Jokes Every Man Should Know Read online

  JOKES

  Every Man Should Know

  JOKES

  Every Man Should Know

  Edited by Don Steinberg

  Copyright © 2008 by Don Steinberg

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number: 2007932002

  eISBN: 978-1-59474-469-3

  Designed by Karen Onorato

  Distributed in North America by Chronicle Books

  680 Second Street

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  Quirk Books

  215 Church Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19106

  www.irreference.com

  www.quirkbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  The French Toast Joke

  The Snail

  An Unusual Hospital

  The Hunting Accident

  The Campers and the Bear

  Airline Pilot’s Gaffe

  Vow of Silence

  Saul Goes to Vegas

  Into the Alligator’s Mouth

  Rejected Gators

  HOW TO TELL A JOKE

  Cruise Ship Magician

  The Ugga Bugga Joke

  Lawyer’s Fee

  Grandmother on the Beach

  First Day in Hell

  Lethal Injection or Electric Chair

  An Inconvenient Mugging

  A Husband Comes Home Early

  Emil Cohen in the Confessional

  Run Down by a Car

  Rescue from the Flood

  Two New York Birds

  Golfing with Jesus and St. Peter

  Mother Teresa in Heaven

  A Genie’s Dilemma

  Road Rage

  He’s a Chicken

  Three Words

  Enjoying the Afterlife

  Joking by Numbers

  Indiscreet Receptionist

  Psychology

  Business Ethics

  Mortuary Mix-Up

  Two Campers and a Rattlesnake

  The Wife’s Bad News

  TEN JOKES FOR ROASTS AND TOASTS

  Wishing for Beer

  At the Stanley Cup Finals

  A Pause on the Golf Course

  Do I Know You?

  Foul-Mouthed Parrot

  Bet with the Bartender

  Going to Kill Hitler

  A Dog at the Movies

  WHERE DO JOKES COME FROM?

  Money in the Casket

  A Golf Confession

  Dying in the Desert

  Angry Stockbroker

  Tragic Golf Twosome

  A Lawyer’s Charity

  S-Shaped Cake

  THIS JOKE BELONGS TO EMO PHILIPS

  Six Months

  Squeeze Five Lemons

  The Very Amazing Pig

  Under the Bed

  Piano Player Wanted

  EIGHT JOKES JUST FOR KIDS

  Drowned in the Beer Vat

  Cheese Sandwiches

  Drinking for Three

  The Taxi Line

  The Texan in the Irish Pub

  A Lawyer in Heaven

  Dear God Letter

  A Gorilla Walks into a Bar

  Discount Parrot

  Religious Conversion

  The Old Man and His Grandfather

  Old Guys

  SIX LIGHTBULB JOKES

  Easy for You to Say

  Rainy Day

  HMO Manager in Heaven

  A Man, a Woman, and a Car Crash

  Talking Dog

  Another Talking Dog

  College Physics

  The Cat’s Dead

  Three Contractors at the White House

  First Day in Prison

  Swiss Guy Looking for Directions

  Engaged Couple Goes to Heaven

  That’s Nice

  The King of Sweden

  The Salesman, the Farmer, and the Sheep

  The Refrigerator

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Introduction

  Look, the reality is, you can get through life just fine without knowing the French Toast Joke, or Saul Goes to Vegas. I’m not going to kid you about this.

  It seems as if every week there’s some new bestseller telling you what you should be doing to qualify as a full-fledged human being and extract every possible morsel of satisfaction out of existence before it’s too late. Fifty Places to Golf Before You Die ? Who needs that kind of pressure?

  So I’m not going to pretend that if you don’t know the Ugga Bugga Joke, or the one about the guy in a bar who puts his privates into an alligator’s mouth, you have failed to fulfill your destiny as a man. I’m not calling this book Jokes Every Man Should Know Before He Dies (in a tragic car crash with two friends. They go to heaven and are asked, “When people see you in your casket at your funeral, what would you like to hear them say?” The first guy says, “I would like to hear them say that I was a great doctor and a great family man.” The second guy says, “I would like to hear that I was a wonderful husband and teacher who made a difference.” The last guy replies, “I would like to hear them say, ‘Look, he’s moving!’”).

  On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with having a stash of great jokes ready to go. The right joke in the right social situation can be pure gold. It’s akin to suavely producing a lighter at the very moment a beautiful woman puts a fresh cigarette to her lips, flicking the flame alight, and holding it steady three inches from her warm breath while she puffs. Like that ever happens. Holy shit, that would be ten times better than telling the joke about the gorilla who goes into a bar and orders a Cosmopolitan for $12.50. But sometimes, you know, the joke is all you’ve got.

  The problem is that there are too many jokes, and an astronomical number of bad ones. The vast majority of them are told badly, in the wrong situations, by too many people. Jokes told by amateurs can be cringe-inducing. There’s so much room for awkwardness and discomfort, so many ways a guy walking into a bar can be a signal for everyone to curl up and die. Will it be racist? Will it misread the audience, delivering ill-considered and disgusting references to defecation in a crowd really better suited to urination? Will it ramble on and on until finally delivering a mediocre payoff that might have been acceptable if it came four minutes earlier?

