“Rectum? Damn near killed 'im!”
What is the original joke?
(I thought this might be too frivolous for GQ)
Here’s what I’ve always heard:
A little boy comes in and says, “Daddy, a doggy just got hit by a car and his ASSHOLE is hanging out!”
"You mean ‘rectum?’ " said the dad.
“Rectum? It damn near killed him!”
This probably isn’t the original joke, but it’s the one that I was told.
Happy
Close to what I heard…
A little boy comes running in from recess: “Teacher, teacher! Billy fell (out of a tree/off a slide/from somewhere) and landed on a (branch/rake/something else) and it went right up his asshole!”
“Rectum, Timmmy, Rectum.”
“Rectum? Damn near killed him!”
A shool boy inadvertantly recounts being kicked in the gonads during classroom show and tell.
The teacher modestly corrects him admonishing, “You should say ‘rectum’, Johnny.”
To which the young lad replies, “Rectum?!? It nearly killed me!”
And of course, there is Futurama, where to end that stupid joke, astronomers in the 2300’s changed the name from Uranus to Urectum.
“Tissue? I hardly know you!”
…and so the girl says…“Wharf??.. I thought you said go down on the DWARF”…
I always heard it this way:
Little Johnny comes in late to class one day and the teacher asks why he’s late. He says he was down by the pond shoving dynamite up frogs’ assholes.
“You mean rectum, Johnny?” says the teacher.
“Rectum? I f*cking killed him!”
The first place I heard this joke, (with the punchline verbatim,) is on Richard Pryor’s album Bicentennial Nigger.
Of course, it’s in the unaltered form of a “Little Johnny” joke, which has enjoyed an established position in american folk tales since at least the 1930’s.
That’s probably the joke that made the strongest impression on me off that album, with the possible exception of the “That’s alright, I’ll just lie here and use my vibrator/That’s some sad dick!” dichotomy. Or maybe the “I did acid once” routine. “Open the pod-bay doors, HAL.”
I always wondered too. If anyone here has seen Black Sheep, when they cut in to Chris Farley getting high he says “…rectum, it damn near killed him!” And they’re all laughing. You don’t hear the first part…
Mrs. Prudebottom was teaching her second grade english class.
“Now, class,” she said, “we’re going to do a simple vocabulary exercise. We’re going to go through the entire alphabet, and for each letter, I’ll call on one of you to name a word that starts with that letter and then demonstrate its proper use in a sentence. Who will begin, with the letter ‘A’?”
Straight away a hand shot up at the back. “Ooh! Ooh! Pick me, Mrs. Prudebottom!” It was Little Johnny, a notoriously nasty little boy, and Mrs. Prudebottom knew better than to give him such an easy opening, so she ignored him.
“Jenny, I see your hand is up. Go ahead.” Jenny cleared her throat and said “Apple. The apple is my favourite fruit.” The teacher knew that she’d dodged a bullet there. “Very good, Jenny. Now who will do ‘B’?”
Once again, Little Johnny’s hand shot up. Again, she knew that the letter “B” offered an easy way for Johnny to misbehave and get the sort of attention he craved, so she called on another student, who said “Ball. I like to bounce a ball against the wall.”
For each successive letter of the alphabet, Johnny became more and more agitated, begging to be called on – but each time Mrs. Prudebottom knew exactly which filthy word he had in mind, so she continued to pass him over — until she got to the letter ‘R’.
Johnny waved his arm just as frantically as before-- and by now all the other kids were turning around to look at him in his back-row seat. Mrs. Prudebottom couldn’t think of a single nasty word that started with ‘R’, and began to feel guilty. Had she been too judgemental? Was it possible Johnny was eager to participate in the exercise? Was she doing the right thing be neglecting and ignoring him? Surely no harm could come from an ‘R’ word.
“Okay Johnny,” she said, “I’ve never seen you this enthusiastic in class before. Go ahead.”
“Rats,” said Johnny. Mrs. Prudebottom relaxed. An ugly word, but Johnny came from a poor neighborhood, so it might be natural that would be his first association. She felt contrite. “Very good, Johnny. Now go ahead and use it in a sentence.”
“Big Fuckin’ Rats,” shouted Little Johnny, “with cocks as big as your arm!”
Teacher asks little Johnny if anything interesting had happened on the bus ride to school.
Johnny says “Well… there was this big dog chasing the bus, and a little dog was chasing the big dog… then bus came to a sudden stop and the little dog ran slam up the big dog’s asshole!”
Teacher: “Rectum!!”
LJ: “Wrecked 'em Hell!!! Killed 'em BOTH!”
I love punchlines that have more than one joke!