An old high school chum who coaches football recently mentioned that he “didn’t mind it when the fans threw tomatoes at him…he just wished they weren’t still in the can.”
The joke sounds suspiciously like it’s been previously said by some comedian or other. Ring any bells? I’d love to know so I can razz him. If not, I’ll praise him for being too funny.
Dunno for sure - but it sounds like something Groucho Marx would say.
More like Rodney Dangerfield.
It IS old, I just can’t remember who said it. Maybe Henny Youngman?
hh
Second Henny Youngman guess.
It sounds to me like Bob Uecker, but I can’t find it with a search.
Definitely not Groucho.
Thanks for trying everyone. I tried to google it but didn’t have any luck.
It reminded me a bit of Emo Philips’ type of joke.
Still would like to find out. But I think most of us have heard this before, so your old high school chum football coach friend person is not an original joke guy. However, let him think he is! Ask him how he made up such a joke. He might surprise you and say “no, I heard it from ______ at a comedy show years ago”. Afterwards, please post the name with us so we can all say that it was on the tips of our tongues.
If it doesn’t go back at least to the beginnings of vaudeville, I’d be very surprised. I’d bet you could find something like that in one of the “Joe Miller” joke books.
I dug up a similar joke from my memory.
“Wow, Joe, how’d you get that big bump on your head?”
“My wife hit me with the tomatoes last night.”
“How could tomatoes give you a bump like that?”
“They were still in the can.”
Unfortunately I already bragged that I had 15,000 expert researchers working on it. 
Not sure if this helps, but I have heard a similar cliche regarding throwing rice at weddings (in a can); I haven’t a clue if this would predate the tomato version, but I thought I’d throw it out there, in case it helps in the search.
I remember something like this from (I think) either James Thurber or H. Allen Smith. He was talking about metonymy, the use of the container for the thing contained. The specific example used was “Friends, Romans, and countrymen, lend me your ears” in which the container; ears, served as a synonym for their function; hearing.
The author speculated that there should be a figure of speech for the opposite, the use of the thing contained for the container, and used the example of “she hit me with the tomatoes” when she actually hit him with the can.
Now that I think of it, it might have been Benchley. I guess I didn’t help much after all, sorry.
That word is synecdoche. However, Fowler only gives a definition of its use in part for the whole, so it may have widened its meaning to fill that hole in the past 75 years.
No, it was Thurber (as I’ve read that too and I’ve read nothing by either of those two others), and the phrase he used was “I’ll hit you with this milk”, meaning the bottle.
Thanks, I was going to be bothered by that until I found out, and it wasn’t going to be easy to sort out on my own. My books are filed using the FAS (first available surface) system, and I’ve got nearly a 50 year accumulation.
Yes, definitely Thurber. It was his schoolteacher who gave the class the Mark Antony line as an example of the “container for the thing contained”. He thought about it for some time and came up with his example. He reported it in class, but the teacher was not amused. 