Know any "jokes to live by"?
Lots of humor is based on negativity towards others or a childish glee in transgressing the boundaries of good taste, but some jokes seem to express a kind of wisdom that helps us makes sense of our actions or the situations we find ourselves in, effectively functioning like humorous proverbs.
For example, when a friend of mine in college was juggling two girlfriends and found to his chagrin that this wasn’t nearly as fun as the average young male might suppose, I told him this joke:
Patient to doctor: Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
Doctor to patient: Don’t do that.
Another example is the one about the drunk looking for his keys under a street lamp late at night. A cop stops to help him. After a lengthy search, the cop asks the drunk if he is sure he lost them in that spot. “Oh no,” says the drunk, “I lost them in that alley over there.” So the cop asks him why on earth he is looking for his keys under the lamp. The drunk replies, “Because the light is so much better here.”
Can you share any others?
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“Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out alive.”
—Bugs Bunny
Never yell “movie” in a crowded firehouse!
“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe”.
Carl Sagan…... :-/
@Scooby lol, that would make things difficult. :P
Well, I thought of this joke, but I would say it isn’t reallyone to live by, because it does not exactly encourage good behavior.
Two guys own a dry cleaner, Joe and David. One day Joe finds $20 in the pocket of a customer’s trousers. Joe thinks to himself…do I share it with David or not?
It’s an old Jewish joke, Jewish comedians told it making fun of themselves and the stereotypes.
Never put all your eggs in one bastard. A play on the Dorothy Parker quote
“Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.”
—Mark Twain
Everything Bill Hicks ever said.
Some examples:
“You do a commercial, you’re off the artistic roll call forever. End of story. Okay? You’re another corporate fucking shill, you’re another whore at the capitalist gang-bang, and if you do a commercial there’s a price on your head. Everything you say is suspect, and every word that comes out of your mouth is now like a turd falling into my drink.”
“I have this feeling that whoever is elected president, like Clinton was, no matter what you promise on the campaign trail -– blah, blah, blah -– when you win, you go into this smoke-filled room with the twelve industrialist capitalist scum-fucks who got you in there. And you’re in this smoky room, and this little film screen comes down, and a big guy with a cigar goes, ‘Roll the film.’ And it’s a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you’ve never seen before, that looks suspiciously like it’s from the grassy knoll. And then the screen goes up and the lights come up, and they go to the new president, ‘Any questions?’”
I am always looking for an excuse to include this in a quip; never mind how appropriate it is.
Des Cartes was asked whether he wanted fries with his hamburger. “I think not,” he said, and instantly vanished.
“Most people use statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post—for support, not illumination.”
Origin unknown, though similar formulations are often attributed to Andrew Lang.
And speaking of Descartes:
“Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.”
—René Descartes
@SavoirFaire: There are, apparently, jokes by Descartes and then jokes about DesCartes. I am not sure which I prefer.
Here are 22 of the world’s greatest philosophers together with a little humour
This was apparently a joke told in the old Soviet Union, but it really is timeless.
A man walks into a bar and sees two farmers sitting together at a table, drinking. The first farmer says to the other, “Do you know why Communism is great? Because if you had two bags of seed and I had none, you would share one with me.”
Both men pounded the table with enthusiasm and clinked their glasses together. The second farmer then replies, “No no, you know why Communism is so great? Because if you had two tractors and I had none, you would give me one.”
And both men roared their approval, slapping each other on the back. The first farmer lifts his glass and says, “You are wrong, my friend! You know why Communism is so great? Because if you had two bicycles and I had none, you would give one to me.”
And the second farmer stands up, glares at the first farmer, and storms out of the bar in a rage.
The man watching all of this is astonished. He leans over the bar and whispers to the bartender, “What was that all about?”
And the bartender whispers back, “He does have two bicycles.”
From Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I hate quotes. Tell me what you know.”
Knowing Emerson, I don’t think he was trying to be funny.
You know what would happen if the Sahara Desert went Communist? For thirty years absolutely nothing at all, then there would be a shortage of sand.
Fun stuff, folks! Keep ‘em coming!
I’m pretty sure my father thinks the “any questions?” joke is 100% true.
Time flies like an arrow…Fruit flies like a banana.
G. Marx
@bkcunningham I guess it’s just disturbing how much evidence there is for it!
My grandmother had a quote she used on my mother, and my mother used it on me then later on my son:
“Looking for sympathy? You can find it between sh*t and syphilis in the dictionary.”
Heck of a family heirloom, eh?
If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.
Expecting life to treat you well because you are a good person is like expecting an angry bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.
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