You know, the kind of line that just hangs over the plate, begging to be hit out of the park.
I will remember this one until the day I die:
Scene: An operating room, in which a young brossa , in his very first month of surgical residency, is being mercilessly pimped by a senior attending vascular surgeon. brossa has answered all questions correctly so far, but knows that this is a process of ‘test to failure’, and there is no way to escape the pain short of a meteor strike. Suddenly, he is asked:
Q:“What is the name of the vein that goes to the dorsum of the foot?”
A:“That would be the deep dorsal vein of the penis.” (beat) “Or is that just me?”
A golden radiance fills the room. Angels sing. Baby Jesus weeps with joy. Pimping ends.
Back in college, I joined a bunch of folks for dinner to celebrate a friend’s birthday at a local Mexican restaurant. We ordered, and the food came, and my dish came on a larger plate than everyone else’s. At a lull in the conversation, my friend’s girlfriend looks over at my dish and says, “Hey, how come yours is so much bigger than everyone else’s?” I told her it was good genes.
I was in emergecy with a friend, who was drunk and thought he mght like to steal an Oldsmobile hood ornament. Only he didn’t know how and the sharp edges cut open his hand. Served him right, of course.
He was getting a shot of ansthetic and the nurse said, “Now you’re going to feel a little prick.” He responded, “Oh sure, take advantage of me when I’m drunk.” The nurse (ostensibly female, btw) had obviously heard it before, but I thought it was great.
I can’t claim it, but…in my med school poker game, we were playing three-card Guts. As most with most close-knit games, we had our own evolving lingo; “jacks” had become “dukes” and finally “ducks”.
There were two people in the hand, and the first confidently turned over his hand, showing a pair of jacks. “What would you say to a pair of ducks?” he said.
Without missing a beat and in a perfect deadpan, the other person turned over his two queens and said, “Quack quack.”
The game paused for about ten minutes while we all laughed our asses off. They couldn’t have scripted it any better.
A friend wondered whether the idea of choosing a religion you mightn’t have opted for otherwise specifically so that you’re covered in case they really are right was known and applied very far back into antiquity. I suggested he was putting Decartes before the Horus.
“Jean Chretien,” said my Canadian Politics professor shortly before Paul Martin took office, “has a certain je ne sais quoi about him. He has a reputation as a streetfighter, which makes people want to do things to bring out that side of him. People run up and hit him with pies, and he grabs them by the back of the neck and slaps them around.”
Oh God, I hope he says it.
“Paul Martin, on the other hand, is more of a traditional politician.”
I was buying a ton of long screws from a hardware store. The female cahiser asked, “You want to do a lot of screwin’?” I replied “I’m flattered, but I barely know you.”
Another time a coworker mentioned a visiting cousin that had just “come fom Alabama”.
I asked “Did he have a banjo on his knee?” I got a shoulder punch for that one, but I couldn’t resist.
I used to clerk for a judge who had an obnoxious secretary who always had the radio tuned to contemporary Christian music, which is really hard on the ears (and not even for the lyrical content). I used to ask politely for her to change the channel sometimes, and sometimes I’d change it myself when she left for a meeting or even to the bathroom. She’d always get offended and huffy, and once she snapped “What, does my music offend you as a Jew?”
Without missing a beat, I said, “No, it offends me as a musician.”
College. Excuse me, historically black college. Think: well educated people who can nonetheless snap ghetto on you at any given time.
Outdoors at the student union. Couple loudly arguing. Man accuses women of cheating in relationship. Woman loudly berates man. Man castigates woman. Big crowd gathers to watch.
Man: Bitch, keep on! One of these days I’ll catch you with your pants down!
Woman: If you do, bend over and kiss. my. ass. (Do the “mad black woman head wobble” on ‘kiss. my. ass.’)
Crowd: Bwah ha ha!
Crowd: Ooooooo.
Crowd: Damn!
I’m still waiting for someone to hand me a line like that…
Not great, but it sure felt good. In college I had a cheap chess set, which was decimated by the very playful kitten our household had adopted. We found all the pieces except for a pawn; then, a few months later, my roommate found the last piece.
“Oh, excellent,” I said. “I was just about ready to go buy a replacement.”
He thought on that for exactly the right length of time, then said, “Where could you buy a replacement?”
“The pawn shop,” I answered.
