke anthology from 1983. She was surprised to find, almost word for word, a joke that she had been transcribing just a day earlier.

 

The joke lives up to the "truly tasteless" promise of the book. This is how it starts in its 1,000-year-old format: Two men were walking along a road talking of this and that. "What do you think," says one. "Which is more fun, defecating or having sex?"

 

The other man ponders the question before coming up with a solution. I'll spare you the details, as it is a little rude by today's standards, but it involved seeking the advice of a sex worker.

 

It struck Bayless that the joke had continued to be shared through a spoken culture of joke-telling, starting with the Latin text and culminating with her modern joke book, without needing to be written down for centuries in between.

 

There is clearly something in this joke that has kept it in use to this day, even if it is crass by today's standards. But what is it that is still tickling audiences through the centuries? And will some modern jokes still be funny for thousands of years to come? As a comedy writer for BBC Radio 4, I was interested to find out.

 

It seems that there are recognisable features in even the earliest written jokes. National Public Radio (NPR) in the US suggested in 2016 that the oldest recorded joke is from Bronze Age Sumeria (an early Mesopotamian civilisation dating 3300-1200BC). The joke goes: "What has never happened since time immemorial? A young wife has not farted on her husband's lap."

 

The earliest jokes we have on record suggest that crude jokes stand the test of time (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)

 

Needless to say, this joke wouldn't pack out comedy clubs today. However, it is striking that the earliest recorded joke is about toilet humour. The comic fixation with the crude, bodily and downright scatological is no modern invention, but instead is common in humour across cultures and time.

 

Bayless, now a director of folklore and public culture at the University of Oregon, has written a number of books on early comedy. She says, "the earliest jokes were dirty jokes. People couldn’t resist them."

 

Flatulence, for example, is funny because it shows our "uncontrollable physicality", says Anu Korhonen, a professor of cultural studies from the University of Helsinki in Finland.

 

She adds the role of farts in early jokes was to represent our shared humanity and the equality of people, in an interview for the university magazine. Flatulence affects everyone – no one can help it.

 

In some cultures, to belch at the table is highly offensive. In other cultures, it might mean 'Thank you, that was a wonderful meal' – Peter McGraw

 

Some researchers suggest that because humour brings us together it might have an evolutionary purpose. Perhaps our ability to make light of bad situations helped us to overcome them – by joining together in laughter, we were able to reinforce our social bonds. Some scholars point to the existence of teasing-like behaviours in primates like chimpanzees as evidence of an early evolutionary origin of humour in humans. However, captive animals could be copying behaviours they have seen in us.

 

But not all rude jokes translate well across cultures. Peter McGraw, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, explains that cultural norms vary so widely, finding a universally funny joke is challenging. "Even something like belching has a cultural element," he says. "In some cultures, to belch at the table is highly offensive. If your child does it, you might laugh because they don't know any better. In other cultures, it might mean 'Thank you, that was a wonderful meal'."

 

If the oldest joke in the book really is the example from Bronze Age Sumeria of a young farting wife, it's not very funny any more (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)

 

By the medieval period, many jokes were so rude you might be forgiven that they originated in bawdy inns and the less salubrious corners of society. But that is not the case at all, says Bayless. "It used to be thought that you had the official level of the [Catholic] Church that was very effete and dignified, and people off in [general society] making jokes – when you do more investigation you find that it's the important people making the jokes as well."

 

Bayless has found that many of the oldest written jokes were scribbled in the margins of ornate early Latin Bibles. Even in a culture where only academic and religious elites could read and write, early Church scholars were busy entertaining each other with smutty comments.

 

Jokes in the times of all-powerful medieval monarchs were a risky business. Bayless recounts a story where a joke fell foul of English king Richard I. "Two men had been ridiculing the king at a drunken feast – the king was furious and summoned the men. Clearly disaster was about to befall the men, but then one of them answered: 'We might have said those things, but that was nothing to what we were going to say if the wine hadn't run out!'"

 

It was a close shave for the men, as "if they hadn't come up with such a witty reply, their fate would have been dire indeed", says Bayless.

 

There is less risk of being dispatched by an angry monarch these days, but reading the room is still an important skill for a comedian. McGraw says that effective jokes are a "benign violation" always walking a delicate balancing act between too soft and too extreme. The purpose of a benign violation is to elicit laughter and disgust at the same time – which perhaps explains why crude subject matter features so commonly.

 

"It explains the two ways a joke can fail," adds McGraw. "That is that it can be too benign and too boring, like a child's knock-knock joke. Or it can be too much of a violation. It highlights how delicate joke telling is because it's easier to fail than it is to succeed." So, telling jokes is serious business, and it requires a strong capacity for understanding the audience.

 

In fact, McGraw suggests that raw intelligence is the most effective indicator for whether someone is funny (of course a comedy writer would say that – Ed.). Among our ancestors, humour indicated that someone had a strong command of their surroundings. These jokes were made in the context of low life expectancy and a hostile world. But these fundamentals still hold in the modern day in our approach to relationships, and McGraw says "it's important to recognise how enjoyable it is to spend time with someone who is funny, they have the propensity to help you better cope with the difficulties of the world".

 

There are two ways a joke can fail: it can be too bland or too offensive. A comedian must aim for a joke that is a "benign violation" (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)

 

For example, jokes help us to subvert emotional states. When dealing with difficult subject matters, a funny punchline can distract us from the negative emotions.

 

And what about the contemporary panic about "cancel culture" in comedy? For McGraw, this is not such a unique moment in history.

 

"This phenomenon has been happening ever since there has been stand-up comedy," he says. As the two jesters from Richard I's court demonstrate, comedy has always been risky, and the power has always ultimately rested with the audience.

