Friar's Club Encyclopedia of Jokes

by Barry Dougherty

  Though the battle was a long one, the captain and his crew managed to fend off the enemy ship.

  Later that day, the lookout shouted, “Two enemy ships on the horizon.”

  As before, the captain said to his ensign, “Get me my red shirt.” And, as before, the ensign did as his captain asked. The battle took the rest of the day to fight, and again they managed to defeat the two enemy ships.

  That evening, the ensign asked his captain, “Sir, why, before every battle, do you ask for your red shirt?”

  The captain replied, “Well, if I am wounded in battle, the blood will not show and the crew will continue to fight.”

  The crew was listening, and they were impressed. They had a brave captain.

  The next morning, the lookout shouted, “Ten enemy ships on the horizon.”

  The ensign looked at his captain, waiting for the usual orders. The captain said to his ensign, “Ensign, get me my brown pants.”

  F

  Failure

  Failure has gone to his head.

  —WILSON MIZNER (ATTRIBUTED), ABOUT A BANKRUPT

  BUSINESSMAN WHO REMAINED INCORRIGIBLY OPTIMISTIC

  If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

  —NEWT HEILSCHER

  When “Winston Churchill was defeated in his bid for reelection as prime minister, his wife consoled him with the thought that the defeat was a blessing in disguise. “If so,” responded Churchill, “then it is very effectively disguised.”

  My friends all told me I’d never be anything but a failure at this business, so I decided to do something about it—I went out and made some new friends.

  He’s never been very successful. When opportunity knocks, he complains about the noise.

  Faith

  Old Mrs. Watkins awoke one spring morning to find that the river had flooded not only her basement but the entire first floor of her house. And, looking out her bedroom window, she saw that the water was still rising. Two men passing by in a rowboat shouted up an invitation to row to safety with them.

  “No, thank you,” replied Mrs. Watkins tartly. “The Lord will provide.” The men shrugged and rowed on.

  By evening the water level forced Mrs. Watkins to climb out on her roof, where she was spotted by a cheerful man in a motor-boat. “Don’t worry, lady,” he called across the water. “I’ll pick you right up.”

  “Please don’t trouble yourself—the Lord will provide.” Mrs. Watkins then turned her back on her would-be rescuer, who buzzed off downriver.

  Pretty soon Mrs. Watkins was forced to take refuge atop her chimney, the only part of the house still above water. Fortunately, a Red Cross cutter came by on patrol. “Jump in, ma’am,” urged a rescue worker.

  Mrs. Watkins shook her head vehemently. “The Lord will provide.” So the boat departed, the water rose, and the old woman drowned.

  Dripping wet and thoroughly annoyed, she came through the pearly gates and demanded to speak to God.

  “What happened?” she cried. “I thought the Lord would provide.”

  “For cryin’ out loud, lady,” said God wearily, “I sent three boats.”

  —RED SKELTON

  Saintly Mrs. Ficalora came to morning mass as usual, kneeled down, and unburdened herself. “Dear God,” she admitted, “sometimes I just don’t understand the wisdom of your ways. My neighbor, that godless slut Angie D’Onofrio never sets foot in church, is on her fourth husband—which doesn’t keep her from entertaining half the men in the parish—yet she has two fine houses, three cars, all the jewels a woman could want, and a closet full of furs. Why has she been so blessed and I not?”

  “Because,” God’s voice boomed from behind the altar, “she doesn’t bug me!”

  Among many other attractions, the traveling circus featured Wanda the Wondrous, a faith healer who claimed the ability to heal any malady, slight or serious, real or imagined. She usually drew a big crowd, from which she would select a few people on whom to practice her healing skills. Among the unfortunate one Friday night, were Cecily Sussman, on crutches due to a congenital spinal malformation, and Irving Bland, who had suffered from a terrible lisp all his life. “Cecily and Irving,” asked Wanda, “do you wish to be healed?”

  “Yeth, ma’am,” said Irving, and Cecily nodded vigorously.

