Come For the 'Net, Stay For the Jokes

Dear Loyal Readers,

I got a rather nasty comment on my last post (not you Josh, yours was cool) that made me come to the sad realization that some people simply do not know how to take a joke. For this reason, I have decided to devote this post entirely to jokes. There will be no politics, no sarcastic outrage, only comedy. And not comedy in the sense of humorous anecdotes or satire, just old fashioned cheesy jokes. So, without further ado, here are a few examples of my take on classic joke formats. You may have heard some of them if you have hung around me recently, but others will be new and undoubtedly hilarious. Enjoy! Share them with your friends!

I will start off with a classic "what do you call" joke. I actually made this up a couple of years ago, but I still find it hilarious. You will too:

Question: What do you call two forwards on the USSR national soccer team?
Answer: A Pair-A-Strike-ahs! (get it, like Perestroika, the Soviet economic plan under Gorbachev)

Here are a few good "guy walks into a bar" jokes I made up recently. The "guy walks into a bar" joke is a classic. What's that guy doing in that bar? I bet some crazy hijinks are afoot:

A guy walks into a bar, sits down, says to the bartender, "I'll have a beer."
The bartender says, "What kind do you want?"
The guy says, "Oh, I don't care, surprise me."
So then the bartender pours him a beer and hands it to him. The guy sits there and takes a few sips and then looks down towards the end of the bar and sees a guy wearing a gray suit with an American flag lapel pin and a red tie. The guy thinks to himself, "Oh my god, that's George W. Bush!" So then the guy gets really excited and he asks the bartender, "Hey bartender, is that Bush?"
Bartender says, "No, it's a Coors."

This one is a variation on the previous joke for those of you who are more into hard alcohol:

A guy walks into a bar, sits down, says to the bartender, "Give me a rum and coke."
So the bartender mixes the drink and hands it to him. The guy pays the bartender, takes a few sips, and then looks down towards the end of the bar and thinks he sees William Shatner. So then he gets really excited and asks the bartender, "Hey bartender, is that Captain Kirk?"
Bartender says, "No, it's Captain Morgan."

And then, here is a good old fashion historical pun-based "guy walks into a bar" joke:

John Sutter walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out of here, we don't serve miners!" (Get it, like "minors." Hilarious. However, though John Sutter owned Sutter's Mill, where gold was first found during California's gold rush, I am not sure of how much mining he actually did personally. This joke would obviously work better with someone who was an actual miner, but I could not think of anyone else famous enough. I suppose you could say, "Derek Zoolander's dad walks into a bar," that would work as well, but may require more explanation.)

Then there's this one, which is a long but effective Airplane joke. The airplane joke, though not a format of its own, is a very common subject matter of the classic annoy-your-friends joke. Sometimes you have to say you are on the plane with the guy for the joke to work. This one can go either way:

So a guy gets on an airplane, puts his luggage in the overhead compartment, sits down, puts on his seatbelt and kind of zones out for a while. All the regular airplane stuff happens; the flight attendant gives the safety demonstration, points out the exits on each side of the plane, and then everything settles down and the plane starts getting ready for take off. The plane taxis down the runway, takes off, and starts lifting off the ground higher and higher until it reaches cruising altitude. Then the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt sign and the flight attendant starts coming around the cabin for drink orders. She goes up the row one by one until she finally gets to the guy and she asks, "What can I get you to drink?"
The guy thinks about it for a while and says, "You know, I would really like a cup of coffee, can you give me a cup of coffee?"
The flight attendant says, "I'm sorry sir, can't do that, we only have ground coffee."

Ha ha ha. Well those certainly were funny. Feel free to use them as much as you like.

The interesting thing that I have found about jokes is that they seem to be more effective the more drawn out you make them. Take that last joke, you could just skip from the guy getting on the airplane to the punch-line, but then there is no buildup and less of a payoff. A spoken joke is like a murder mystery, but instead of finding out who the killer is at the end you get a crappy pun. There needs to be time for the audience to think they know what is going on before you pull the rug out from under them and tell them it was Kevin Spacey the whole time (oh shit, did I ruin that for someone?). This is especially important in jokes like my airplane joke. This isn't necessarily that funny, but after the long setup people almost trick themselves into laughing to convince themselves that their time has not been wasted.

Anyway, those are my jokes, use them at your own risk. I think this is an interesting experiment because you always hear jokes like these but you never know where they come from. But for these, you know exactly where they came from, they came 100% from my comedic genius. So, spread them around and with any luck I will be sitting in a bar someday and I will overhear someone saying "No, it's a Coors," to the response of half-hearted chuckles and annoyed groans. And then I will know my gift to the world is complete.