When Mozart passed away, he was buried in a churchyard. A couple days later, the town drunk was walking through the cemetery and heard some strange noise coming from the area where Mozart was buried. Terrified, the drunk ran and got the priest to come and listen to it. The priest bent close to the grave and heard some faint, unrecognizable music coming from the grave. Frightened, the priest ran and got the town magistrate.
When the magistrate arrived, he bent his ear to the grave, listened for a moment, and said, “Ah, yes, that’s Mozart’s Ninth Symphony, being played backwards.” He listened a while longer, and said, “There’s the Eighth Symphony, and it’s backwards, too. Most puzzling.” So the magistrate kept listening; “There’s the Seventh… the Sixth… the Fifth…”
Suddenly the realization of what was happening dawned on the magistrate. He stood up and announced to the crowd that had gathered in the cemetery, “My fellow citizens, there’s nothing to worry about. It’s just Mozart decomposing.”
A guy named Paul Larr was obsessed with getting the best blowjob on earth. He traveled from city to city and would always hear of this incredible sword swallower from the far east.
He determined that this was the place to go and saved up his money for a trip to the orient.
First stop was Honk Kong, the source of all the rumors. After searching for days he finally runs into a pimp who seems to know about this woman.
“A midget, right? Waist high and no teeth with lips like Mick Jagger?” Paul Larr, could only nod in delight knowing that he had finally found her at last. “Sure.” Says the pimp, “She’s down at Hong Fing’s bar on the Kowloon wharf.”
After threading through several back alleys and getting totally lost three times, finally they arrive at Hong Fing’s bar.
Paul walks into the place, and sure enough, sitting on the end of the bar, there she is. Her lips stuck out three inches in front of her face, there could be no mistaking this. The words still ring in my ears.
“Step into my fly.” Said Paul Larr as he spied her.
Just after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, the fad of elephant jokes was winding down. One elephant joke was :
Q. How did the elephant get into the basement of the Dallas Police Station?
A. They didn’t know he was there.
This, of course, is a swipe at the Dallas Police for allowing Jack Ruby to carry a gun into the station and go down to the basement to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald before Oswald could go to trial.
Shortly after this I met a Spanish teacher at my older brother’s high school. I told him the elephant joke and he rendered it into Spanish. I can’t raise the accent on one word, but the teacher said, in an alternate answer for this, “Tuvo rubies en sus ojos.”
He said that meant, “Because he had Rubies in his eyes.”
No, not Tom Waits. I found it in a book titled 10,000 Jokes, Stories and Toasts–published originally in the 1930s. (I like that toast, incidentally. :))
I saw a bumper-sticker on a car obviously driven by a Star Wars fan, reading,
“Metaphors Be with You.”
I was working with a carpenter; I nearly knocked a coffee cup over at a donut counter. He said that was a “counter-fit.”
Another French pun:
In a second-year French book, there was a story about the characters–The “Dejarnacs”–in a park (parc); the second part of the story read, “DANS LE PARC, Suite.”
One of the characters was a sister (sœur) of the other.
In a discarded copy of the book, I wrote at that point, “Suite et Sœur Parc.”
True story of the pun that got away.
I knew a guy who worked at some sort of wastewater treatment plant. In attempting to explain what he did, he made a distinction between sludge and slurry. From what I could make of it, it appeared that the slurry was discarded. So I asked him:
So, sludge means never having to save your slurry.
Everyone nodded and went back to work.
Another one I heard recently on TV, might have been the History Channel:
They’re having a wake for dear Paddy O’Donovan. Everyone comes from miles around to see Paddy laid out in the parlor of his house, his coffin propped up on a set of chairs. The house is packed, and in the kitchen, where the men are gathering to smoke their pipes, it becomes quite crowded. So some of the men go into the parlor and take Paddy’s coffin and prop him up against the wall. They take the chairs into the kitchen so they can sit and continue conversing.
Father Murphy comes in and is horrified to see the deceased propped up against the wall instead of being laid out dignified and all. So he storms into the kitchen to see where the chairs are. He sees the men sitting around, and he bellows:
“Give me three chairs for the deceased.”
And they bellow back:
"Hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray.
Three squires come back from the crusades, and as tribute for their bravery they have acquired lovely new saddles of the hides of exotic beasts… Squire Robin has a saddle made from the skin of a giraffe, and Squire Alfred has a saddle made from the skin of a tiger… but as Squire Bartholomew weighs as much as the other two put together, he has to have a specially constructed saddle made from hippo skin…
the moral of this story is:
the squire on the hippopotamus is equal to the sum of the squires on the other two hides.
A farmer is having a terrible problem with some pesky birds - they keep building their nests in his horse’s mane. He tries all sorts of different remedies to get them to stop - ammonia, saltpeter, saltpaul, nothing works!
But one day he grabs a box of yeast from his kitchen counter and spreads it all over the little birds and their nests. Amazingly, that does the trick. The birds leave and don’t come back. Which proves the old saying:
“Yeast is yeast, and nest is nest, and never the mane shall tweet.”
Roy Rogers bought a fancy pair of hiking boots. But one day he left them in the yard, and a hungry mountain lion wandered down from the mountains and started gnawing on them. Roy chased it away. A few days later the animal appeared again when Roy and Dale were both in the yard.
Dale asked:
“Pardon me, Roy–is that the cat that chewed your new shoes?”
My Mom (love that woman) will inevitably say “I don’t see any trains, but I can still see their tracks!” whenever coming to a railroad crossing. The nut must not have fallen very far from the tree, because the other day my daughter was demonstrating her musical talents, to which I stated
“Katrina, you maraca my world”
Those who know my know that I frequently crack myself up.
The dominatrix paddled all her clients. She would leave no stern untoned.
That fish inside the piano is the piano tuna. It makes good money because it gets paid scale.
Vague memories of a Frederic Brown story:
The male deer looked at the female and thought, Why shouldn’t a lucky buck try to make a little doe? … As he tried to romance her, she said, “No, no, a dozen times no!” He whispers “Only a doezen? My deer, think of the fawn you’ll have.”
During high school days, my friend and I were having an extended pun contest. His older sister looked up from her Latin book, and sniffed, “The pun is the lowest form of humor.”
My friend, without missing a beat: “And you are the lowest form of human.”
Here is one that I read recently but didn’t get, so maybe someone could explain it to me: It is well known that throughout Central Europe that members of William Tell’s family were early devotees of league bowling. They had sponsors and everything. According to historians, though, the records have been lost, so nobody knows for whom the Tells bowled.