  Wanda motioned them behind a purple velvet curtain and proceeded to chant and pray, grinding powders together and swaying before the audience. Finally she intoned, “Cecily, throw out your left crutch.”

  A crutch came sailing over the curtain.

  “Cecily, throw out your right crutch.”

  A second crutch clattered on the floor at the healer’s feet.

  “Now, Irving,” asked Wanda solemnly, “say something to the people.”

  Irving’s voice came clearly from behind the purple curtain.

  “Thethily Thuthman just fell on her ath.”

  The minister of an Oklahoma farming parish convened a prayer meeting to pray for rain during a serious drought. Noting that on that cloudless morning the church was full to overflowing, he came to the pulpit and posed a single question to his flock. “You all know why we’re here,” he said. “What I want to know is, why didn’t any of you bring umbrellas?”

  One night little Johnny finished his prayers with “God bless Grandma,” and the very next day his grandmother kicked the bucket. Johnny told his family about his prayer, but no one seemed to give it too much thought. A week later he ended his prayers with “God bless Grandpa,” and the next day his grandfather died. The family was running a little scared by now, and when Johnny finished his prayers one night with “God bless Daddy,” his mother thought maybe she better warn her husband about it.

  All that night Johnny’s dad couldn’t sleep for worrying, and the next day he came home from work early. “I had a terrible day worrying about all this,” he confided to his wife.

  “You think you had a bad day,” she said. “The mailman came to the door and dropped dead.”

  Fame

  The pope decided to visit America and was gratified to see a huge crowd waiting for him at JFK Airport. But it was disconcerting to hear them chanting, “Elvis! Elvis! Elvis!” as he stepped down from the plane. “Oh, my children, thank you,” he said, bowing his head modestly. “But I am not Elvis.”

  No one seemed to hear him, and he was ushered into a white stretch limo with “Elvis” written in diamonds on the doors. “Bless you,” he said to the sequined chauffeur, “but I am not Elvis.”

  When the limo pulled up to the Waldorf, it had to make its way through a huge crowd crammed behind police barricades. The crowd was chanting, “Elvis! Elvis! Elvis!”

  Shaking his head, the pope followed his luggage to the most sumptuous suite in the hotel. As he was unpacking, the door behind him opened and in walked three lovely women clad in the scantiest of negligees. The pope looked them over for a moment or two, cleared his throat, and began to sing, “Well, it’s one for the money, two for the show. . . .”

  The story is told that Winston Churchill, scheduled to address the entire United Kingdom in an hour, hailed a cab in London’s West End and told the cabbie to drive as fast as he could for the BBC.

  “Sorry, sir,” said the cabbie, shaking his head. “You’ll have to find yourself another cab.”

  “And why is that?” asked the annoyed prime minister.

  “Ordinarily it wouldn’t be a problem, sir,” explained the driver apologetically, “but Mr. Churchill’s broadcasting at six o’clock and I want to get home in time to hear him.”

  Churchill was so gratified that he pulled a pound note out of his wallet and handed it over. The cabbie took one look at the bill and said, “Hop in, sir—the devil with Mr. Churchill.”

  I was walking down Madison Avenue and I saw a very good-looking tie in a shop window. So I went in, and before I could say anything, the manager said, “Oh, Tony Randall. In my store! Please, just a minute, I gotta call my wife, she’ll never believe me!”


  He calls her up and says to me, “Here, say hello, say anything, talk to my wife. Say anything!” He flattered me so much that I bought the tie, bought six shirts. I didn’t have enough money. I said, “Will you take a check?”

  He said, “Do you have any identification?”

  November 16, 1916, was the Friars Frolic in honor of Enrico Caruso in the Great Hall of the Monastery. The Friars’ abbot, George M. Cohan, was the toastmaster; Friars Victor Herbert and Charles Emerson Cook wrote a special song for the occasion; and Irving Berlin arranged the entertainment, which included Al Jolson, John Barrymore, and Enrico Caruso himself.

