Help me out, Dopers! There’s got to be somebody who knows what this joke involves. My brothers and I have long conjectured as to what it might contain, but my father even now, at the age of nearly 67, will not let slip one word.
As long as I can remember, I have heard mention of a dirty joke involving an Arab with a large left nostril. My dad would never, ever tell us any details, except that it existed. Even tonight, as we were celebrating my 28th birthday, my father would not divulge any details, except that this joke is “a bit raw”.
As the story goes, my parents met during their freshman year of college, my dad going to Haverford and my mother to Bryn Mawr. Evidently shortly after they started dating, my dad spent a whole evening regaling my mother with all sorts of risque and off-color jokes. My mom had evidently never heard anything like them before, and was rather impressed. The most shocking and terrible of these jokes was “the one about the Arab with the large left nostril”.
Just in case it might aid in tracking down what types of dirty jokes my father might have been privy to, here’s some biographical information. My father grew up on the south side of Chicago, in Hyde Park. My grandfather was a Poli Sci professor, and both my grandparents were Quakers. My father went to a co-ed Quaker boarding school in Iowa. If my father picked up this legendary naughty joke prior to starting college, it likely would have been through one of those avenues.
One dirty joke he did tell my mother on that fateful eve, that apparently was less offensive, goes as follows. Note that Dave Barry, also a Haverford alum (although half a decade later than my father), makes mention of the punch line of this joke in one of his books, although he says he learned it at camp:
A man and a woman are in the throes of passion, when suddenly the woman’s husband comes home. The interloper is naked, and needs some place to hide, and the only place he can find is a high chandelier in the main hallway of the house. He climbs up into this chandelier, but evidently has a tremendously elastic scrotum, which hangs down rather low. As the husband enters the foyer, he tugs on what he assumes is the bell-pull, to summon his valet. Nothing happens, so he gives it another tug. After a third (and still yet stronger) tug, the man in the chandelier exclaims, “DING DONG, Dammit!”
