And then all eyes fell on me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“A joke or an embarrassing story about yourself,” was the rule.<\/p>\n
An embarrassing story, fine, but you know as well as I that the unwritten expectation there was that it be an entertaining embarrassing story<\/em>. My embarrassments are many, but their entertainment value is nil. So it remained for me to tell a joke. (Can you imagine?)<\/p>\n I explained to them that, as my wife and son well know, my joke buffer is only three jokes deep, and it filled up when I was six. So I warned them in advance, “My jokes are the jokes of a six year old.”<\/p>\n The first was a joke my brother told many, many years ago when we were very young and he had a big book (which he still has) of jokes and tricks. I wondered if anyone would get it.<\/p>\n I looked down the table to my left, and then I looked down the table to my right.<\/p>\n “What goes around a button?” I asked.<\/p>\n They sat in silence. No one tried to answer.\u00a0<\/p>\n I waited a moment.<\/p>\n “Well?” someone asked.<\/p>\n “A goat!” I said with a mock expectant smile on my face.<\/p>\n I got blank stares. Blank stares from every single person at that table, except for Bill down at the end who laughed out loud.<\/p>\n “A goat!?” the others asked.\u00a0<\/p>\n “Well, like an opera singer goes around a-singin'”, I said, “and a dog goes around a-barkin’, a goat goes around a-buttin’.”<\/p>\n There were groans. They guys from India were silent.<\/p>\n Unfulfilled by the first joke, they demanded another.<\/p>\n I looked down the table both ways and explained that this one was one my mother taught me when I was young.\u00a0“She called it a shaggy dog story,” I said.<\/p>\n “Ok, so tell us this shaggy dog story.”<\/p>\n Which I proceeded to do.<\/p>\n “It goes like this,” I began. “Herman, Sherman and Kerman were twins,” I said, stopping to look at them all. “Except for Ralph, whose hair was,” and at this point I held up my hand with my thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Except for Ralph whose hair was this color.”<\/p>\n Silence, as you might imagine.\u00a0<\/p>\n “I don’t get it,” someone said.<\/p>\n “No, it’s a shaggy dog story,” I said. “They don’t make sense!”<\/p>\n And now my reputation is cemented.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Prelude And then all eyes fell on me.\u00a0 “A joke or an embarrassing story about yourself,” was the rule. An embarrassing story, fine, but you know as well as I that the unwritten expectation there was that it be an entertaining embarrassing story. My embarrassments are many, but their entertainment value is nil. So it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103,56],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2340"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2340"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2356,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2340\/revisions\/2356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Joke #1<\/h3>\n
Joke #2<\/h3>\n