 

"What is wrong and what is OK is determined not by the teller, but by the audience member, by the receiver, and by their mood, the context they're in, the number of drinks they've had, their culture, their identity," continues McGraw.

 

If the power rests with the audience, the comedian has a tricky task in pleasing them. Stand-up comedian Catherine Bohart knows this pressure well. "The psychology of an audience is really interesting because [if] you seem fine, they are willing to trust you," she says.

"But if you are being vulnerable, they can sniff out that anxiety and vulnerability."

 

It is an unusual arrangement to be commanding so much attention for such a long time, and audiences demand value. Bohart is currently touring across the UK and Ireland, and she agrees with McGraw that, while there may be common themes across thousands of years of comedy, there is no single bit of stand-up material that works 100% of the time. Stand-up comedy is risky precisely because the comedian faces a fresh set of audience members to win over each time.

 

They power in comedy rests with the audience – they decide what is funny and what is offensive (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)

 

Bohart says that audience laughter is complicated. "The moment of shock can stifle laughter. Anything we're not supposed to laugh at: death, mental health, brutal self-deprecation. People can shy away from laughing out loud."

 

Stand-up comedy in recent years has evolved at speed. Kylie Brakeman was one of the early adopters of a new kind of observational comedy that emerged at the start of the pandemic. Her to-camera Twitter videos have attracted millions of views and kicked off an era in which the day's events can be parodied within minutes.

 

"It's insane that we're living in a world where daily TV is too slow to keep up," says Brakeman. Online comedians are increasingly at the bleeding edge of satire. "If something happened in the news you could jump on it right away. It's an advantage that online comedians have. Even if you're writing for a late night show, the joke has already been made 17 times on Twitter before the show airs at night."

 

This type of modern comedy, which dates in minutes, is a far cry from a joke scribbled in the margins of a Latin text, which needed to remain funny for the next scholar at whichever time they stumbled across it.

 

With this accelerated production process comes a different set of risks. But with an audience of millions kept behind a screen, "bombing" online feels less catastrophic. Brakeman says, "If people like it, then they like it. And if they don't, they're really not thinking about it that much. I think it's much less of a severe thing than bombing on stage, because it's just a case of getting no likes on something."

 

Who knows what audiences thousands of years in the future would think if they unearthed videos of contemporary comedians. Maybe they will look at the cutting-edge comedy of today and see it much like the Mesopotamian fart joke: lacking in some of the finer cultural details, but with fundamentals that stand the test of time.

 

*Matt Kenyon is a journalist and comedy writer for 'The Skewer' on BBC Radio 4.

 

Source 

 

Edited March 24, 2022 by aum

[aum]

What do you call a dog that won’t come when you call it, refuses to sleep in it’s bed, and seldom wants to play?

A cat.

 

[aum]

A husband and wife were grocery shopping when the husband picked up a case of Budweiser and placed it in the cart.

 

“What do you think you’re doing?” asked the wife.

 

“It’s on sale. Only $10 for a case,” he replies.

 

“We can’t afford it. Put it back,” demands the wife.

 

They continue shopping and a few minutes later the wife puts a $20 jar of face cream into the cart.

 

“What do you think you’re doing?” asks the husband.

 

“It’s my face cream. It makes me look beautiful,” replies the wife.

 

“So does the Budweiser and it’s half the price,” retorts the husband.

 

[aum]

A small tourist hotel was all abuzz about an afternoon wedding where the groom was 95 and the bride was 23.

 

The groom looked pretty feeble and the feeling was that the wedding night might kill him because his bride was a healthy, vivacious young woman.

 

But lo and behold, the next morning, the bride came down the main staircase slowly, step by step, hanging onto the bannister for dear life.

 

She finally managed to get to the counter of the little shop in the hotel.

 

The clerk looked really concerned, “Whatever happened to you, honey? You look like you’ve been wrestling an alligator!

 

The bride groaned, hung on to the counter and managed to speak,

 

“Oh my God! He told me he’d been saving up for 75 years and I thought he meant his money!”

 

[Dce3480]

Edited April 9, 2022 by Dce3480

[ducky88]

The Lone Ranger was ambushed and captured by an enemy Indian War Party.
"So, you are the great Lone Ranger"... "In honor of the Harvest Festival, YOU will be executed in three days."
"Before I kill you, I grant you three requests"
"What is your FIRST request?'
The Lone Ranger responds, "I'd like to speak to my horse."
The Chief nods and Silver is brought before the Lone Ranger who whispers in Silver's ear, and the horse gallops away.
Later that evening, Silver returns with a beautiful blonde woman on his back.
As the Indian Chief watches, the blonde enters the Lone Ranger's tent and spends the night.
The next morning the Indian Chief admits he's impressed.
"You have a very fine and loyal horse", "But I will still kill you in two days."
"What is your SECOND request?"
The Lone Ranger again asks to speak to his horse.
Silver is brought to him, and he again whispers in the horse's ear.
As before, Silver takes off and disappears over the horizon.
Later that evening, to the Chief's surprise, Silver again returns,
This time with a voluptuous brunette, more attractive than the blonde.
She enters the Lone Rangers tent and spends the night.
The following morning the Indian Chief is again impressed.
"You are indeed a man of many talents,"
"But I will still kill you tomorrow."
"What is your LAST request?"
The Lone Ranger responds, "I'd like to speak to my horse...alone."
The Chief is curious, but he agrees, and Silver is brought to the Lone Ranger's tent.
Once they're alone, the Lone Ranger grabs Silver by both ears, looks him square in the eye and says,
"Listen Very Carefully!!!
FOR...THE...LAST...TIME...
"BRING POSSE, NOT PUSSY!"

[Karlston]

[aum]

The economy is terrible. At the beginning of the year, the politicians promised things would improve by the last quarter.

 

Well, I'm down to my last quarter and they haven't improved!