A man in a restaurant says to the waiter, "Give me two lamb cops and make 'em lean." The waiter says, "Which way?'
Two old ladies in the same restaurant, and one says, "You know the food here is terrible." And the other says, "Yes, and they don't give you much either."
There are two blondes on opposite banks of a big river, and one shouts, "How do I get to the other side?" The other yells back, "You are on the other side."
But blondes aren't the only stupid people around. I know a guy who's so dumb he can't count to 21 with his clothes off.
Two men in a locker room, and one says, "When did you start wearing a girdle?" And the other says, "When my wife found it in the glove box."
My family is half-Irish and half-Swedish. They're all alcoholics but very quiet about it.
Have you heard about the 40th anniversary Barbie doll. It comes with tennis shoes, cropped hair, and a T-shirt that says, "I've had enough of this Barbie crap. Get me a beer."
Bumper stickers I saw:
Horn is broken. Watch for finger.
I brake for no apparent reason.
Forget about World Peace. Try using your turn signal.
Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.
How can I miss you if you won't go away?
Where there's a will, I want to be in it.
In case you're wondering what I'm doing, it's called stealing jokes. Specifically, I'm pilfering respectively from Myron Cohen, Woody Allen, Phil Proctor, Joan Rivers, Henny Youngman, Brett Butler, Leigh Ann Jasheway, and Earthchannel.com. Unlike recently defrocked Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle, I identified my sources so it's not plagiarism.
In the Orient, students learn by exactly replicating the work of the masters. Milton Berle became Mr. Saturday Night by embezzling one-liners and gags from every comic on the Borscht Belt. And regular people tell each other jokes all the time without attribution. Before the Carson monologue and the Internet started broadcasting chuckles, the diffusion of a good joke over time was a design for a highly effective interpersonal communication network.
A pompous big-city daily has to admit that its prize-winning journalists have no more integrity than the folks around the water cooler do. That's embarrassing and mildly amusing, but hardly front page stuff. So what's the big deal about Barnicle filching a line or two from George Carlin? The answer to that one is not as simple as it seems. Using inexpensive media technology, we can sit at a desktop chop shop, sample, appropriate, and manipulate images and sounds, then sell the results as original work. In this era of non-linear digital magic, words alone represent creative evidence that can still be traced to their origins, and the only intellectual property that the law adequately protects. We bust writers, partly out of frustration, because we can apprehend them easily.
So we come down with both feet on plagiarists and wordsmiths who present fiction as truth, unless they concoct docudramas or infotainment for TV. Then they get Emmys and six-figure incomes. This reminds me of something W.C. Fields said: "There comes a time when one must grab the bull by the tail and face the situation."