  Into this setting ambled the young vaudevillian Joey Frisco. Every hotshot in town was waiting patiently backstage to get on. Big as they were, they each had a respect for Caruso that amounted to awe. The famous opera star stood in the wings, waiting his turn, but nobody actually had the courage to address the great man himself—that is, nobody but Frisco. “Hey C-C-Caruso,” he nudged, “d-d-don’t do ‘D-D-Darktown Strutters’ Ball.’ That’s my number, and I follow you.”

  —JOEY ADAMS, ABOUT JOEY FRISCO

  I don’t mind men who kiss and tell. I need all the publicity I can get.

  —RUTH BUZZI

  Three guys were sitting around talking about what being really, really famous would be like. The first guy defined it as being invited to the White House for a personal chat with the president.

  “Nah,” disagreed the second fellow. “Real fame would be being in there chatting when the hot line rings, and the president won’t take the call.” The third guy said they both had it wrong. “Fame,” he declared, “is when you’re in the Oval Office and the hot line rings, the president answers it, listens for a second, and then says, ‘It’s for you.’”

  George Jessel could spend as much on a girl as Mike Todd could on a night of gin. A couple of years back he chartered a plane to take him from Cleveland to New York because he had a date and no commercial airline could get him in on time. Due to the low ceiling, we couldn’t land, and kept circling for more than an hour. Tension mounted, and conversation in the plane ceased. “My luck,” I murmured. “We’ll get killed and you’ll get top billing.”

  —JOEY ADAMS

  When the brash young advertising executive arrived at La Coupole for his lunch appointment, he spotted Bill Gates at a corner table and went right over. “Excuse me for interrupting your meal, Mr. Gates,” he began, “but I know how much you appreciate enterprise and initiative. I’m trying to win over a very important account today—it could really make or break my company—and the clients I’m meeting with would be incredibly impressed if you stopped by our table at some point and said, ‘Hello, Mike.’ It would be an incredible favor, Mr. Gates, and some day I’d make it up to you.”

  “Okay, okay,” sighed Gates, and went back to his smoked pheasant. He finished and was putting on his coat when he remembered the young man’s request. Obligingly, he went over to his table, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Hi, Mike.”

  “Not now, Bill,” interrupted the young man. “Can’t you see I’m eating?”

  Eddie Cantor and Georgie Jessel were on the same bill on a vaudeville unit. “When they arrived in town, Jessel saw the billing, which read: “Eddie Cantor with Georgie Jessel.”

  Georgie berated manager, Irving Mansfield. “What kind of conjunction is that—Eddie Cantor with Georgie Jessel?” Irving promised to fix it.

  The next day the marquee read: “Eddie Cantor but Georgie Jessel.”

  —JOEY ADAMS

  I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re in my socks.

  —GROUCHO MARX

  A big-time celebrity was doing a benefit at a senior citizens home. He went up to one of the elderly ladies, sat down beside her, and said, “Do you know who I am?”

  She said, “No, but go to the front desk. They’ll tell you who you are.”

  —NORM CROSBY

  Family

  Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

  —GEORGE BURNS

  Nothing in life is “fun for the whole family.”

  —JERRY SEINFELD

  George: This family of yours, did they all live together?

  Gracie: Yes, my father, my uncle, my cousin, my brother, and my nephew used to sleep in one bed, and my—

  George: I’m surprised your grandfather didn’t sleep with them.

  Gracie: He did. But he died and they made him get up.

  —GEORGE BURNS AND GRACIE ALLEN

  After all, what is a pedestrian? He is a man who has two cars—one being driven by his wife, the other by one of his children.

  —ROBERT BRADBURY

  The trouble with the average family is it has too much month left over at the end of the money.

  —BILL VAUGHAN

  My parents used to send me to spend summers with my grandparents. I hate cemeteries!

  —CHRIS FONSECA

  I worked some gigs in the Deep South . . . Alabama . . . you talk about Darwin’s waiting room. There are guys in Alabama who are their own father.

  —DENNIS MILLER

  The middle-aged man walked into the bar with a shit-eating grin on his face and ordered a round for the house. “It’s nice to see someone in such a good mood,” commented the bartender. “Mind if I ask why?”

