Almost exactly a year ago I talked about - on this here blog - those joke of the day emails one can subscribe to. I have one email account that I check irregularly which is kept nourished by daily infusions of that nonsense. So I read the awful humor, & the one today went something like this:
Some children are taken on a tour of the local police precinct to see what the working atmosphere of a cop is, or something like that. At one point in the tour, the cop shows them the ten most wanted criminals in the standard "wanted" poster format.
One precocious little pickle says to the cop, "Do you want to catch this one?"
Officer McTourguide replies, "Oh yes, he's a hardened criminal."
Says the tot, "Why didn't you just keep him after you took his picture?"
(Cue audience chuckling & going "awwww.")
I felt a weird shock of recognition - I realized something - as I read this, & here's what I discovered: these services are stealing jokes from children's comic books from the forties & fifties. You know, the Archie shit or Little Lotta or Richie Rich or comic versions of Looney Tunes or Walter Lantz or Terrytoons. Those are the kinds of jokes that ended up in the short six-panel one-page filler. Someone at "joke a day" has a stack of them he's had since his childhood - which are handy because he still lives at home - & he just tosses one in every three or four days.
Either that, or he's a big Bazooka Joe fan. You can just see the cop's feet in the air, with an exclamation point above his falling body, as the punchline is spat out.
It could be worse, I know - they could be dirty jokes. Stolen from Hustler magazine. From the 1970s.
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