Friar's Club Encyclopedia of Jokes

by Barry Dougherty

  “Daddy, what are you doing?” asked little Johnny.

  His father looked around nervously, wondering what he could tell his son. “I, um, I’m just checking out the bathroom for mice,” replied his father.

  Johnny looked at his father with a gaze of confusion and said, “Well, what are you doing? Screwing them?”

  It seems that a little girl and a little boy are arguing about differences between the sexes, he arguing that boys are inherently better and she that girls are. The subject, of course, spills over into the personal realm, so that the real issue is which of the two children is superior. Finally, the boy drops his pants and says, “Here’s something I have that you’ll never have!”

  The little girl is pretty upset by this, since it is quite clearly true. She turns and runs home.

  A while later, she comes running back with a smile on her face. She drops her pants, and says, “My mommy says that with one of these, I can have as many of those as I want!”

  Hanging out with a baby is like hanging out with a really, really small . . . really, really hammered person all the time. That’s really all a baby is. Just the smallest drunkest person that you’ve ever seen in your life. I found myself talking to my sister’s baby the same way I do a buddy at the end of a Saturday night. It’s the same conversation. It’s just me standing over him going, “What’s wrong dude? Why you crying?”

  —NICK SWARDSON

  Two Iraqi fathers meet on the street and ask each other how they’ve been. One replies, “Terrible. With this war, I’ve lost my house and business. How have you been? And the boys, how are they? My two sons became suicide bombers.” The other man says, “These kids blow up so fast these days.”

  —JEFF PIRRAMI

  When you talk to a kid on the phone, you gotta remember the conversation could go in any direction. You just gotta get ready. There’s no segues in the conversation. “Dad, are you coming home tomorrow?” “No, I’m not.” “I have one thousand pennies.”

  —RAY ROMANO

  Alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.

  —EVE ARDEN

  The rotten kid next door isn’t completely useless—at least ten parents use him as a bad example.

  I don’t have any kids. Well, at least none that I know about. I’d like to have kids one day, though. I want to be called Mommy by someone other than Spanish guys in the street.

  —CAROL LEIFER

  Circumcision

  Two men were standing at adjacent urinals when one said to the other, “I’ll bet you were born in Newark, Ohio.”

  “Why, that’s right,” said the second man in surprise.

  “And I’ll bet you were circumcised when you were three days old.”

  “Right again. But how’d you—”

  “And I’ll bet it was done by old Doc Steadman.”

  “Well, yes, but how did you know?” asked the second man in amazement.

  “Well, old Doc always cut them at a sixty-degree angle,” explained the first guy, “and you’re pissing on my shoe.”

  An old Jew was retiring from the string and twine business. “Herschel,” he implored his best friend, “I got one last load of string. Buy me out so I can retire with an empty shop and a clear heart.”

  Herschel had no interest in purchasing a load of string, but his old friend’s impassioned pleading finally wore him down. “Myron, all right, all right,” he finally conceded. “I’ll buy some of your string—enough to reach from the tip of your nose to the tip of your dick.”

  To Herschel’s surprise, his friend embraced him warmly and left without another word. He was even more surprised when a truck arrived the next morning loaded with a massive roll of string. “Myron, what is this?!” he screamed at his friend over the phone.

  “My nose is in Palm Beach,” explained Myron happily, “but the tip of my dick is buried somewhere outside Minsk.”

  I am not a rich man, but whatever I have is profit. I began with nothing—not only that, but after I was a few days old, they took something away from me.

  —GEORGE JESSEL

  A small-town doctor routinely performed circumcisions, and got in the habit of saving the foreskins in a jar of formaldehyde. Many years went by, it came time to retire, and the doctor was cleaning out his office when he came across the jar, now completely full. “Why throw it out?” he reasoned. So he took it to the tailor’s shop downstairs with instructions to make whatever he saw fit.