  Most joke books compile hundreds, even thousands of jokes. They don’t help the problem. I think they hurt. It’s like they’ve put a tremendous pile of steaming, putrid crud in your living room, with a few gold nuggets mixed in, and said, “Well, here you go.” All of a sudden, you’re like the hopeful little kid who just wants a pony for Christmas. When he rushes downstairs on Christmas morning, there’s a gigantic mound of manure. His eyes light up, and he starts digging into the pile of crap, saying “I just know there’s a pony in here somewhere.”

  We’re just going to give you the pony. That is what this slim volume is all about.

  Since we’re very selective, it’s exciting what we get to leave out. No horrific puns, for starters. If you’re looking forward to a little something about the car mechanic who tells the penguin, “looks like you blew a seal,” I’m sorry, you’ll need to find another book. The classic and contrived tale of the perverted religious man named Pastor Fuzz? Let’s pretend it doesn’t exist.

  We all grew up hearing the awful puns so horrific they make your right eye start throbbing, with setups that disrespect the art form of the joke by using crappily contrived names. The lady who had two dogs, bizarrely named Freeshow and Seymour; when she ran outside naked to find them, guess what she yelled? I have an acquaintance who recently took a whole room of people on a journey
of at least five minutes that ended in the line: “Only Hugh can prevent florist Friars.” Please, spare us. Life is too short.

  These kinds of jokes, I believe, are told as a sort of revenge against society. They’re a form of passive aggression, intended to lash out and annoy. Tremendously bad jokes are more fun to tell than to hear, like a beginner practicing on the drums. Listen to me! People pass on the terrible jokes after hearing them, making others share the pain and perhaps relieving a bit of their own sorrow. It’s a cycle of abuse.

  So, yeah, we’ll leave those jokes out. And I’m not a fan of toilet humor, so we’ll leave that aside too. There are differing schools on this, but to me, someone sitting down and going to the bathroom isn’t a good scene to set when you’re going for laughs. Now, standing up—that’s a different story entirely. Peeing someplace crazy can be hilarious.

  A lot of so-called jokes are really just a cover for saying something mean-spirited, derogatory, racist, or sexist. We don’t need that trash in this little joke pile. Look, funny is funny, we’re all adults, and in this wide world people sometimes do have cultural differences. It’s okay to bring up the subject. But let a joke be a joke.

  Bad language is another story. I’ve never had a problem with well-played obscenity. Somebody once called profanity the effort of a feeble mind to express itself forcefully. The comedian Alan King once said that if you need to say “fuck” at the end of a joke, you don’t have a joke. Screw them all. A bad word is just a word, used for emphasis, used because it sounds funny. That’s what words are for. And sex acts, well, we’ve got ’em in here, too. You can’t have a good dirty joke without the good dirty. The feeling here, though, is that a true gentleman’s sex joke is one that can be told in gender-mixed company.

  There are people who will tell you that telling these kinds of jokes is a dying art. In fact, in 2005, the New York Times ran a mock obituary for the classic joke (headlined “Seriously, The Joke Is Dead”), reporting that jokes had been “drowned out by the din of ironic one-liners, snark, and detached bon mots.” Which makes you want to revive old jokes immediately. Sure, humor consumption has changed. Instant reactions to political blunders and celebrity problems flow over e-mail, blogs, and cable comedy shows. There’s probably more good comedy being made now than ever, though sometimes it seems like everything is a parody of something else. Who has time for the convoluted, made-up story about the husband who inexplicably keeps a box of empty beer bottles under the bed?

  Still, how many late-night monologues or fake news-show quips can you remember right now?

  There’s something undeniably retro about these classic jokes. They describe a throwback world of cheating 1950s-era husbands and wives, a time when alcohol abuse was still amusing and strangers made obscene bets in bars, when dogs spoke perfect English, golf was more important than friends, and good news always came with bad news. The joke in this book that involves sending e-mail? In its original version, the husband sent a telegram. But the classics endure. Sinatra and Skynyrd. Citizen Kane and West Side Story. The one about the airline stewardess in the awkward situation and the one where Jesus and St. Peter go golfing.

  So here they come, one hundred—plus Grade-A, tellable jokes. Jokes every man should know. Now get out there and tell the one about the guy who bets a bartender that he can pee into a shot glass without spilling a drop. Your life may depend on it.

  THE

  JOKES

  On a Saturday morning, three boys come down to the kitchen and sit around the breakfast table.

  Their mother asks the oldest boy what he’d like to eat.

  “I’ll have some fuckin’ French toast,” he says. The mother is outraged at his crude language. She hits him and sends him upstairs.

  When she calms down, she asks the middle child what he wants. “Well, I guess that leaves more fuckin’ French toast for me,” he says. The mom is livid. She smacks him and sends him away.

  Finally, she looks at the youngest son and asks him what he wants for breakfast.

  “I don’t know,” he says meekly, “but I definitely don’t want the fuckin’ French toast!”

