Friar's Club Encyclopedia of Jokes

by Barry Dougherty

  Two days later, right on schedule, Jake arrived with two girls in tow. “I didn’t know what a panoe was,” he explained cheerfully, “but I got the girls.”

  The determined angler staggered up to the counter with an armload of the latest gear. As the cashier was ringing up the total, which came to several hundred dollars, the angler commented, “You know, you could save me an awful lot of money if you’d just start selling fish here.”

  Stinginess

  Hear about the Scotsman who quit golf, then took it up again twelve years later?

  He found his ball.

  An engineer with a small construction company was in the field when a tremendous storm front caught up with him and all outbound flights were canceled. He cabled the home office: “Marooned by floods. Send instructions.”

  Ms. Lowenstein, the owner of the firm and a woman of legendary tightfistedness, wired back: “Begin annual vacation immediately.”

  A chronic borrower begged an old friend to lend him a hundred dollars. “I’ll pay it back the minute I return from Chicago,” he promised.

  “Exactly what day are you returning?” the friend asked.

  The man shrugged. “Who’s going?”

  —MYRON COHEN

  Did you hear about the Scotsman who was so cheap that he went out into the yard on Christmas Eve and fired a shotgun?

  So he could tell his kids that Santa had killed himself.

  He likes to watch porno movies in reverse because he likes the part where the hooker gives the money back to the guy.

  —JIM BELUSHI, ABOUT BILLY CRYSTAL

  A tightwad owed a wedding present, and everything in the store seemed way overpriced—until he spotted a lovely porcelain vase which had, unfortunately, been broken. The storekeeper was delighted to part with the damaged item for a low price, and agreed to ship it to the newlyweds.

  The next week the cheapskate received a note thanking him politely for the vase. It concluded, “Thank you, too, for taking care to wrap each piece separately.”

  He read in the paper that it takes ten dollars a year to support a kid in India, so he sent his kid there.

  —RED BUTTONS

  He had an awful dizzy spell. He dropped a dime in a revolving door and it took him five minutes to find it.

  —BOB HOPE

  Stress

  Nervous? I feel like a pizza on the way to Jabba the Hut!

  My husband was made president at the agency, and of course, it affected our lives. There are a lot of pressures. It made him very nervous. He became a nail-biter. Now, this doesn’t sound like much, but it’s my nails that he’s biting.

  My grandfather says, “You just write a few jokes and you’re riding the gravy train?”

  First of all, it’s hard to write jokes. Second of all, what is a gravy train? I didn’t know they were actually hauling gravy by rail. People gather around big mounds of mashed potatoes waiting for the five-fifteen gravy train to show up?

  —RICH HALL

  One has two duties—to be worried and not to be worried.

  —E. M. FORSTER

  What’s the difference between anxiety and panic?

  Anxiety is the first time you can’t do it a second time, and panic is the second time you can’t do it the first time.

  When you don’t have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it’s sex. When you have both, it’s health. If everything is simply jake, then you’re frightened of death.

  —J. P. DONLEAVY

  I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.

  —CHARLES M. SCHULZ

  The psychiatrist pointed out that most of the things his patient was anxious about never actually came to pass.

  “I know,” admitted the patient unhappily, “but then I worry about why they didn’t happen.”

  The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

  —ROBERT FROST

  Listening to the radio on the way to work doesn’t help either. The other morning the disc jockey asked, “Hey, what makes you so sure you locked the front door?”

  Stupidity

  Mr. Weinberg came home unexpectedly and found his wife in bed with another man. Furious, he cried, “What are you doing?”

  “See,” said Mrs. Weinberg, turning to her lover, “I told you he was stupid.”

  When I was a kid, I was disappointed when I learned what an idiot Adam was. God gave him a woman and an apple and he ate the apple.

  —NORM CROSBY

  Why did the Mafia have Einstein killed?

  Because he knew too much.

  Did you hear about the dumb guy who got his dick stuck in the battery?

  He was told he had to jump it in order to get his car started.

  Comic Stanley Myron Handelman says, “My house was burglarized about ten times. Finally I figured I’m really going to get this guy. So I made believe I went out, turned off all the lights, and hid in the closet. This guy thought I was out, came in, and stole two candlesticks, my silverware, and a portable television set. He thinks he’s gonna get away. But this time I got a complete description of him. He was average height and build and he was wearing a rubber mask of Charles de Gaulle.”

  —JOEY ADAMS

  He would come in and say he changed his mind—which was a gilded figure of speech, because he didn’t have any.

  —MARK TWAIN

  How about the kid whose teacher told him to write a hundred-word essay on what he did during summer vacation?

  He wrote, “Not much,” fifty times.

  A carload of morons approached the scene of an accident. “Oh my God,” gasped the driver, pulling over for a closer look at the crumpled sedan, “that looks like Joe’s car.” So they all piled out and walked closer.

  “Look,” said the second, “that’s Joe’s arm—I’d know that watch anywhere.”

  “I’m sure that’s Joe’s leg,” said the third, pointing out where it lay against the curb.

