That’s it, really. I think this has been discussed here before in the larger context of punchlines in general, but I can never remember the joke. Or is it apocryphal?
Kid: “Teacher, Billy fell off his bike and hurt his ass!”
Teacher: “Rectum!”
Kid: “Rectum? Damn near killed 'em!”
The way I heard it:
Billy came to school crying. The teacher asked, ‘What’s wrong, Billy?’ Billy replies, ‘My dog was following me to school, and an old Model T came up the street and hit him and the crank went right up his ass!’ The teacher said, ‘You mean “rectum”.’
'Wrecked 'im, hell! It killed ‘im!’
I investigated that once, and found someone posting on a website (I forget which one) that an early reference was in an Irish play called Richard’s Cork Leg (by Brendan Behan), first conceived around 1960, and reconstructed by Alan Simpson, the editor of Behan’s Complete Plays, as a full-fledged play in 1972.
I found this on Google Books:
A century of Irish drama: widening the stage By Stephen Watt, Eileen M. Morgan, Shakir M. Mustafa, p.141
ISBN 0-253-33812-3 or 0-253-21419-X
In this section of the book the authors are discussing the play Richard Cork’s Leg, and include the following excerpt:
Doesn’t help the joke, but it bears repeating that the rectum and the arse hole are indeed different things.
Party-pooper.
The version I heard was rather nastier. It involved the little boy telling a story about putting fireworks up cats’ arses:
“Rectum? Blew 'em to pieces miss!”
“Rectum? Blew 'em clean off!”
“Want your nuts crushed?”
In a related issue, the name of the planet** Uranus **is about to be changed to stop all the stupid jokes. The new name will be …
And in the name of Political Correctness, we’ll soon have Nativeamericanapolis, Nativeamericana.
Urrectum
A Boston Taxi driver sees man on the side of the road writhing in pain. He stops to help the man who can just get out the words “Take me to the hospital”. The driver says “Peter Bent?” and the man replies “Bent?, she damn near bit it off”.
The “so-and-so got shot in the ass” version is the one Richard Pryor told, and thus the one I am most familiar with.
We talked about this in another thread not too long ago. The “Little Johnny” jokes.
Here’s how my mother told it in 1957:
Little Johnny comes running up to his mother and says “A car ran over the dog’s ass.”
Mother says “Now Johnny, it’s rectum.”
Johnny says “Rectum, hell. It killed him.”
.
I think I saw a German website devoted to party poopers.
Of course; it’s all coming back to me now, so thank you all for the responses.
Special recognition to Arnold for that very nice literary find.
There’s an old journalistic urban legend that a major newspaper (often said to be the Boston Globe) had a macro for all of its reporters’ word processing that would automatically replace the word “black” with “African American,” which led to the unfortunate headline, “Governor says next budget will be back in African American.”
In that vein, there was the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website, which automatically changes “gay” in wire stories to “homosexual”. Which didn’t bode well when they published an AP story about sprinter Tyson Gay qualifying for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.