Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri
Katy is represented by
Greg Johnson at
WordServe Literary
Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net
Recent Posts
- Try
- Becoming Brenda Starr
- Off Beat
- Scattered
- That’s It
- So I’ve Finally Signed With An Agent. Now What?
- The Spoon
- Sciatica
- Sweetheart
- A Woman’s Train of Thought Has No Caboose
- However much we own, we are all still living on borrowed time
- After all, when restaurants shrink portions, they don’t shrink prices.
- As with everything in life, balance is key.
- Slow down, you move too fast…
- Yeah, I know. I have issues.
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Can Someone Please Adjust Her Meds?
I’m really, really awful at remembering jokes. I know there was one going around when my kids were little that we told over and over for years. Even now, I can only remember the punchline, which went “My buns are burning! My buns are burning!”
I smiled as I typed those words, because I have such happy memories evoked by them, but honestly, what was the joke? Can anybody clue me in?
My dad—dead lo these 22 years—used to tell a fabulous joke about a Western Union telegram delivery man. The punchline was sung in a Broadway musical type of rendition. “Da-da-da-da-da-da! Your sister Rose is dead!”
What the heck came before that line? I’ll never know. Dad told that joke for a few years until one day the call came from Scotland. He answered the phone to receive this message: “Your sister Rose is dead.”
It might be the whole repeating the scenario three times with only slight changes and then doing the punchline thing. I can never remember the three dealies and I concentrate so hard on saying them perfectly because I’m so sure that’s the key to telling the joke that I can’t get all the way through it.
I used to watch the Carol Burnett show every week when I was a teenager. I remember only one of her comedy sketches. She performed it with Harvey Korman, and this episode must have been on TV after I married Doug, or it would not have stuck with me through the past 30 years. Or then again, maybe it would.
She played a woman about to be released from an insane assylum, where she’d been in a padded room for years. Korman played her loving, patient husband, who’d remained faithful to wait for her recovery, desperate to have her home again, whole.
He arrives on the long-anticipated day, and she seems totally cured. She’s smiling, fit, serene, obviously in love with her husband, and ready to meet the world.
He opens the car door for her, such a gentleman, and presents her with two dozen peach-colored roses.
“You remembered!” she says.
“How could I forget?”
He smiles, starts the car, and drives toward home. She relaxes.
Then the tapping begins. On the steering wheel at first, but he doesn’t stop there. While his left hand plays bass and guides the vehicle, his right reaches over to the stick shift to tap out the melody. Of course, he still had a freakin’ spare foot, so why not add tympani? Yeah, that’s the ticket.
The corner of her mouth twitches. “What song is that?” she asks. Wait….what’s this feeling of deja-vu all over again? All of a sudden, she knows what he’ll say.
He smirks and taps harder. “Whatever do you mean, my love? Song?”
Her twitches become something like mild seizures. She puts a palm over his right hand and tries to stop the tap-tap-tapping, which has rapidly escalated to a mind-rattling cacaphony, but it’s no use.
“STTTOOOOPPPPPPPP!!!” she shrieks.
He grins evilly, makes a U-turn, and takes poor Carol back to the funny farm.
Why on earth would I remember this particular sketch, you ask, when I’m pathetic at recalling all but the lamest of jokes?
If the psych unit has free wifi, I’ll get back to you on that.
- I loved that show. Tim Conway as the shuffling little old man? So funny.
George can't tell jokes, either. He tries, bless his heart, but he always bungles it. We laugh--not at the jokes, but at him. So I guess he gets the desired results one way or another.Posted by Jeanne Damoff on 11/04/06 at 10:17 AM - I can't even <i>write</i> a joke properly, let alone tell it. This post reminds of a joke a family friend told us at a party:
A man is sent to prison for the first time. At night, the lights in the cell block are turned off, and his cellmate goes over to the bars and yells, "Number twelve!" The whole cell block breaks out laughing. A few minutes later, somebody else in the cell block yells, "Number four!" Again, the whole cell block breaks out laughing.
The new guy asks his cellmate what's going on. "Well," says the older prisoner, "we've all been in this here prison for so long, we all know the same jokes. So we just yell out the number instead of saying the whole joke."
So the new guy walks up to the bars and yells, "Number six!" There was dead silence in the cell block. He asks the older prisoner, "What's wrong? Why didn't I get any laughs?"
"Well," said the older man, "sometimes it's not the joke, but how you tell it."
(Since I couldn't remember how it went exactly, I copied this from http://reddit.com/info/6xmp/comments/c6yaw)Posted by Sabine on 11/04/06 at 10:34 PM - I can't remember any parts of jokes, and I can't retell them well even when I've just heard them. You, at least, have a fine grasp of humor in your writing.
I hope there wasn't more to your post today, that life (or a parent?) isn't driving you crazy...Posted by Chris(tine) on 11/05/06 at 12:26 AM - Wow really very nice and good information you share here. I read your entire post and really superb information you share here on <a href="http://www.hohahe.com/index.aspx">funny stuff</a> thanks for your information.
Posted by Mob mesh on 07/12/09 at 06:18 AM
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