I’m not usually quick-witted enough to come up with witty one-liners on the spur of the moment, but I’ve got a couple.
I was talking with my father-in-law Tim and his cousin Bob. Bob is fond of poking fun at Tim with mock insults, which Tim accepts with good nature. On this occasion they were discussing Tim’s late wife Phyllis who died years before I married into the family, so I never knew her. Bob concluded an anecdote about her by saying “She was a wonderful woman”. Then being serious for once, he added “And she had a wonderful husband.” Tim smiled and there was a pause. With impeccable timing I asked, “Was that before she married Tim?”
A few days ago I was visiting a relative in a hospital. I was walking down the hall behind two nurses, one behind the other; so the procession was nurse #1, nurse #2, and then me at the rear. Nurse #2 stepped into a room. Nurse #1 then said something over her shoulder to nurse #2 who was no longer there. She turned around and saw that I was behind her and said, “Oh, you’re not the person I need.” I replied “Yeah, I’ve heard that a lot.”
This one wasn’t me but I have to include it because it is so awesome. Todd, a friend of mine, is black and is married to a white woman Mary. Todd was in his yard talking to a new landscaper. Mary walked out of the house carrying her blond, blue-eyed nephew, and came over to Todd and the landscaper. Todd saw the landscaper looking rather curiously at the boy, so he said “She swears he’s mine.”
When I was much younger and quicker, a member of our gang came up to us with a toothpick hanging out the side of his mouth. I said “Is that a toothpick or did your brain just declare a dividend?”
At work, I was talking to someone about some technical thing and they said “Well, I’m not sure I believe that.” Which I thought was stupid, because we were talking about something that was very easy to benchmark and I was demonstratively correct, so I said “Facts don’t care if you believe in them.”
They replied that that statement was gold, and I ought to print it on a bumper sticker because it would look right at home on the back of a Prius between an Obama “change” sticker and a Darwin fish, which I thought was a good comeback to my comeback.
I was driving to a clients office very early in the morning. I stopped at a gas station and decided to pick up coffee and water while I was there.
I make a cup of coffee, grab a bottle of Smart Water and head to the register. First I put my stuff down at a closed station and have to move it. Then I handed the guy a $1 instead of a $5. I hands it back to me with a puzzled look on his face and I looked puzzled for way to long. Then I fumbled in my purse for the right bill, and I took me way to long.
As I handed him the $5, I looked pointedly at the Smart Water and said “I didn’t drink it yet.”
In one of my military classes about 15 years ago, the instructor was telling us about his karaoke night over the weekend, and said “I was such a big hit! I sang that song, you know, that song, from that movie…” and I immediately yelled out “Total Eclipse of the Heart!” and he said “Yeah, that’s the one!”, and then began teaching. The class was amazed.
I ran into him last year, since the Navy is a small world, and he said he still remembers that day. But I had to remind him that it was me.
One from a friend of mine:
Friend 1: “If you had to make a deal with the Devil, what would you ask for in exchange for your immortal soul?”
Friend 2: “His.”
I wrote about this here before a long time ago. My wife was out with a bunch of her friends and I was at home with the kids. I put the kids to bed and turned on the TV. The learning channel was still actually about learning, and there was a show about human sexuality. They said that men are attracted to women whose hip to waist ratio is .70. Being an engineer, I had to check…
Wife gets home and I have a tape measure. I measure her hips and her waist and say, “I love you anyway” (we have that kind of marriage, I’m not a complete A-hole). She says “What,” and I explain the whole hip to waist thing, so she says she wanted to see how far she was “off”. She starts doing the math and I’m looking over her shoulder and she forgets to carry a number. Then she adds the “carry” wrong. She says, “Where is my head today?!” and I say, “Up your ass, that’s why your hips are so wide”. A dozen yellow roses arrived at her doorstep the next day.
This one probably doesn’t meet the OP, but its another “quick thinking” line. Another time, I was at a month long training in California while my wife was in Ohio trying to sell our house. We had an offer but it fell through and she had two kids who were missing their daddy, and she was missing me as well (This was before the above story:)). She called me and was just falling to pieces. My reptilian brain kept telling me, “You have to make this better. Wait, take her mind off of it…she likes John Denver…he was just in the news!” “Hey Hon, did you hear about John Denver?” “No.” “He died yesterday in a plane crash” “BWAAAAAAAAAAA!” To this day, I have no idea what I was thinking.