  Every year, Joe takes a week during the summer to relax at his friend’s cabin in the Maine woods. One night after he’s just arrived, he’s sitting in the cabin when he hears a knock at the door. He opens the door and doesn’t see anything—until he looks down. On the wooden porch he sees a small snail. Annoyed, he picks up the snail and throws it as far as he can.

  Three years later, Joe is back in the cabin for another summer retreat. There’s a knock on the door. He opens it and sees nothing, then remembers. He looks down—and there’s the same snail!

  The snail says: “What the hell was that all about?”

  There’s an unusual hospital where one of the treatments involves the female nurses taking the male patients home and sleeping with them.

  For most of the patients, the treatment is very effective. But one day, into the hospital comes an odd patient who has the word “Shorty” tattooed on his penis. None of the nurses want anything to do with him.

  Days go by and the poor man’s health doesn’t improve. So finally, this one nurse feels sorry for him and brings him home.

  When she comes in the next morning, she is smiling and happy. The other nurses ask, “Why are you so happy? Weren’t you with the guy who has ‘Shorty’ tattooed on his penis?”

  “Yes,” she says, “but when he became aroused, it said ‘Shorty’s Restaurant and Pizzeria.’”

  (pause)

  “. . . established 1922.”

  (pause)

  “. . . orders to take out.”

  (pause)

  “. . . all baking done on premises.”

  (pause)

  “. . . ask about our party platters.”

  Joke Delivery Alert!

  The key to telling this joke is making listeners believe that it’s over after the first punchline, the remark about the pizzeria. Pause for a couple of seconds after that, to allow for whatever laugh that comes. But you don’t want to put a distinct period to end the sentence yet. Think of it as a comma. If it helps, become that nurse in your mind, recalling with terror and excitement the unfurling of the tattoo, one length of text at a time.

  Two hunters are in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing. His eyes are glazed.

  The other guy takes out his cell phone and frantically calls 911. He gasps: “My friend is dead! What can I do?”

  The operator says: “Calm down, I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.”

  There is a silence, then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: “OK, now what?”

  Global Opinion Alert!

  This joke was rated the “funniest joke in the world” in a survey conducted by British scientists in 2001. At the LaughLab Web site, people from all over the world rated more than forty thousand jokes. One researcher traced this joke’s origin to comedian Spike Milligan. Incidentally, the survey’s second place joke wasn’t funny enough to make it into this book.

  Two campers are walking through the woods when a huge brown bear appears in the clearing about fifty feet away. The bear sees the campers and begins heading toward them.

  The first guy drops his backpack, digs out a pair of sneakers, and frantically begins to put them on.

  The second guy says, “What are you doing? Sneakers won’t help you outrun that bear.”

  “I don’t need to outrun the bear,” the first guy says. “I just need to outrun you.”

  On a passenger flight, the pilot comes over the public address system as usual to greet the passengers. He tells them their altitude, the expected arrival time, and a bit about the weather. He advises them to relax and have a good flight.

  Then, forgetting to turn off the microphone, he says to his copilot, “What would relax me right now is a cup of coffee and a blowjob.”

  All of the passengers hear it.

  As a stewardess immediately begins to run t
oward the cockpit to tell the pilot of his slip-up, one of the passengers stops her and says, “Don’t forget the coffee!”

  A guy joins a monastery and takes a vow of silence. He’s only allowed to say two words every seven years.

  After the first seven years, the elders bring him in and ask for his two words.

  “Cold floors,” he says. They nod and send him away.

  Seven more years pass. They bring him back in and ask for his two words. He clears his throat.

  “Bad food,” he says. They nod and send him away.

  Seven more years pass. They bring him in for his two words.

  “I quit,” he says.

  “That’s not surprising,” the elders say. “You’ve done nothing but complain since you got here.”

  Saul is working in his store when he hears a booming voice from above. It says: “Saul, sell your business.”

  He ignores it. The voice goes on for days: “Saul, sell your business for $3 million.”

  After weeks of this, he finally relents and sells his store.

  The voice says, “Saul, go to Las Vegas.” He asks why. It says: “Saul, take the $3 million to Las Vegas.” He obeys and goes to a casino.

  The booming voice says, “Saul, go to the blackjack table and put it all down on one hand.” Saul hesitates, but knows he must. He’s dealt an eighteen. The dealer has a six showing.

  “Saul, take a card.”

  “What? The dealer has a six—”

  “Take a card!” the voice booms. Saul tells the dealer to hit him. Saul gets an ace. Nineteen. He breathes easy.

  “Saul, take another card.”

  “What?”

  “TAKE ANOTHER CARD!”

  Saul asks for another card. It’s another ace. He has twenty.

  “Saul, take another card,” the voice commands.

  “But I have twenty!” Saul shouts.

  “TAKE ANOTHER CARD!!” booms the voice.

  “Hit me,” Saul says. He gets another ace. Twenty-one.

  The booming voice: “Un-fucking-believable!”

  Alternative Ending Alert!

  In a cleaner version of this joke, Saul busts on the last card—and God says, “Damn!” It’s about 84 percent as funny.