  Two weeks later the tailor presented him with a beautiful little wallet. “A wallet! That’s all I get after a lifetime of work?” exclaimed the doctor. “There were hundreds and hundreds of foreskins in that jar!”

  “Relax, Doc, just relax,” said the tailor soothingly. “Rub it for a minute or two and it turns into a suitcase.”

  An adult man was converting and becoming a Jew. When asked if he minded being circumcised, he replied, “Why not, it’s no skin off my nose.”

  —RED BUTTONS

  What is the proper medical term for the circumcision of a rabbit?

  A hare cut.

  Vaudeville, radio, and television entertainer Eddie Cantor sent this telegram to producer Irving Thalberg after the birth of Thalberg’s first son: “Congratulations on your latest production—I’m sure it will look better after it’s been cut.”

  —JOEY BISHOP

  Anybody here know what you call the man who performs the ritual of the bris? You know what it is? That’s right. A moyel. A moyel. I want to tell you about a man who was walking along the street in New York.

  He passed by a jewelry shop, walked inside, and said to the owner, “Could you repair my watch?”

  He said, “I’m sorry, I don’t repair watches.”

  “You don’t repair watches? What do you do?”

  “I’m a moyel.”

  “You’re a moyel? Then why do you put all those watches in the window?” asked the man.

  He says, “Well, what would you put in the window?”

  —DR. MURRAY BANKS

  College

  College is the best time of your life. When else are your parents going to spend thousands of dollars a year just for you to go to a strange town and get drunk every night?

  —DAVID WOOD

  I have a daughter who goes to SMU. She could’ve gone to UCLA here in California, but it’s one more letter she’d have to remember.

  —SHECKY GREENE

  I was thrown out of NYU. On the metaphysics final I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

  —WOODY ALLEN

  If you’ve never met a student from the University of Chicago, I’ll describe him to you. If you give him a glass of water, he says, “This is a glass of water. But is it a glass of water? And if it is a glass of water, why is it a glass of water? And eventually he dies of thirst.”

  —SHELLEY BERMAN

  How many Harvard grads does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

  Just one. He grabs the bulb and waits for the world to revolve around him.

  I went to college, majored in philosophy. My father said, “Why don’t you minor in communications so you can wonder out loud?”

  So I did. I got out of school, landed a job as a morning DJ on an all-philosophy radio station, WYMI. “Good morning, it’s 8:05 on YMI. For those of you just waking up, what’s the point, really?”

  —MIKE DUGAN

  A graduate with a science degree asks, “Why does it work?”

  The graduate with an engineering degree asks, “How does it work?”

  The graduate with an accounting degree asks, “How much will it cost?”

  The graduate with a liberal arts degree asks, “Do you want fries with that?”

  I couldn’t get a date the entire freshman year of college. The whole year I spent . . . well, they call it “stalking” now. But I call it “getting to know you.”

  —DAVID ALAN GRIER

  Comedians

  When the iceman cometh, I hope he cometh all over you.

&nbs
p; —RED BUTTONS, ABOUT JOEY BISHOP

  You know, you can be only thirty-five years old, but if your first joke doesn’t get a laugh, you get to be eighty in a hurry. And if you’re eighty and you get laughs in a hurry, then you get to be thirty. Jack will always be thirty.

  —GEORGE BURNS, ABOUT JACK BENNY

  Joey Adams received an honorary law degree from a Chinese university. I am told that a horse once graduated with an honorary degree from this institution. It was the first time in history a college gave an honorary degree to an entire horse.

  —BOB HOPE

  What a wonderful thing to be conscious. I wonder what the people in New Jersey do?

  —WOODY ALLEN

  Take Bob Hope, for example. Take away his class, his dignity, his charm, and what have you got? Milton Berle!

  —AL BERNIE

  I’ve known all of you, Bill. And the truth is, you do taste like chicken. I love you, man!

  —ROBIN WILLIAMS, ABOUT BILLY CRYSTAL

  The Friars hosted a night in honor of Gene Baylos. Gene did a good bit of Joe E.’s routine that night, and right before, Joe was introduced to say something nice about Baylos.

