Mensch tracht, und Gott lacht

Saturday, February 18, 2006

It's Jay Day!

In honor of Mr. Homnick, our consummate playa-on-words (see the title of his post below this one, for example), we offer this bit of e-mail apocrypha to completely ruin your sleepy, snowy weekend:


Here are the 10 first place winners in the International Pun Contest:

1. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, "I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger."

2. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. The one turns to the other and says, "Dam!"

3. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it too.

4. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, " I've lost my electron." The other says, "Are you sure?" The first replies, "I'm positive."

5. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.

6. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. "But why?", they asked, as they moved off. "Because," he said, "I can't stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer."

7. A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named "Ahmal." The other goes to a family in Spain, and they name him "Juan." Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, "They're twins! If you've seen Juan, you've seen Ahmal."

8. These friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds. Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival florist across town thought the competition was unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. He went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored him. So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town to "persuade" them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he'd be back if they didn't close up shop. Terrified they did so---thereby proving that only Hugh can prevent florist friars.

9. Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him...a super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

10. And finally, there was a person who sent ten different puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.

3 comments:

Jay D. Homnick said...

No one offered me a chance to enter, those anti-Semites what they are!

But my personal favorite comes from my dentist, Dr. Berger, who used to date a lovely young woman who had a bad knee and was always having treatments and surgeries. Finally, in exasperation, Berger exclaimed: "What's a joint like this doing in a nice girl like you?

Jay D. Homnick said...

Incidentally, this genre of constructing elaborate and absurd scenarios in order to produce a long phrase that sounds like a popular phrase has never been my cup of tea.

Yet I can never get this particular one out of my mind because I read it in Boys' Life 40 years ago and it lodged in my brain.

It goes like this:

In this orphanage, there was a bunch of kids who were at the mercy of this mean doctor. So one day a genie came and cast a spell that turned the doctor into an apple. The only proviso was that every day they must check its weight.

The moral of the story was that "a weigh a day keeps the doctor an apple".

Barry Vanhoff said...

A termite walked into a bar and asked, "Is the bar tender here?"

Jay ... I like your two jokes, as they turn the popular phrases upside-down.