  “This is the happiest day of my life—I’m finally taller than my brother Jim,” explained the fellow, beaming from ear to ear.

  The bartender studied his customer disbelievingly. “Are you trying to tell me that at your age you actually grew taller?”

  “Of course not! See, Jim was in an accident on the interstate yesterday,” he explained cheerfully, “and they had to amputate both his legs.”

  Hamlet is the tragedy of tackling a family problem too soon after college.

  —TOM MASON

  The reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy.

  —SAM LEVENSON

  My parents threw a great going-away party for me. According to the letter.

  —EMO PHILIPS

  Fashion

  A woman’s dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.

  —SOPHIA LOREN

  I went to a store and asked to see something cheap in a dress. The saleswoman said, “The mirror is to the left.”

  —JIM BAILY, IMPERSONATING PHYLLIS DILLER

  One night, Fred came home from work and told his wife over dinner that he had just signed up to play with the company hockey team. Worried that he might hurt himself, his wife went out the next day to buy him a jock strap.

  The effeminate salesclerk was only too happy to help her. “They come in colors, you know,” he told her. “We have Virginal White, Ravishing Red, and Promiscuous Purple.”

  “I guess white will do just fine,” she said.

  “They come in different sizes, too, you know,” said the clerk.

  “Gee, I’m really not sure what Fred’s size is,” confessed his wife. So the clerk extended his pinkie.

  “No, it’s bigger than that.”

  The clerk extended a second finger.

  “No, it’s bigger than that,” said the wife.

  A third finger.

  “Still bigger,” she said.

  “When the clerk stuck out his thumb too, she said, “Yes, that’s about right.”

  So the clerk put all five fingers in his mouth, pulled them out, and announced expertly, “That’s a medium.”

  Never let a panty line show around your ankles.

  —JOAN RIVERS

  What counts is not how many animals were killed to make the fur, but how many animals the woman had to sleep with to get the fur.

  —ANGELA LAGRECA

  A lot of women are getting tattoos. Don’t do it, that’s sick. That butterfly looks great on your breast when you’re twenty, thirty. When you get to be seventy, eighty, it stretch
es into a condor.

  —BILLY ELMER

  When Mr. Petrowski realized he was having trouble reading road signs, he knew it was time to visit the eye doctor and get his first pair of glasses. Seating him in front of the eye chart, the opthalmologist instructed his patient to cover one eye with his hand. But despite the doctor’s repeated instructions, Mr. Petrowski seemed incapable of anything other than a saluting motion.

  Finally the opthalmologist lost all patience. Fashioning a mask out of a brown paper bag and cutting out a hole for one eye, he put it over the man’s head. “How does that feel, Mr. Petrowski?” he asked.

  After a little pause, Petrowski answered, “The fit is fine, Doctor, but I confess I was hoping for something a little more stylish, maybe something in a tortoiseshell frame.”

  A well-endowed woman entered a chic Madison Avenue boutique and tried on every evening gown in the store. Finally setting eyes on a very sexy, low-cut dress hanging in the display window, she asked the exhausted salesclerk if she could try it on.

  “Of course, madam,” he muttered through clenched teeth, squeezed into the window, and began the painstaking task of taking the dummy apart to remove the gown. Eventually he succeeded and was able to hand it over to the demanding customer.

  “How do I look?” she asked, emerging from the dressing room. “Does it show off my marvelous breasts to advantage?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” the clerk assured her, “but do hairy chests run in your family?”

  My dad’s pants kept creeping up on him. By sixty-five, he was just a pair of pants and a head.

  —JEFF ALTMAN

  I know a guy who loves wearing a dress so much that when he saw the movie Some Like It Hot, he thought it was a documentary.

  I base my fashion taste on what doesn’t itch.

  —GILDA RADNER

  A man and a woman walk into a very posh Rodeo Drive furrier. “Show the lady your finest mink!” the fellow exclaims.

  The owner of the shop goes in back and comes out with an absolutely gorgeous full-length coat.

  The lady tries it on, looks wonderful in it, and the man says, “It’s yours.”