I’m feeling in the mood for something funny. Maybe wrapped in colored paper, all curly-cues and ribbon. Something to tickle the funny bone, featherish and ticklish. With chocolate.
Join me in a few notes gathered from various places — i.e. signs on the side of the road, Reader’s Digest, my daily calendar, and a book called The Joy of Lex: How to Have Fun with 860,341,500 Words by Gyles Brandreth.
As they say, truth is stranger than fiction…
Let’s start with a note from my 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said Calendar:
Monday, September 20, 2004: Comment attributed to Senator Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut), remarking on stay-at-home Moms, of which I was one not so long ago…” [Stayat-home mothers have chosen not to work because they] want to go play golf or go to the club and play cards.”
Gee, I shoulda lived in Connecticut. The stay-at-home Moms in my hometown took care of kids, volunteered at school, drove carpools, attended soccer practice or gymnastics or dance class. Wow, were we missing out!
From Reader’s Digest, an apropos’ Quotable Quote, circa sometime last year?? “Baseball it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.” (George F. Will, Men at Work, MacMillan)
Also from Reader’s Digest, circa sometime in the last half of the last century (they don’t put the issue dates on these pages), “A great many people mistake opinions for thoughts.” You know someone like that, don’t you? No, it isn’t your mother-in-law. It’s…(I don’t know but stop picking on mothers-in-law.)
Here’s a cute ditty on censorship from The Joy of Lex, p.184 (1983 edition), in the chapter on Unmentionables:
An author owned an asterisk
And kept it in his den
Where he wrote tales which had large sales
Of erring maids and men,
And always, when he reached the point
Where carping censors lurk,
He called upon the asterisk
To do his dirty work!
Obviously, this is pre-new millennium. Today, only wardrobe malfunctions get asterisks…if there’s time. The book was a gift from a friend many, many years ago. Tucked inside, I found this note, handwritten by…I have no clue… It said, “Woodrow Wilson,” and underneath his name, “Never Murder a Man who is committing suicide.”
Seems like good advice. Don’t know for sure if it came from Woodrow Wilson, but…it could have.
My last punny…comes from a sign I saw on the side of the road, recently. There is a great deal of construction in my local area, broken roads, detours, traffic that moves first left, then right, then doesn’t move at all, everywhere you go. On one sidestreet, this sign alerted motorists to be aware: “Bump — Flagman Ahead.” Well, my fiance and I elected NOT to bump the flagman, but I can’t say as the rest of the long line of cars behind us came to the same decision. After all, when people see a publicly displayed sign, they often feel compelled to obey it. Poor flagman.
As we pulled away from the construction, there was the usual “End Construction” sign. My fiance, ever the punster, remarked, “Is that a call to action? Should we start a protest group against construction?”
I demurred on the grounds that, no doubt, someone else, somewhere else, is already starting one.
End of post.