I’ve never objected to corny jokes, and this issue includes quite a few.  The corniest are to be found in Richard Lederer‘s “Blessed be the Children,” a collection drawn from his “Revenge of Anguished English” of startling things children have said about religious topics.  Some of the funniest:

A teacher was explaining the story of Noah and his ark to her young students.  She asked the class if they thought Noah did a lot of fishing during the Flood.  “No,” said a bright boy, “he only had two worms.” 

A woman was trying hard to get the catsup to come out of the jar.  During her struggle the phone rang so she asked her four year old daughter to answer it.  “It’s the minister, Mommy,” the child said to her mother.  Then she added, “Mommy can’t come to the phone right now.  She’s hitting the bottle.”

A friend of mine took her four year old daughter to a baptismal service at her church.  Later that night, her daughter took all of her dolls into the bathtub with her and held her own “baptism.”  As she dunked each doll under the water, she repeated, “Now I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and hold your nose.” 

These may be true stories, they may not be.  It scarcely matters.  One case where it does make a difference is the first item on the list:

A little boy’s prayer: “Dear God, please take care of my daddy and my mommy and my sister and my brother and my doggy and me.  Oh, and please take care of yourself, God.  If anything happens to you, we’re gonnabe in big trouble.”

If you actually heard a little boy saying this prayer, it would be very funny.  But it sounds so much like a joke a preacher would make up to open a sermon that the phoniness gets in the way of the laugh. 

Jon Winokur’s “Curmudgeon” column has some good quotes on the topic of work.  Robert Benchley: “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to bedoing at the moment.”  Benchley made this claim decades ago, but in the last 12 years the world’s bloggers have established the truth of it beyond doubt.  Don Marquis: “When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him ‘Whose?'”  Well, ask away- I doubt you’ll get much of an answer.  Robert Frost: “By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be the boss and work twelve hours a day.”  Lane Kirkland: “If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.” 

Chuck Shepherd’s “News of the Weird” (this issue includes the 19 October edition of this weekly feature) includes stories of daring thieves in Germany sneaking into trucks on the Autobahn and passing their swag from one speeding vehicle to another and of feckless law enforcement authorities in Britain telling people to keep their sheds unlocked so thieves won’t make a mess by breaking the doors down.

Some funny cartoons in this issue are available for pasting:

Keith Knight