Awhile back, watching the opening ceremonies for the Olympics at a friends house, the team from Turkey marched onto the field and I was reminded of a joke I heard a long time ago: if Italy attacked Turkey from the rear, would Greece help?
I told this to my friends who surprised me by exploding with laughter. I thought it was an old joke and we weren’t even doing anything illegal.
It got me to thinking, any other jokes that have to do with geographical locations or names of states, countries, continents?
I remember something my sister told me when I was a kid that linked a lot of the states together. Something like “Who’s coming to the party? I don’t know, Alaska. And what will Delaware.” That’s all I can remember.
There are two rural towns near each other, one called Plano and the other Sandwich. My dad always joked they should build a town called Bologna in between.
In downtown L.A. Olive and Grand are parallel streets separated by a block. One dark night there was a power outage. Popeye was feeling his way up and down Olive and thought it was Grand.
From a Scholastic Press book when I was in 2nd grade, a dialog between two horrible monsters: ‘I’m Hungary!’ ‘Stop your Wales! I’ll Fiji.’ ‘I want a slice of Turkey fried in Greece.’ (Well, it was funny when I was eight.)
*When the white man came up north
dressed in his finest furs,
he told you that he owned the land
you just smiled and shrugged and you said “Ftttt… sure.”
Uranium, oil, and gold
Man, he took a ton of it.
You asked him what was left for you
and he said, “Nunavit.”
Patiently you sat and you planned.
Quietly you made your stand
through facts and email, shaking hands.
You said, “Come on whitey, give us back our land.”
You wondered what could possibly
become of it.
“We’ll keep Canada,” he said,
“and you can have Nunavit.”* --Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, “Nunavit.”
*These are all names of towns in Oklahoma. I mention this because they’re towns you probably haven’t heard of.
More Okla towns you haven’t heard of: “You have to go through Bowlegs to get to Maude.” (Also heard with Idabel instead of Maude.) Hilarious, right? And not entirely true, that is, I don’t think you have to go through Bowlegs for any reason.
All bananas grown in Queensland are straight*, but by the time they get down here to Sydney they’re all bent. That’s because they pack them for transport in the town of Bendemere, where they …