  “And look—that’s definitely Joe’s head,” shouted the fourth, running after an object rolling slowly down the street. “Joe, Joe,” he cried, picking it up. “Are you all right?”

  Just before dawn, an Indian chief walked into his daughter’s tent unannounced, only to find her in an embrace with one of the village’s handsome young braves. Irate, he said to the brave, “Now that you’ve had relations with my daughter, you must marry her. But first you must pass an endurance test to prove your worth.”

  “I love your daughter,” the young tribesman avowed, “and will be happy to submit to any test.”

  The chief and the brave walked down to the lake by the village, wrapped in their bearskins because it was mid-February and the temperature was five degrees below zero. They stopped on the edge of the frozen lake and the chief said, “You must chop a hole in the ice, swim the three miles to the other side, then swim back. Upon your return, we shall have a great feast and you shall wed my daughter.”

  “Love shall sustain me through this trial of my manhood,” the brave vowed. And when he had finished chopping through the ice, he plunged into the icy waters. Three hours later there was no sign of the young brave. And though the vigil was kept until the wee hours of the evening, by then everyone in the village knew the worst—the young brave had not survived.

  In his memory, the chief’s daughter decided to name the lake after her lover. And to this day, it’s referred to as Lake Stupid.

  He’s so stupid, he once studied five days for a urine test.

  —NORM CROSBY

  The basketball coach stormed into the university president’s office and demanded a raise right then and there.

  “Jesus Christ, man,” protested President Kubritski, “you already make more than the entire English department.”

  “Yeah, maybe so, but you don’t know what I have to put up with,” the coach blustered. “Look.” He went out into the hall and grabbed a jock who was jogging down the hallway. “Run over to my office a
nd see if I’m there,” he ordered.

  Twenty minutes later the jock returned, sweaty and out of breath. “You’re not there, sir,” he reported.

  “Oh, I see what you mean,” conceded President Kubritski, scratching his head. “I would have phoned.”

  A fellow walked into a nice-looking bar, sat down, and ordered a drink. As he sat there, he noticed people walking in and out of a back room but he didn’t really think twice about it. Ordering another drink, he asked the bartender casually, “So, what do people around here do for excitement?”

  “See that number on the back of your seat?” answered the bartender. “If your number’s called, you get a free piece of ass.”

  “Wow, that sounds great,” said the guy, deciding to stick around. When it came time to order another drink, he turned to the guy next to him and griped, “Hell, I’ve been here over an hour—how do you win at this thing?”

  The man gave him a conspiratorial wink and said, “Don’t give up, buddy. Hell, my wife has already won five times!”

  “Look at my new watch,” said one Aggie to another. “This here shows what time it is now. And when you push this little button, you can see what time it was at this exact time yesterday.”

  When the son of a wealthy Italian industrialist was kidnapped, his parents waited impatiently for word from his abductors. The first contact was a box that arrived on the doorstep containing the boy’s left ear.

  “Magnifico!” exclaimed the magnate. “As soon as we get alla his parts, we can put him back together again.” A stranger walks into a bar and announces loudly, “Hey, guys, have I got some great longshoremen jokes for you!”

  The bartender leans over and says in an ominous tone, “Listen, if I were you, I’d watch my tongue. The two three-hundred-pound bouncers are longshoremen; I’m no midget, and I’m a longshoreman; and so is every other guy in here.”

  “Oh, no problem,” counters the stranger cheerfully. “I’ll talk v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.”

  Remember, even a head of iceberg lettuce knows more than you do. It knows whether or not that light really does go out when the refrigerator door shuts.

  Three men were sitting at a bar. Ordering a drink, the first said, “I hate this place. I know a place on State Street where I can get every third drink free.”

  “That’s nothing,” spoke up the second. “I know a joint over on the west side where every other drink is free.”

  “Oh yeah?” chipped in the third guy. “Well I know a place on the south side where every drink is free and at the end of the night you can get laid in the parking lot!”

  “No kidding?” asked his companions. “That sounds great—where’d you hear about it?”

  “From my wife,” he told them proudly.

  If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t more people happy?

  A guy walks into work, and both of his ears are all bandaged up. The boss says, “What happened to your ears?”

  He says, “Yesterday I was ironing a shirt when the phone rang and shhh! I accidentally answered the iron.”

  The boss says, “Well, that explains one ear, but what happened to your other ear?”

  He says, “Well, jeez, I had to call the doctor!”

  Chester walks into Marshall Dillon’s office with a huge boner. The marshall says, “For Christ’s sakes, Chester, go out in the barn and stick that thing in a shovelful of horseshit.”

  Chester walks into the barn with this huge hard-on, and there’s Miss Kitty, lying in the hay playing with herself. She takes one look at Chester, spreads her legs, and says, “Put it in there, Chester.”

  Chester says, “The whole shovelful?”

  Stupid Steven is walking home loaded late one night and smacks into a tree. He backs up, and then walks into the tree again. Twice more the same thing happens.

