A neutron walks into a bar and orders a beer.
“How much do I owe you?” he says.
“For you,” says the bartender, “no charge.”
Humor
“Geographical Love Song”
In the State of Mass.
There lived a lass,
I love to go N. C.;
No other Miss.
Can e’er, I Wis.,
Be half so dear to Me.
R. I. is blue
And her cheeks the hue
Of shells where waters swash;
On her pink-white phiz.
There Nev. Ariz.
The least complexion Wash.
La.! could I win
The heart of Minn.,
I’d ask for nothing more,
But I only dream
Upon the theme,
And Conn. it o’er and Ore.
Why is it, pray,
I can’t Ala.
This love that makes me Ill.?
N. Y., O., Wy.
Kan. Nev. Ver. I
Propose to her my will?
I shun the task
‘Twould be to ask
This gentle maid to wed.
And so, to press
My suit, I guess
Alaska Pa. instead.
— Anonymous, cited in Carolyn Wells, A Whimsey Anthology, 1906
“Topographical”
An old couple living in Gloucester
Had a beautiful girl, but they loucester;
She fell from a yacht,
And never the spacht
Could be found where the cold waves had toucester.
An old lady living in Worcester
Had a gift of a handsome young rorcester;
But the way that it crough,
As ‘twould never get through,
Was more than the lady was uorcester.
At the bar in the old inn at Leicester
Was a beautiful bar-maid named Heicester;
She gave to each guest
Only what was the buest,
And they all, with one accord, bleicester.
— Anonymous, cited in Carolyn Wells, A Whimsey Anthology, 1906
Rimshot
Why should not a chicken cross the road?
It would be a fowl proceeding.
— Potter’s American Monthly, 1892
Can Do
PLEASE DO NOT BE A DOG.
— Sign, Paris park
Rimshot
Three men are stranded on a desert island when a bottle washes up on the shore. When they uncork the bottle, a genie appears and offers each a wish.
The first man wishes he were in Paris. The genie snaps his fingers, and the man instantly disappears.
The second man wishes he were in Hollywood, and at a snap of the genie’s fingers, he too vanishes.
The third man, now alone on the island, looks around and says, “I wish my friends were back.”
Inferno Etiquette
Mark Twain’s list of 27 items to be rescued from a boardinghouse fire:
- Fiancees
- Persons toward whom the operator feels a tender sentiment, but has not yet declared himself
- Sisters
- Stepsisters
- Nieces
- First cousins
- Cripples
- Second cousins
- Invalids
- Young lady relations by marriage
- Third cousins, and young lady friends of the family
- The unclassified
- Babies
- Children under 10 years of age
- Young widows
- Young married females
- Elderly married ditto
- Elderly widows
- Clergymen
- Boarders in general
- Female domestics
- Male ditto
- Landlady
- Landlord
- Firemen
- Furniture
- Mothers-in-law
“In either ascending or descending the stairs,” Twain wrote, “the young gentleman shall walk beside the young lady, if the stairs are wide enough to allow it; otherwise he must precede her. In no case must he follow her. This is de rigueur.”
Limerick
There was a young lady named Susie
Whose surname said she was a floozie.
Cathouse was the name;
It caused her such shame
She chose to pronounce it Cathouse.
“Does a One-Legged Duck Swim in Circles?”
Recent winners of the Foot in Mouth Award, presented each year by the British Plain English Campaign for “a baffling quote by a public figure”:
- 2005: Welsh politician Rhodri Morgan on the police: “The only thing which isn’t up for grabs is no change, and I think it’s fair to say it’s all to play for, except for no change.”
- 2004: M.P. Boris Johnson on the television program Have I Got News For You: “I could not fail to disagree with you less.”
- 2003: U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a news conference: “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns–the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
- 2002: Actor Richard Gere: “I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe and somebody said I was a snake, I’d think, ‘No, actually I am a giraffe.'”
- 2001: English artist Tracey Emin: “When it comes to words, I have a uniqueness that I find almost impossible in terms of art–and it’s my words that actually make my art quite unique.”
- 2000: Alicia Silverstone, quoted in the Sunday Telegraph: “I think that [the film] Clueless was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it’s true lightness.”
Writer’s Block
A limerick fan from Australia
Regarded his work as a failure:
His verses were fine
Until the fourth line.