And you can’t correct them because you just know that next time there is an eclipse you’ll find them outside staring at the sun.
I saw on the news this morning where a cake decorator put a cat on the head of a graduating student. All the wording on the cake indicated graduation. The p must have looked like a T. The lady accepted the cake for its laugh value.
I believe what he is trying to say is this and the green side up one are both well known jokes. He is not saying you used it in and ethnic way, but it was common when “Polish” joke books as an example of how stupid (insert race) is.
A Google search on Green Side Up Joke gives 75 Million hits. There are also apparently thousands of landscape companies with this name as well.
It is most likely that if you did hear it first hand the person was reciting an old joke they had heard and not being stupid.
I grew up near Mount Rushmore. I kid you not, people actually asked “Where do you put the faces in the winter?” 
One time, after hearing this for the umpteenth time, the manager at the restaurant I worked at said, “Oh, we store them in Rushmore cave. That’s how it got it’s name you know.”
I mean, seriously people, you think we take the faces down during winter? They are part of a mountain!
I walked to the coffee shop the other day with the aid of my walking stick. A woman there, who is not known for her smarts, said, “When did they start making those?”
The answer I wish I’d thought of at the time, “Oh, about the time man started walking upright.”
When I was about ten or eleven, my parents were having a little happy hour party on our back porch. My dad was drinking some beer that had rebus puzzles in the cap. In this particular cap was as follows…
Duh+a picture of a bull + U+C+a picture of a meadow.
My mom sat there for a good ten or fifteen minutes putting the emphasis on different letters, and finally had to be told it was WC Fields.
I can still hear her…"DuhBULL UC Fields
DUH bull uc fields
Duh Bull UC FIELDS.
Awesome.
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Many years ago I worked with a woman who was not known for her intellect. One day I was writing names on diplomas using a calligraphy pen in an olde English-type script (remember, this was years ago, which was the style of time, along with onions on the belt). She watched me do a few, then asked to borrow the pen for a moment. She wrote her name on a blank piece of paper, then after being obviously disappointed in her results, said “why, this is just a regular pen!” She actually expected her handwriting to magically be transformed into “fancy writing”.
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I called a local doctor’s office to get directions. Their office was on a side road that connected two larger, busier highways. I asked “are you on the east side or west side of the road?” Her answer: “it depends on from which way you’re coming.”
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Another many years ago one, coincidentally at the same place: we needed to order a large date stamp, one of those that has the changeable month, day, and year wheels, and it had to be quite large as it would be used for placards displayed on vehicle dashboards. The supply guy included a stamped sample on paper that read “MAR 13 85”. The requisition was sent off through USAF channels. A month later he received his stamp: a regular, permanent (unchangeable) stamp that read MAR 13 85.
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As I was patrolling the streets I observed a vehicle where the registration renewal sticker was held onto the license plate by Scotch ® tape. I pulled him over, and the driver/owner identified himself, including the fact that he was a dentist (not sure how that came up, but it did). I explained why I stopped him, and he replied: “I know, I know, but I licked the back of that darn thing so many times but it just wouldn’t stick!”
Jay Leno used to do a bit on the Tonight Show where he’d interview people on the street and get really dumb answers to simple questions. One of them was whether Mt. Rushmore was a natural mountain. Someone said “yes”, and he started teasing them about whether the faces had just formed naturally. Uh, Jay, it is a natural mountain; it’s not like they started with a prairie and built the whole thing from scratch.
I’ve told this on myself before but. . . .
I always try to avoid starting a book series until the author has finished it. I hate and despise waiting around for a year or more to find out if poor Timmy is going to make it out of the well or not. And I purposefully put off starting A Song of Ice and Fire especially, because so many of my friends (here too!) were in absolute apoplexy waiting for the next book.
Then, at last, I gave in. Because I just had to find out who this “Cthulhu” character was*. I was well into the third book, I think, still waiting for him to rise up out of the icy North before I figured out my mistake. :smack:
*In my defense, he always seems to come up in the same discussions, and with the same people, as ASoIaF characters.
TruCelt, that was ignorance, not stupidity.
But, still funny.
While I appreciate the vote of confidence, I kinda think somewhere in book 2 it graduated to the next level. 
I read that story, too - here’s a link to it. It does look awfully funny. 
I read that the earliest known references to laying turf instruct that it should be laid green side down. I read this in a textbook about turf keeping. Apparently it was done this way. I’ve never tried it but I’m gonna guess the grass gets itself growing right again somehow, and there is some benefit. Go figure.
Besides, for this story to be true, they were using rolls of turf with the green on the outside of the roll. Where would that have come from?
Since it keeps coming up, here is a version of the joke in question:
A painting contractor was speaking with a woman about her job.
In the first room she said she would like a pale blue. The
contractor wrote this down and went to the window, opened it,
and yelled out "GREEN SIDE UP! "In the second room she told the
painter she would like it painted in a soft yellow. He wrote
this on his pad, walked to the window, opened it, and yelled
“GREEN SIDE UP!” The lady was somewhat curious but she said
nothing.
In the third room she said she would like it painted a warm
rose color. The painter wrote this down, walked to the window,
opened it and yelled “GREEN SIDE UP!”
The lady then asked him, “Why do you keep yelling ‘green side
up’?”
“I’m sorry,” came the reply. “But I have a crew of blondes
laying sod across the street.”
We have a new product in our store: it is a 4-pack of plastic shot glasses filled with an alcoholic beverage. It says proudly on the display that it is 16% alcohol.
I have had two different people ask if it was 16% for each one, or for all 4 together. The one who asked me (rather that rhetorically) I told “either, that’s how percentages work”. He looked puzzled and restated his question, and my manager interceded to assure him that it was for each one.
That’s hilarious
Friend: What percent is 98 out of 100?
Me: …
Friend: …
Me: Let’s think about it. What percent is ninety-eight out of one hundred. . .
Friend: Um. . .
Friend: Oh. OH! Oh. My. God. Don’t tell anyone!
Me: No, I won’t. 
I pulled that one on a poor assistant at an Ace Hardware.
ME: I need a 1-inch diameter dowel
HIM: How long do you want it?
ME: I guess quite a while, I want to hang my clothes from it.
HIM: I should know better
I once mentioned that one of my claims to fame is that I walked four NYC blocks with Christopher Reeve.
“Was that before his accident?”
Speaking of sod . . .
When I was a kid, the couple next door were newlyweds, and for each of them, it was their first time living in a house. They were very proud of their new sod lawn. One fall day, the husband asked my father “What do you do with the grass in winter?” My father replied “Roll it up and keep it in the basement.” It took the neighbors a while, but they got the job done. Then they realized that nobody else had rolled up their lawn. My father had to confess that he hadn’t thought they’d take him seriously. They were not amused.