A six-year-old boy walked into a saloon and said to the barmaid, “Give me a Scotch on the rocks.”
“You’re just a kid,” said the barmaid. “Do you want to get me in trouble?”
“Maybe in a couple of years,” replied the boy. “But in the meantime, I’d still like that Scotch.”
A man with a winking problem is applying for a position as a sales representative for a large firm. The interviewer looks over his papers and says, “This is phenomenal. You’ve graduated from the best schools; your recommendations are wonderful, and your experience is unparalleled. Normally, we’d hire you without a second thought. However, a sales representative has a highly visible position, and we’re afraid that your constant winking will scare off potential customers. I’m sorry … we can’t hire you.”
“But wait,” he said. “If I take two aspirin, I’ll stop winking!”
“Really? Great! Show me!”
So the applicant reaches into his jacket pocket and begins pulling out all sorts of condoms: red condoms, blue condoms, ribbed condoms, flavoured condoms; finally, at the bottom, he finds a packet of aspirin. He breaks it open, swallows the pills, and stops winking in a few moments.
“Well,” said the interviewer, “that’s all well and good, but this is a respectable company, and we will not have our employees womanising all over the country!”
“Womanising? What do you mean? I’m a happily married man!”
“Well then, how do you explain all these condoms?”
“Oh, that,” he sighed. “Have you ever walked into a pharmacy, winking, and asked for aspirin?
A blonde went out to her mail box and looked in, closed the door and went back in the house. A few minutes later she went out and looked in the mail box again. She did this several times and her neighbour who was watching her said “you must be expecting a very important letter today the way you keep looking into your mail box.”
The blonde answered, “No, I am working on my computer and it keeps telling me that I have mail.”
A minister was asked to dinner by one of his parishioners who was known as being an unkempt housekeeper.
When he sat down at the table, he noticed that the dishes were the dirtiest that he had ever seen in his life. “Were these dishes ever washed?” he asked his hostess, running his fingers over the grit and grime. She replied, “They’re as clean as soap and water could get them.”
He felt a bit apprehensive, but blessed the food anyway and started eating. It was really delicious and he said so, despite the dirty dishes. When dinner was over, the hostess took the dishes outside whistled and yelled, “Here Soap! Here Water!”
A young man hired by a supermarket reported for his first day of work.
The manager greeted him with a warm handshake and a smile, gave him a broom and said, “Your first job will be to sweep out the store.”
“But I’m a University graduate,” the young man replied indignantly.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know that,” said the manager. “Here, give me the broom and I’ll show you how.”
A man is giving a speech at his lodge meeting. He gets a bit carried away and talks for two hours. Finally, he realizes what he is doing and says, “I’m sorry I talked so long. I left my watch at home.”
A voice from the back of the room says, “There’s a calendar behind you.”
A Husband comes home with a half gallon of Ice Cream.
He asked his wife if she wants some.
“How hard is it?” she asked.
“About as hard as my dick,” he replies.
To which the woman replied, “OK, then. Pour me some.”
A Briton, a Frenchman and a Russian are viewing a painting of Adam and Eve frolicking in the Garden of Eden. “Look at their reserve, their calm,” muses the Brit. “They must be British.”
“Nonsense,” the Frenchman disagrees. “They’re naked, and so beautiful. Clearly, they are French.”
“No clothes, no shelter,” the Russian points out, “they have only an apple to eat, and they’re being told this is paradise. They are Russian.”
A rather confident man walks into a bar and takes a seat next to a very attractive woman. He gives her a quick glance, then casually looks at his watch for a moment.
The woman notices this and asks, “Is your date running late?”
“No”, he replies, “I just bought this state-of-the-art watch and I was just testing it.”
The intrigued woman says, “A state-of-the-art watch? What’s so special about it?”
“It uses alpha waves to telepathically talk to me,” he explains.
“What’s it telling you now?”
“Well, it says you’re not wearing any panties…”
The woman giggles and replies, “Well it must be broken then because I am wearing panties!”
The man explains, “Damn thing must be an hour fast.”
