Not me, but I provided the setup. You maybe need to get English traditional attitudes to really appreciate it.
At my old houseshare, we’d had a bit of an ongoing saga about the council food waste collection bin. The first one had broken, but you could order a free replacement. The way it was supposed to work was that you left the broken one out and it was replaced next recycling day, but they hadn’t taken it, so we had one broken one and a new one. We kept leaving the broken one out, tried sending pickup requests, but nope, it kept getting left. Then I went away for a week, and while I was away, the neighbour accidentally took the new bin, so my landlord ordered another replacement, which promptly arrived, only for the neighbour to return the one they’d taken. So I get back, and there’s now three food waste bins, one broken one we can’t get rid of, one we were actually using, and now a shiny new one.
Me: Why do we have yet another new food waste bin?
Housemate: That one’s for best.
Thank you! That was forty years ago, and I’m still proud of that one. Didn’t even pause, just boom.
Well played!
Funny thing is, it could have been just a few weeks ago! Venus, Jupiter, and the moon were all lined up, within maybe a degree of sky. Pretty cool, really.
My wit is usually fired by the long fuse, but once in my life I was able to pull off the perfect zinger.
A friend was a bridesmaid for a girlfriend. The bride was Indian, so the wedding party was in South Asian dress. My friend was complaining about the trouble she was having making herself understood in the Indian clothes shops. Without missing a beat, I said, “Well, sometimes ‘sari’ seems to be the hardest word.”
Driving down the highway here, I see a truck approaching from a side road. Expecting him to turn onto the road in front of me, I get ready to brake but then notice that the truck is instead slowing down for his stop sign. I say sarcastically, “Must be a Farang driving that truck.”
My son — then just 4 years old and without missing a beat — interprets my sarcasm and comes up with a better punchline: “Maybe he ran out of gas!”
Ringing up the items of a woman on her cell phone who says “My in-laws refused to come into the house because I was wearing slacks.”
I mutter “What century are they living in?” She hears me, cracks up, and says into the phone “The checkout lady just said it perfectly. What century are they living in?”
This week at work. Meeting about “what happens between stuff being made and stuff leaving the factory in a truck.”
Warehousing dude, talking about where stock gets put away when it arrives from the production line: “blahblah and quality is completely irrelevant…”
General laughter and remarks of “that was diplomatic!”
Warehousing dude: “well, uhm, I mean it’s, uhm”
Me: “the elegant way to put it is ‘quality is assumed to be good’”.
Was wandering around a university building with a friend looking for an office. As with many universities the building had been added to many times over the years so we passed hallways with signs reading “Annex A,” “Annex B,” etc… Finally we came to a short stairway that led down about 5 steps into what what looked to be a small hallway with about 5 offices oddly hanging off the side of the building between two floors of the main building. My friend said, “This must be an annex dote.” I replied, “OK, I’ll bite, why is it an annex dote.” He explained, “Because it’s a short story.”
My son who was about 5 at the time had gotten a knight costume for Christmas and was showing it off to a family friend. He said, “Look! I have a shield, and a sword, and an axe, and a spear. I’ve got everything!” Our friend replied, “Wow, you’re a real swiss army knight.”
When I was in grade school, I got dinged quite impressively. We were touring the state capitol and the tour guide was going on about the ten-foot bronze relief of the state seal inlaid in the floor of the rotunda, around which we were gathered. When she finished, I asked, naturally, “If that’s the state seal, where are its flippers?” Not missing a beat (because, surely she had never heard that one before), she responded, “I don’t know about that, but,” pointing to the trees over on the side, “there’s its bark.”
Further re the two senses of “seal” – though admittedly, an aged cliche rather than something particularly spur-of-the-moment. In school history classes in England: when the episode was told about, of how King James II, when being relieved of his kingship, threw the Great Seal of England into the River Thames, in the hope of gumming-up the future workings of government – a smart-alec kid could be relied on to ask, “Sir, where did it swim off to?”
Dunno if these qualify as 1-liners, but they were spontaneous:
I had taken my son to Cub Scouts one evening, and gathered up his things at the end of the meeting and tossed them in my purse.
The next day, I was looking for something while at work, spotted a particular item, grabbed it, walked over to a co-worker’s desk, slapped it down, and said “It’s NOT TRUE. I know EXACTLY where they are!!”.
It was a bag of marbles.
Then there was the time we had a TV show on about famous scientists, and the topic o the moment was Enrico Fermi.
My husband said “yeah, people don’t realize how brilliant Fermi was!”.
I said “Of course he was. He had those two PhDs, after all.”.
::::Blank look from spouse::::
“… you know, Fermi’s pair ‘o’ docs!”.
Then in college: I grew up near the capital of Pennsylvania… and the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was giving a bit of grief and was much in the news just then.
Some dorm-mates were making wisecracks about something or other, and I walked into the room just as one of them said “mutant cows from Harrisburg!!”.
A few years ago I was working at the same company as my dad. We one day had reason to introduce ourselves to someone from another company, who remarked on us having the same last name, asking if we were relatives. Dad says “yes, father and son.”
Me: I’m the son.
My wife’s grandmother recently passed away at age of 111. I once told someone who asked how old she was that when she was born there were two pilots in America - Wilbur and Orville.
Working third shift at a previous job… we’d be lucky to have four people on the floor at most, so as long as we kept up production we pretty much had the run of the place. Radio reception was nonexistent, so one of the guys had his Bluetooth speaker on him usually, and he’d be streaming his playlist or Pandora feed or whatever. Most of his tunes were late 90s alt-pop type stuff, and he’d sing along to a lot of it, especially that one song by… I forget who. I want to say Edwin Mccain but something tells me that’s not quite right. But anywhoo…
On the other hand, I usually think my own singing voice is shit. Even when I don’t, I realize it’s mostly suited to a lot harder style of song than this guy listened to. So this guy’s playing this song one night and singing along as he’s working, and I’m close by working on something else. Then the song’s bridge comes up, and as it’s nearing its end:
Coworker: “Okay, jrbor76, hit it!” (meaning take the next verse, I’m guessing)
Me: (shrugging) “All right, if you say so… where do you want it? Up high [pantomiming an uppercut], or down low [pantomiming a nut shot]?”
Fortunately, I knew the guy to be pretty laid back and he got a decent chuckle out of it.
I do this all the time. Once made my father laugh so hard people worried for his health (“Bob! Sit down, try to breathe!”), some crack about him fucking a jelly doughnut.
My wife is wonderful at this. A memorable one is when I joked after our wedding that maybe I should have sown more wild oats, her response “It would have been a bitter harvest.” We just (almost) died laughing at that one.
Some years ago, when Spongebob Squarepants was relatively new and just becoming a huge cultural phenomenon, a co-worker of mine bought a stuffed Spongebob doll for his little nephew online and had it shipped to the office. One feature of this particular doll was that you could pull down Spongebob’s pants to reaveal his tighty-whities underneath.
As my co-worker demonstrated this feature, I glanced down at the doll and deadpanned, “Can you show me where the man touched you?”
Shortly after we graduated from college, I was in a friend’s wedding. After the reception, I was helping another of the groomsmen up from an apparent nap in the flower bed outside of the reception venue. An elderly lady asked me if he was okay. I replied, I hope so, he’s driving.
