Of course you know the situation, you tell some utterly witty and insightful bon-mot at the recent literary salon only to be met with the host responding “my mother was a crippled Polish Jew steel worker!” then he leaving with a harumf, leaving the guests aghast, and leaving you stark scarlet!
While my recent faux pas was not as horrid as that social slip, it was still quite frightful.
As I have mentioned before, I work as a bartender at a big and fancy hotel. Well, sometimes I am asked to help as a server when there is a large party or several people call in sick. Recently there was an exceptionally large and expensive wedding party that I was asked to help serve for. When I say expensive I really mean expensive, as in well over $100,000 dollars, probably twice that. The floral arrangements alone cost well more than I have earned in my short working life. Everyone serving was given a big speech by the general manager (a rare event in itself) of how important this was along with a long list of special instructions of how we were to handle ourselves and the party.
I was, I am not ashamed to say, terrified. I am not a server, I barely know how to be a server, and I have failed to remember a damnable thing from my previous outings as a server. So I asked my partner ( we always have a partner) if I could be the runner (the guy that goes to the back room to bring food and take away dirty dishes). ‘Running’ is a job that while having a greater workload, does not require as much skill as directly serving the guests. He refused (I don’t know why) and I said that if anything goes wrong that I would stab him in the face. Now I know that that looks weird, but I said it in a deadpan style that was funny and he laughed at. Unfortunately a passing manager heard it and, already being nervous about tonight’s proceedings, took me outside of the building and asked me if anything was wrong and said that I did a poor job of telling jokes. I was terribly embarrassed and I know that this is something that will remain in the back of the manager’s mind forever.
Well, it wasn’t as dire as what you described, but back in 1999, I was in the breakroom at my job with some co-workers and the owner.
C-W: “Anyone seen Lost In Space?”
Me: “I saw it…I think I liked it better last year. When it was called Event Horizon.”
“…”
Owner: “No, Event Horizon was a totally different film.”
Me: “Well, I meant, Lost In Space was practically the same plot as Event Horizon, and not as good a film…I was referencing David Spade, back when he was on SNL. He was doing his Hollywood Minute thing, and said he’d seen Stone Temple Pilots on tour, and that he’d liked them better the year before…when they were called Pearl Jam.”
Owner: “Well, Pearl Jam was originally called Temple of the Dog. That’s probably what he meant.”
C-W: “You’re 0 for 2, Rilch!”
Rilch: [stuffs orange slice in mouth]
FTR, I’d made the same remark re: LIS != EH to a friend, earlier in the week. He didn’t know the D. Spade reference, but he knew what I was getting at. So there.
BTW, Maud, did you pass muster as a server, at least?
I’ve told this story here before, but that’s not gonna stop me…
A close friend of ours committed suicide a few years ago. Another friend, call her “W”, offered to help out with the inevitable large quantities of food giffts that accompany any southern tragedy. We were at the home of the deceased’s releatives. Many visitors were dropping by to offer condolences and casseroles. “W” was in the kitchen organizing and putting the foodstuffs away. Someone came in with one of those large cooler-on-wheels gizmos. “W” took one look at it and said, loudly enough to be heard throughout the house, “Dang, that’s a big cooler! You could hide a body in that thing!” :o
Yup. I was at the Great British Beer Festival in August with various Dopers, and I told a Pratchett joke which involved quaffing. No one got it. I was very embarrased. :o
I don’t think it counts when the audience is a moron.
I once tried to tell the Chicken Sammich “joke” to my wife, which got a stunned reaction of, “Never tell that joke again”. It’s not a joke so much as an utterly bizzare and long non sequitur, which I’ve decided was only funny at a specific point in space time with the assistance of large quantities of caffeine and sugar.
The so-called “plots” aren’t at all similar. One has a dorky family, a wooden dude, and an overemoting bad guy in a spaceship trying to get home, and the other has Sam Neil suddenly show up in weird makeup and kill a bunch of people.
Like Miller said, the only thing they have in common is the suck.
Almost every day I pass on a joke that someone else told me, which I found to be hilarious, and which generally gets no more than a sarcastic “ha ha.”
But what’s even WORSE is when I find myself the ONLY person laughing histerically, nearly to tears, while everyone else stands around and looks at me like I’m a freak.
If it helps, we’re talking about movies. Bad movies that no one should ever see, on pain of losing his or her sanity.
Event Horizon was a bad movie that had absoulely no aquaintance with actual physics and had nothing to do with black holes at all.
“Event Horizon” was the name of of a spaceship designed to explore this solar system and it got lost and 85 (rough estimate) years later they sent out a rescue ship for some reason, and when they got there everything was weird, and they had problems, and Sam Neil turned into the Devil or something, and he killed a bunch of the other characters, and so it turned into just another stooopid slasher flick, and Exgineer got really pissed off because the effects were cool but the story was lame, and he walked out, and it just sucked.
Lost in Space was a movie that also sucked. That’s about where they meet up.
No actual physics involved in either movie. Hope this helps.
I’m constantly telling jokes that fall flat on their face, so I could fill up a whole thread with just those stories. But there was one that was particularly bad, and I deserved it because I was being a total ass.
I went up to talk to a co-worker, and she told me she was going on vacation. “Great,” I said, “Where are you going?” She held up this really cheesy watercolor painting of a beach, complete with sunset through the palm trees and seagulls, everything. “I’m going here!” she said.
I asked, “You’re going to take a vacation in the side of a van?”
She, and the other co-worker who’d been sitting there talking to her, just sat and stared for a moment. Then she said, “No, I’m going to Hawaii! And Kim [the other co-worker, who was sitting right there] painted this picture for me!”
My religious mom was telling me about when she saw ‘The Passion Of The Christ’ , and after it ended the audience just sat there during the credits. “Because everyone was just so blown away,” she said. I said “Ah, they were just waiting for the funny bloopers during the credits!”.
Dead silence.
I suppose I shouldn’t ask her if the DVD has alternate endings…
So, I’m thirteen, and I’m trying to impress a girl. This is never a good combination. She and her friend are talking about how much they loved The Brady Bunch. “Ah ha!” I think, “I will impress them with my wit by making fun of The Brady Bunch!”
:smack: number one.
So, at an appropriate pause in the conversation, I say “I haven’t been able to watch The Brady Bunch since Danny Bonaduce got arrested for beating up transexuals.” Now, the astute reader will notice several flaws with this “joke.” The most glaring is that it does not, in anyway, resemble anything remotely funny.
:smack: number two.
Even better, Danny Bonaduce wasn’t on the Brady Bunch. He was on the Partridge Family.
:smack: number three.
Naturally enough, no one laughs. This mystifies me, because clearly it’s the funniest thing since the invention of the rubber chicken. So I repeat it.
Three more times.
:smack: four through seven.
This was at a dinner party, and the entire evening went like that. And for the whole thing, I had absolutely no clue what a colossal ass I was making of myself until, quite literally, the moment I was walking out the door, when it all came crashing down on me. Of course, I immediately killed myself.