A little while ago. But I am still pretty certain that it’s mine alone.
So a man is selling pencils on a street corner. And another man walks up to him. ‘How much are your pencils?’ the other man asks. ‘A million dollars.’ ‘Oh! People aren’t going to buy pencils for ‘a million dollars’!’ ‘I know that,’ the man selling pencils replies. ‘But just think, if I sell even one, I’ll be rich!’
Well, I’m not a professional joke writer. Hey, you know this would be an excellent joke if someone needs a good clean joke to break the ice. A minister or priest. Or maybe someone giving a speech.
Anyone else ever come up with a joke? Share it here. Please.
Sorry to inform you that your joke was already told on Spanish TV in a Christmas Special sometime at the end of the 70s or the very beginning of the 80s. Only it was not a million $, but a million pesetas and he didn’t sell pencils but sparklers, the rest is identical.
You may have re-invented a joke. It’s been done with that same basic theme with all sorts of products, and sometimes used to negatively stereotype a class of people for being foolish or stupid in believing they can sell a product worth pennies for a million dollars.
A friend of mine once asked me for a joke involving a priest, a rabbi and a piano tuner. Here’s what I came up with:
A Catholic priest calls a piano tuner to his home and as the tuner works he comments on how little use it appeared the instrument was getting.
“Oh, that’s one of my little quirks. You see, I think of the piano as a family instrument and so I feel guilty sitting here by myself playing with it. One of the occupational hazards of being a religious leader is a tendency to project one’s beliefs and practices into all contexts, no matter how irrational.”
“Ah - that explains a lot. And I’m guessing that this piano also used to belong to a rabbi?”
I also once sent in an extremely topical joke (about Ann Winterton) to a radio station. Not only did they read it out, by evening it was making the rounds on the TV news. But it would take waaaaay too long to explain now, and it’s not worth it now.
I read this, took a beat, chuckled, then re-read it to better appreciate how cleverly constructed it was. Nice one.
As for the second one - you went viral before things went viral!
I find the best jokes are the ones that come up on the spur of the moment - and so they can’t be taken out of context and ‘told’ as a joke later (well, they can, but they lose most of the humour along the way).
Then there is the opposite, and probably equally old, joke about the salesman who wants to increase his figures by slashing the price of the widgets his company makes from $2 to $1. “But,” objects Accounts, “they cost $1.50 to make!”. “I know,” our hero replies, “but what we lose on margins, we’ll make up for with volume!”.
So many jokes have been told before that it’s hard to come up with one that’s truly original, especially when you consider slight changes and variations that are made to accommodate changing fashions and technology.
I think I actually did invent a new joke myself, on this very Board almost eight years ago*. But only because it was a new development:
How do you ruin King Kong for a Cognitive Psychologist?
“Did you hear Ann Winterton was going to star in The Passion of the Christ? It didn’t work out - they kept withholding the whip.”
Short explanation: Ann Winterton was a UK Conservative MP who, around the time The Passion of the Christ was in theatres and garnering controversy for its violent depiction of flogging, made a rather tasteless joke regarding some Chinese migrant workers that had recently drowned in Morecambe Bay. She “had the Conservative whip removed” (that is, lost the support of her Parliamentary party) for it.
A BBC radio show thought that the appropriate response was to air an offensive Ann Winterton joke, and they asked Bernard Manning to provide one but I thought Manning’s offering was so feeble I sent in mine and they read it out. Apparently various news people were listening; I heard it on Channel 4 News later that night (which, frankly, is an odd medium for a joke).
My wife makes something called caldo verde which is a soup made with greens (kale, mustard greens, beet tops, whatever you have) and some kind of meat (ham, sausage, bacon,…). We had some once and I froze the leftovers. She was rooting around in the freezer a few weeks ago and she found this container labeled “green dregs and ham”.