Not mine but I over heard this on the dock at our commercial storage warehouse from a driver who, going by his accent, was an immigrant from eastern Europe (maybe?). He was struggling with a pallet that had seen some rough handling. It was about half way off the truck when the pallet broke in two, spilling boxes everywhere. He loudly exclaimed “tongue punch me in the poop hole!”
Our IT person had just informed my boss and me that the minor glitch that was keeping us from finishing our project was traced back to a problem in the server and he would have to take the entire office off line and reboot the system from backups and whatever else IT people say before telling you it would take the rest of the afternoon.
I looked at my boss and said, “Technology isn’t just a bitch, she wears boots and carries a whip.”
After a trip overseas, I sat down to dinner with my parents one night and one of the first things my Mom said was, “So, how did you find Paris?” My reply: “Well, basically I just got on the plane and about eight hours later, there I was.”
The other day one of the passengers on my bus (we all know each other quite well) turned to one of the other passengers and said loudly, “And no, I’m not going to call you, Chad.” To which I said, “But you just did call him Chad.” To her credit, she didn’t smack me across the back of the head.
My dad used to have a very spoiled pug named Bubba. One time, after a visit to my Dad’s, I was playing the “what sound does this animal make” game with my son who was about four. What sound does the cow make? Moo. What sound does the pig make? Oink. What sound does Bubba make? Without missing a beat, my son started panting loudly in a pretty good imitation of Bubba.
1.) Walking through the video store with my daughter. I accidentally knocked over a low, badly-placed rack, dumping a lot of DVD copies of the 2008 Gus van Sant movie Milk onto the ground. My daughter pointed this out, but I kept on walking, say “There’s no point crying over spilled Milk.”
2>0 In high school I was delayed getting into my English Literature class. The teacher, trying to flummox me and provoke a word-associative response, immediately fired a question at me: “What’s a scholar?” I replied without thinking that “It’s what goes around your sneck.”
This year, whenever I see a person wearing a shirt or hat from another baseball or football team, I always ask “How did they do this season…said the lady from Boston.” I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of that one-liner.
My best one word ever uttered occurred from a incident in the library’s women’s bathroom. I’m sitting in one of the stalls, and I notice the feet in the other stall are pointing the other way. I finish, and as I washing my hands a young black dude comes out of the other stall. He looks at me and say “Is this the women’s bathroom?”
In a flash of inspiration, I go to the inner door, prop it open with my foot, open the outer door, hold it so he can see the outside of the door with the sign “WOMEN” on it, and I say “Yep.” He leaves, and I was on the floor laughing.
I was reminded of this just the other day. A friend texted me to tell me he just got the joke (that occurred a few years ago).
A group of us were playing low stakes poker, but on a “real” poker table with chips. I lost a few hands in a row and was in a generally foul mood. I threw chips into the pot, and anoother player said, “whoa, take it easy, huh?”.
I replied, " I will splash the pot whenever the fuck I please" in a shitty Russian accent.
Nobody got it, they all just stared at me and life went on. Years later, one of the guys watched Rounders and got the joke. Years too late.
I’m in my 60s. Waiting for a conference call with the 20-somethings at work, the conversation turned to recent internet outages. Each person told about the longest internet outage they’d ever experienced. When my turn came I said: “Forty three years.”
We all have rubber ducks around our workstations at my office (long story). One of my coworkers had a particularly large one (about a foot tall).
A couple of days ago, another coworker brought in a duck that might have been a little bit larger. They were going back and forth about which one was bigger.
I said, “Let’s not get into a duck measuring contest.”
A few years ago I was on a behind the scenes tour of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. The guide was explaining how their Halloween nighttime tours were a huge success.
Her - “I mean, people would kill to get in here at night.”
Me - “They did.”
I was walking around a flea market with my mom. She held up some oven mitts and said, “Look at these pot holders.” I grabbed up some roach clips and said, “Look at these pot holders!”
'Twas Halloween at the junior high, and a boy was decked out in one of those cow costumes complete with an udder. I asked Jim, another teacher, if he’d seen the cow costume. He said “Yes. It’s obscene, isn’t it?” I said “Obscene? Well, at least it’s not a bull costume.” I was new there, and didn’t know Jim was also a Southern Baptist minister.