Last weekend, my dad came up to Asheville to visit, and our family were tooling around town. He gestured up at one of the ubiquitous Asheville Billboards that say, “Thomas Wolfe! [with a picture of a sleazy-looking realtor] I buy ugly houses!” My dad read it aloud questioningly.
I answered, “Yeah: he buys your house and then tells you that you can’t go home again.”
The bus kid’s boyfriend came out from Ohio to vists last month. Now understand, the b-k’s bf is subject to all sorts of good natured ridicule from us just based on the fact that he’s from Ohio, and despite living near Cleveland, kind of a bumpkin. Nice kid, just in over his head with the bus kid, who is (like dad) sharper than a tack.
So, bus kid, the boy and I were in Ikea. This large bin full of little sheepskin swatches was there, bus kid grabbed one and admired it, feeling “oooh, how fluffy” or similar nonsense.
The boy, grabs one, holds it and says…(hang on, it’s really good)
“You know, if you took four of these together you could dress like a sheep”
I will have to admit to first laughing because I just could not hold it in.
But my response ultimately was:
“So** that’s ** how you meet all the best looking cowboys, is it?”
Poor guy spent the rest of the week having to listen to me “baaaa” at him.
I can tell you the best set-up line I ever provided. The fact that it was booted is still a source of great disappointment to me.
We live in a suburb of Philadelphia. Not exactly a big city, but not Mayberry either. Well, one day my wife and I are driving down a street we had driven down a thousand times before. It is about twenty yards parallel to a major 4-lane highway, not at all out in some remote farm country. Anyway, without warning I see it happen. About fifty yards in front of our car a chicken–I kid you not–is crossing the road.
Well, I’ve waited over 40 years for this, and I’m sure it will never occur again. Someone has to take one for the team and be the straight man. Being the magnanimous sort I am, I run with it. It’ll be worth it just to be part of such a once-in-a-lifetime moment.
“Say, why do you think that chicken is crossing the road?” I ask with a comical nonchalance.
My wife shrugs. “I think that house over there raises chickens,” she says in a bored tone. “I think the chicken just lives there.”
My jaw hits the floor in devastation. Can you believe it? I tee up the straight line for perhaps the corniest, most widely told joke ever uttered, and this is the response I get? And she still rolls her eyes when I tell this story, as if I’m the weird one.
My younger brother is the master of the setup, I tell you. Certain incidents include:
Bro: Hey, phouka, what does “je ne sais quoi” mean?"
phouka: “I don’t know.”
Bro: Well, what the hell are you taking French for anyway?
Bro and friend are at a movie theater, watching the pretty pictures of the slide show. Some of them happen to be shots of planets within the solar system.
Bro: Which planet is that?
Friend: Uranus.
Bro: (sounding huffy) Hey, there’s no need to be insulting. Just say you don’t know!
phouka: (griping about some bad writing I’d come across)…and it’s not even a real word!
Bro: what are you talking about? It’s a perfectly cromulent word.
Mr. S frequently gets heartburn, and one time (of many) while we were traveling we stopped at a gas station to buy him some Rolaids. He went up to the counter with his three rolls (they were on sale or something) and the cashier said . . .
There were nearly 15 of us one time, driving down the road in a hatchback. We were crammed in. There was someone sitting on the parking brake. There were four people shoved in the middle seat, with someone else lying across them with their feet hanging out the window. There were two or three people behind that in the hatchback area. We looked like clowns in a VW bug. There was also a single bike strapped on to the back of the car. I was sitting in the passenger seat, up front, when we pulled up to a stoplight.
A car with two guys in it pulled up next to us. I could see them out of the corner of my eye staring at us. Finally one of them said to me, “What, only one bike?”
I instantly responded, “Yeah, you should see us on THAT!”
At that exact moment, the light turned green, and we drove off, leaving those two guys doubled over in laughter.
I’m such a geek. Mine happened while playing an MMORPG a few years ago with my ex. We were playing Everquest, and he was experiencing some lag. This often results in a fight ending with the lagger still stuck in fight mode for a few seconds. Often, the person who is lagging is not aware right away that they are a few seconds behind everyone else.
So, we finish a fight, and he obviously sees the enemy has died, but then his character takes a few extra, unnecessary swipes at the corpse.
He asks, annoyed, “Why am I still swinging?”
I couldn’t resist. “No underwear?”