  “I like Gene,” he said. “He’s got very witty ears.”

  —JOEY ADAMS, ABOUT JOE. E. LEWIS

  Sammy was brought up in a poor colored family—and grew up in a rich Jewish home.

  —RED BUTTONS, ABOUT SAMMY DAVIS, JR.

  He’s so popular, when he was in Vietnam they were shooting at him from both sides.

  —DON RICKLES, ABOUT BOB HOPE

  I’d like to introduce Henny Youngman, the king of the one-liners—that’s because the schmuck can’t remember two. This man is the only comic in town that can tell four jokes in a minute, because he’s never interrupted by laughs. I love him—I have no taste, but I love him.

  —MILTON BERLE, ABOUT HENNY YOUNGMAN

  Jerry is the only man to get a Dear John letter from Typhoid Mary—they caught him selling Portnoy coloring books on Sesame Street.

  —MILTON BERLE, ABOUT JERRY LEWIS

  In France, Jerry Lewis is hailed as a genius. That’s the same country that burned Joan of Arc.

  —CHARLIE CALLAS, ABOUT JERRY LEWIS

  This [bleeping bleep] is Man of the Year? I wouldn’t vote him Jew of the Block.

  —JAN MURRAY, ABOUT JERRY LEWIS

  What pisses me off, here’s a man, says one fucking word, “Marvelous!” Everybody’s marvelous. You’re fucking marvelous. You’re marvelous. He gets the fucking Oscar.

  —PAT COOPER, ABOUT BILLY CRYSTAL

  Conscience

  A guilty conscience is the mother of invention.

  —CAROLYN WELLS

  Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.

  —H. L. MENCKEN

  Conscience is the one thing that hurts when everything else feels great.

  Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff.

  —PETER DE VRIES

  A Sunday school teacher was having a hard time getting her young charges to grasp the message of the Good Samaritan. Finally, she pointed at one of the least attentive children and asked, “Alison, suppose on the way to church you passed a vacant lot and saw a man in ragged clothes lying on the ground, so badly beaten up that he was covered in blood . . . What would you do?”

  The eight-year-old’s response: “I’d throw up!”

  Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?

  —JULES FEIFFER

  Conservation and Ecology

  I didn’t realize how bad the smog was getting until they started making freeway signs in Braille.

  Pollution is so bad that when I put air in my tires, two of them died.

  —LEE TULLY

  The giant panda lives in bamboo thickets and feeds on bamboo shoots. There are only thirty-six giant pandas left. The reason there are only thirty-six giant pandas left is the shortage of bamboo shoots, which the natives eat in great quantities, especially with baked giant panda.

  —JACK DOUGLAS

  It’s not that our rivers aren’t fit to drink . . . but where else can you see the fish coughing?

  Help beautify our city dumps—throw something pretty away today!

  The other day I bought a wastebasket and brought it home in a paper bag. And when I got home I put the paper bag in the wastebasket.

  —LILY TOMLIN

  I just found out where all that chemical fertilizer comes from: plastic horses.

  A new report from the government says raw eggs may have salmonella and may be unsafe. In fact, the latest government report says it wasn’t the fall that killed Humpty Dumpty—he was dead before he hit the ground.

  —JAY LENO

  What about all those detergents that are going out into our rivers and the ocean? If this keeps up, it’s going to leave a ring around the country.

  —JOHN BYNER

  Pollution is so bad in New York that I saw the Statue of Liberty holdin’ her nose.

  —MOMS MABLEY

  Save Water—Shower with a Friend

  Two tall trees are growing in the woods. A small tree begins to grow between them.

  One tall tree says to the other, “Is that a son of a beech or a son of a birch?” The other tall tree says it cannot tell. Then one day a woodpecker lands on the small tree.

  One tall tree says, “Woodpecker, you are a tree expert. Can you tell if that is a son of a beech or a son of a birch?”

