I recognize and hit straight lines so rarely that you’d think I could remember them better, but they’re all mostly foggy. There is this recent one I was pleased with, though.
Probably the single post on the Dope that I am most proud of. Unfortunately, I can’t find it. It was a long time ago. The setup was just too perfect for the Python reference.
There was a thread about what to call the decade with the single digit years. Several people were championing different things, when zut piped up that we should call them the Naughts, because it would be fun to call the decade the Naughty Naughts.
I replied, “Naughty zut, bad zut! First, the spanking, then the oral sex…”
Where I worked this was a running joke in the men’s room:
Guy 1: That’s cold!
Guy 2: Deep too
G1: And there’s a burr in the pipe
G2: You mean the one in the trap or the one in the basement?
G1: Neither. The one out by the main line in the street
G2: Don’t worry. It smooths at the sewage plant.
One time after a too long meeting we took this joke all the way to the Mississippi Delta.
It was our annual family get-together
in Georgia and one of my brothers, a union blockmason in Florida, was telling a story about how a guy he knew happened to be on the scene when the Sunshine Skyway Bridge between St. Petersburg and Sarasota collapsed after being hit by an empty freighter during a storm. (This was back in 1980, 35 people were killed, cars and a bus falling 150 feet into the water. http://tinyurl.com/2uuwl4 has details and photos.) The guy was out fishing in the bay that morning, shot a lot of photos of cars going off the bridge, etc., and was making money selling them.
After he told this story, I started telling about how a local whorehouse, known to college boys all over the South in the Fifties and Sixties, had been torn down recently. A friend of a friend had bought the bricks, put plaques on them telling where they came from (“Peggy’s”), and was making money selling them. My brother kept interrupting me from the very beginning of my story, trying to make his own jokes about everything I said. It was annoying.
Then he gave me my opening for payback, saying, “So you have a friend who goes to a whorehouse to get bricks?”
I shot back, “Yes, he’s a bricklayer.”
The whole family began to whoop with laughter and say “She got you. She got you good. You are done. Done, done, done.” For the rest of the week, if he tried to crack a joke, somebody would say “bricklayers.”
Most people find this pretty funny without knowing the back story but it is better if you know, as I did and as the rest of my family did, that the standard joke pulled on new masons/ bricklayers is to hold up a brick with holes in it and ask him if he knows what the holes are for. I think you can guess the punchline yourself, and now you can really imagine how surprised I was when my brother gave me that opening.
When I worked at a Domino’s, I had a walk-in customer ask if we sold pizza by the slice. I indicated the pizza maker tossing a pizza crust high in the air and remarked, “We can’t. It’s too hard to toss them to make little triangles.”
A bunch of us were drinking in a bar and, knowing the owners, it was around 4am and way past closing time. One girl, fairly drunk, lamented into her drink, “Ugh… I have an exam at 8am.” Someone asked her, “In what?”, to which I immediately replied, “Time Management 101”.
This is a pun, not a straight line, but I’m telling it anyway because it was perfect. I was sitting with my girlfriend at the greasy spoon ordering breakfast. She ordered eggs Benedict and I ordered a denver omelette. When they brought out our food, I commented on how they brought out her food on a ceramic plate, and not a chrome plate. She looked confused and said “Why would they bring it out on a chrome plate?” “Because,” I said in a completely deadpan voice, “There’s no plate like chrome for the hollandaise”.
She said “I’m not talking to you any more.” And it was quiet for 20 minutes.
Totally worth it.
At choir rehearsal, the choir director was trying to remember what other work a particular phrase in the piece we were working on sounded like. After humming the phrase for a bit he finally pegged it as a line from the musical Oliver!:
Him: *"…As long as he needs me… *Nancy, is it?"
Me, from the back row: “It’s just the way you sing it.”
Choir erupts into hilarity.
A recent, less exciting example: watching the horribly-scripted CSI trilogy, there is a scene in which a sobbing mother is begging Horatio Cain to find her missing daughter:
Overacting woman: “Please find her! She’s just a small-town girl!”
Me, in my best Horatio imitation: “Frank, check out the midnight train going anywhere.”
The spouse was amused.
A woman friend was complaining how there are never enough women’s toliets. The men go in whip it out and they are done. She said she didn’t think she would like those dangly parts between her legs. I said, “You do sometimes”
The other day I was walking down the street and saw a cop backing a horse up an alley with cars parked on either side. He then turned the horse sideways and walked it sideways up the alley and then trotted it forward a bit. I turned to a group of women standing there and said, “He sure seems to be having trouble parallel parking that horse!”
Damn, that’s pretty tight.
When I lived in Chicago, a good female friend lived in the flat below me, and we often went to the laundry mat together on Saturdays. One Friday night she had a bunch of our friends over for dinner. At some point late in the evening while we were all a bit buzzed, for some reason she asked me “Are you gonna do a white load tomorrow?”
Standing up and reaching for my fly, I said, “You know, why wait til tomorrow baby? Everybody LEAVE NOW!”
The alcohol may have helped, but I actually had people rolling on the floor and one woman piddled her pants with that one. Never before and never again have I killed like that.
Choir practice one Monday night, and we were practicing on a new song. It wasn’t classical, and it wasn’t pop, so I wasn’t sure how our director wanted us to pronounce certain words.
“Do you want us to say |kont| or |kehyent|?” I asked, looking for clarification on “can’t”.
“Kahnt,” he answered.
“Kont?”
“Kahnt.”
It took a couple more tries for me to get the right nuance of pronunciation. Then, I waited a beat, and both me and a soprano on the other side of the choir said, at the exact same time:
“An’ I keent stan’ 'im!”
Had all but the college students laughing at that one. (During break, the soprano and I did the scene for them.)
A few months ago, a female friend and I were talking and the subject of “loose women” came up. My friend asked, “Why is it people talk about ‘loose women,’ but never ‘loose men’?”
Me: “It would be redundant.”
I can never resist when in a resturant and I order eggs, I get asked how I like them. I tell them cooked.
You just gave me a great idea. Three of them, actually.
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Like them?! I LOVE them!!
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How should I know? I haven’t tasted them yet.
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LIKE them?! LIKE them?! I HATE them! I HATE them! Always staring up at me from the plate. Makes me want to shake pepper and Tabasco all over them and say, “How does that feel? Burns doesn’t it!” And then I take my fork and my knife and just SHRED them. And then I DEVOUR them…but only if they’re over easy.
Oslo Ostragoth, I believe phouka is referring to this scene from “Singing in the Rain”.