This collection has been emailed
to me by friends over the years.
Chances are you've seen some of these before. Out of the thousands
I've saved, only a few make it here. These are my picks for "the
best of the best".
Most but not all of this collection
are jokes. Some are erudite, some are cute, some are so stupid they
are, well, funny. We have a few narratives that claim to be true stories,
and a few stories that claim to be true narratives.
Cuss words are allowed, but
we like them better when they're essential to the joke ... as you'll
see!
There are a few items here that
are not funny, but are amazingly bizarre.
Most of all, we want to thank
some wonderful friends of ours, who had the impeccably good taste
to not only find and send us these jokes, but to have developed a
sense of what we liked.
Humor is a funny subject. Beyond
a narrow band of jokes so universally appealing that almost everybody
likes them, there's a vast topical sea of specialty jokes which appeal
to certain mindsets, and offend others.
For example, some of the most
outrageously funny jokes I ever heard (and I remember almost all of
this category) are so crass they could never, ever be told in polite
company -- unless you also had an absolutely perfect sense of timing.
On the other hand, I find most
of the toilet jokes of the "1,000 Dirty Party Jokes" genre so lame
that they make the label "low-life" sound like effusive praise. And
yet some of my best friends love them.
That's why joke collections
often go flat so quickly. Beyond the "core rules", the chances are
that the "mindset" to which they appeal is not present, so to speak,
at the party.
An example of this receptive-audience
problem is the much-circulated dirty joke about the ranch-hands or
sheep herders pushing and shoving each other to be the first off the
bus at their new assignments.
Depending on which version you
have heard, the locale is variously a sheep ranch or a pig farm. There
is always a newcomer who asks, "What's the big hurry?"
The rejoinder is always, "You
wouldn't want to get an ugly one, would you?"
This is a classic "dirty joke"
theme.
For twenty years I always thought
it to be a gross exaggeration on the "lonely cowboy" theme, stupid,
and purposelessly coarse. It's all of that.
Then, on a hunting trip in the
mountains, our party encountered an individual who actually boasted
about a liaison with a pig. I immediately told that stale old joke.
It was the laugh of the camp for several years afterward.
Timing is everything in
this business.
The difference? The joke suddenly
connected with something real. We had (regrettably) met an individual
who was a living caricature of the joke.
"That's nothin', mister. You
should have seen last week's act. They had a feller in here with a
chicken."
We won't go there, but setup
and timing are everything. A good joke doesn't have to be "dirty"
to get a laugh; it can be witty, topical, occupational or merely thematic.
A good joke has to have the elements of surprise and recognition,
but now we're getting too serious, so I'll stop here.
Here, you'll find parrot jokes,
rabbi and priest jokes, historical and biblical jokes, kid jokes,
office jokes, eccentric jokes, humorous anecdotes, and some just plain,
really-stupid jokes. I don't think you'll find any genuine "dirty"
jokes.
No matter. All jokes poke fun
at the human condition.
The more seriously we start
to take the small stuff, the funnier it gets when we identify the
absurdity of posturing. Most joke humor derives its instantaneous
punch from identifying the small, the mean, the false, the vain and
the stupid.
I honestly believe that those
who never see the humor in jokes have the most to hide. They are almost
as dangerous as those who laugh at everything. Go figure.
- New Humor is flagged in the scrolling index (left-hand pane) by
the red letters - NEW! - to
the right of the entry.
We hope you enjoy this collection.
Come back and browse again, because we'll be adding new material
as time allows!
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