  The woodpecker takes a taste of the small tree. He replies, “It is neither a son of a beech nor a son of a birch. That, gentlemen, is the best piece of ash I have ever had my pecker in!”

  Cooking

  I can’t cook. I use a smoke alarm as a timer.

  —CAROL SISKIND

  My wife’s not the worst cook in the world, but she keeps burning the coffee. You would, too, if you kept pouring it through the toaster all the time.

  —JACK E. LEONARD

  Did you hear about the guy who went ice fishing and brought home a hundred pounds of ice?

  His wife died trying to cook it.

  My husband says I treat him like he’s a god; every meal is a burnt offering.

  —RHONDA HANSOME

  When microwave ovens didn’t exist . . . did people sit around [in an emotional vacuum] saying, “Heat is so boring. I wish I could bombard a potato with mutant intergalactic energy?”

  —COLIN MCENROE

  When Marilyn Monroe was married to Arthur Miller, his mother always made matzo ball soup. After the tenth time, Marilyn said, “Gee, Arthur, these matzo balls are pretty nice, but isn’t there any other part of the matzo you can eat?”

  Eating her cooking is like playing Russian roulette. I never know which meal is going to kill me.

  —HARVEY STONE

  Courage

  This guy was so brave, he went down to the Russian embassy and sang “Look for the Union Label” in Polish.

  —RED BUTTONS

  The Texan was trying to impress on the New Englander the valor of the heroes of the Alamo. “I bet they were braver than any man from your part of the country,” he declared.

  “I suppose you’ve never heard of Paul Revere?” countered the New Englander.

  “Sounds familiar,” said the Texan. “Isn’t he the guy who ran for help?”

  The new employee had only been with the firm for a few months when she went in to ask for a raise.

  “So soon!” The boss was taken aback. “Certainly not. In this company you have to work yourself up.”

  “I have!” she insisted. “Look at me—I’m trembling all over.”

  “In the center ring,” cries the ringmaster, “we have Nero, the boldest and bravest animal trainer in the world. Watch, ladies and gentlemen, as he puts his head between the jaws of our man-eating lion!” The crowd roars as Nero pulls out his head unscathed.

  “Now, folks, watch this!” shouts the announcer, as Nero
unzips his pants and puts his prick between the giant teeth. “Don’t do it!” shrieks the audience as the lion’s jaws clamp shut. But without flinching Nero pulls them open and removes his unharmed penis. Wild cheers fill the arena.

  When the noise dies down, the ringmaster steps forward and announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, a prize of five thousand, yes, five thousand dollars, to any man in the audience who’ll try that trick.” His jaw drops as a small, effeminate-looking man steps right up to the ringside. “You’re going to repeat that trick with our man-eating lion in front of all these people?” the ringmaster asks incredulously.

  “Certainly,” says the man, “but I must tell you something first. I don’t think I can open my mouth as wide as the lion did.”

  A young man was so proud of his new red Cadillac that he just had to show it off, so he cruised through the bad part of town. At a stoplight a giant older man hauled him out of the driver’s seat, drew a circle around him in the road, and told him not to step out of the circle unless he wanted to get the shit beat out of him.

  The older man started to demolish the Caddie, beginning with the headlights and windows, when he heard the young man laughing. He moved on to the body and engine, but in between crashes he couldn’t help hearing the young man’s hysterical giggles. Finally, the older man came over with his crowbar and said, “What in hell you laughin’ at? Your fancy car’s never gonna run again.”

  Snickering, the young man replied, “So? Ever since you’ve been tearing up my car, I’ve been stepping in and out of this circle.”

  Crime

  Did you hear about the practical joker who sent an anonymous telegram to the town’s ten leading citizens? It read: “All has been found out. Flee before dawn.”

  Seven of the ten did.

  If you had a penny and you were on top of the Empire State Building, and you took that penny and threw if off the Empire State Building and it hit somebody in the head, it would kill him. Talk about getting your money’s worth.