And Joseph went up from Galilee to Bethlehem with Mary, his espoused wife, who was great with child. And she brought forth a son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. And the angel of the Lord spoke to the shepherds and said, “I bring you tidings of great joy. Unto you is born a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”
“There’s a problem with the angel,” said a Pharisee who happened to be strolling by. As he explained to Joseph, angels are widely regarded as religious symbols, and the stable was on public property where such symbols were not allowed to land or even hover.
“And I have to tell you, this whole thing looks to me very much like a Nativity scene,” he said sadly. “That’s a no-no, too.”
Joseph had a bright idea. “What if I put a couple of reindeer over there near the ox and ass?” he said, eager to avoid sectarian strife.
“That would definitely help,” said the Pharisee, who knew as well as anyone that whenever a saviour appeared, judges usually liked to be on the safe side and surround it with deer or woodland creatures of some sort. “Just to clinch it, throw in a candy cane and a couple of elves and snowmen, too,” he said. “No court can resist that.”
Mary asked, “What does my son’s birth have to do with snowmen?”
“Snowpersons,” cried a young woman, changing the subject before it veered dangerously toward religion. Off to the side of the crowd, a Philistine was painting the Nativity scene. Mary complained that she and Joseph looked too tattered and worn in the picture. “Artistic license,” he said. “I’ve got to show the plight of the haggard homeless in a greedy, uncaring society in winter,” he quipped.
“We’re not haggard or homeless. The inn was just full,” said Mary.
“Whatever,” said the painter.
Two women began to argue fiercely. One said she objected to Jesus’ birth “because it privileged motherhood.” The other scoffed at virgin births, but said that if they encouraged more attention to diversity in family forms and the rights of single mothers, well, then, she was all for them. “I’m not a single mother,” Mary started to say, but she was cut off by a third woman who insisted that swaddling clothes are a form of child abuse, since they restrict the natural movement of babies.
With the arrival of 10 child advocates, all trained to spot infant abuse and manger rash, Mary and Joseph were pushed to the edge of the crowd, where arguments were breaking out over how many reindeer (or what mix of reindeer and seasonal sprites) had to be installed to compensate for the infant’s unfortunate religious character.
An older man bustled up, bowling over two merchants, who had been busy debating whether an elf is the same as a fairy and whether the elf/fairy should be shaking hands with Jesus in the crib or merely standing to the side, jumping around like a sports mascot.
“I’d hold off on the reindeer,” the man said, explaining that the use of asses and oxen as picturesque backdrops for Nativity scenes carries the subliminal message of human dominance. He passed out two leaflets, one denouncing manger births as invasions of animal space, the other arguing that stables are “penned environments” where animals are incarcerated against their will. He had no opinion about elves or candy canes.
Signs declaring “Free the Bethlehem 2” began to appear, referring to the obviously exploited ass and ox. Someone said the halo on Jesus’ head was elitist. Mary was exasperated. “And what about you, old mother?” she said sharply to an elderly woman. “Are you here to attack the shepherds as prison guards for excluded species, maybe to complain that singing in Latin identifies us with our Roman oppressors, or just to say that I should have skipped patriarchal religiosity and joined some dumb new-age goddess religion?”
“None of the above,” said the woman, “I just wanted to tell you that the Magi are here.” Sure enough, the three wise men rode up. The crowd gasped, “They’re all male!” And “Not very multi cultural!”
“Balthasar here is black,” said one of the Magi.
“Yes, but how many of you are gay or disabled?” someone shouted.
A committee was quickly formed to find an impoverished lesbian wise-person among the halt and lame of Bethlehem.
A calm voice said, “Be of good cheer, Mary, you have done well and your son will change the world.” At last, a sane person, Mary thought. She turned to see a radiant and confident female face. The woman spoke again: “There is one thing, though. Religious holidays are important, but can’t we learn to celebrate them in ways that unite, not divide? For instance, instead of all this business about ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo,’ why not just ‘Season’s Greetings’?”
Mary said, “You mean my son has entered human history to deliver the message, ‘Hello, it’s winter’?”
“That’s harsh, Mary,” said the woman. “Remember, your son could make it big in midwinter festivals, if he doesn’t push the religion thing too far. Centuries from now, in nations yet unborn, people will give each other pricey gifts and have big office parties on his birthday. That’s not chopped liver.”
“Let me get back to you,” Mary said.