  He says, “This is just terrific. I should have been home two hours ago, and here I am lost in the forest.”

  Why’d the dimwitted girl stop wearing her training bra?

  The wheels were irritating her armpits.

  Two friends rented a boat and fished in a lake every day. One day they caught thirty fish. One man said to the other, “Mark this spot so we can come here tomorrow.”

  The next day when they were driving to rent the boat, the same one said, “Did you mark that spot?”

  His friend replied, “Yeah, I put a big X on the bottom of the boat.”

  The first one said, “You fool! What if we don’t get that same boat today!”

  Two guys, Tom and Jack, were sitting in a bar one day, when two fishermen walked in with two huge trout. Jack asked where they got the fish, and the fishermen told them that they go down to the bridge, and one guy holds the other by the ankles until a fish is caught.

  Tom and Jack figured they could do that.

  After holding Tom for about twenty minutes, Jack asked him if he had anything, and the reply was “No.” About twenty more minutes passed, Jack asked again, and again the reply was “No.” Finally, Tom yelled, “Pull me up!! Pull me up!”

  Jack said, “Ya got one?”

  Tom said, “No! A train is coming!!”

  Lifeguard: I’ve been watching you, Mr. Jones, and you’ll have to stop urinating in the pool.

  Mr. Jones: But everybody urinates in the pool.

  Lifeguard: From the diving board?

  A prominent Russian scientist conducted a very important experiment. He trained a flea to jump upon giving her a verbal command (“Jump!”).

  In the first stage of the experiment, he removed the flea’s leg, told her to jump, and the flea jumped. So he wrote in his scientific notebook: “Upon removing one leg, all flea organs function properly.”

  So, he removed the second leg, asked the flea to jump, she obeyed, so he wrote again: “Upon removing the second leg, all flea organs function properly.”

  Thereafter he removed all the legs but one, the flea jumped when ordered, so he wrote again: “Upon removing the next leg, all flea organs function properly.”

  Then he removed the last leg, told the flea to jump, and nothing happened.

  He did not want to take a chance, so he repeated the experiment several times, and the legless flea never jumped. So he wrote the conclusion: “Upon removing the last leg, the flea loses sense of hearing.”

  A man is walking past a travel agent’s office when he notices a billboard announcing “Four-Day Cruise Down the Murray River—$40 all inclusive.” Impressed by the low price, he races into the shop, slaps forty dollars on the counter and announces, “I’m here for the Murray cruise.”

  Quick as a wink, the travel agent whips out a baseball bat and knocks him unconscious.

  When the man wakes, he finds himself tied to a floating log and drifting down the river. After a time, he notices another man in the same predicament on the other side of the river. “Forty-dollar Murray cruise?” he calls out.

  “Yep!” says the man on the other side. “I’ll bet you we don’t even get breakfast,” he yells.

  “Well,” calls the other man, “we did last year.”

  Success

  A friend of mine got a seat in his honor at a local college. He would have been more flattered had they taken off the strip that said “Sanitized for your protection.”

  When her formal education was over, a young woman went out into the world to start her own business. After a year, she reported that she was worth five thousand dollars, but her parents merely smiled. After a few more years her net worth had grown to some fifteen thousand dollars, and each year it increased by modest amounts, but her parents never had more than a smile or pat on the back for her.

  Then one year she came home and announced that in order to keep the business going, she’d had to borrow a million dollars. At this her father bounded up from the sofa, clapped her on the back, and crowed, “Now that’s an achievement!”

  There’s no secret about success. Did you ever know a successful man that didn’t tell you all about it?

  —KIN HUBBARD
>
  Behind every successful man stands an amazed woman.

  I bought a cassette tape on how to be successful. It was one of those subliminal tapes, a motivational cassette. It was twenty dollars and it kept saying, “Don’t ask for your money back, don’t ask for your money back.” I exchanged it for one on how to be more assertive. Then I went back and threw it through the store window. The store owner came out. He had been listening to a motivational tape on how to commit murder. If he hadn’t been listening at slow speed, I would never have been able to dodge the bullets.

  —RON SMITH

  Eighty percent of success is showing up.

  —WOODY ALLEN

  When I was young, I used to think that wealth and power would bring me happiness. . . . I was right.

  —GAHAN WILSON

  I’ve always gone along with the view that, first, the surest guarantee of sexual success is sexual success (you can’t have one without the other and you can’t have the other without the one), and, second, that the trappings of sexual success are only fleetingly distinguishable from sexual success itself.

  —MARTIN AMIS

  All my life I said I wanted to be someone. … I can see now that I should have been more specific.

  What does a little WASP girl want to be when she grows up?

  “The very best person I possibly can.”

  [Success] means that you have, as performers will call it, “fuck you” money. . . . All that means is that I don’t have to do what I don’t want to do.

  In the Beginning was the Plan

  And then came the Assumptions

  And the Assumptions were without form

  And the Plan was completely without substance

  And the darkness was upon the face of the workers

  And they spoke among themselves, saying,

  “It is a crock of shit, and it stinketh to high heaven.”