It's raining dad jokes in April - Just for the pun of it

 By Peter Healy

Catskills Comedy Writer

We all need a good laugh — especially this month.

A deluge of dad jokes can divert your mind from the current chaos in the equity markets.

The Oxford Languages website defines a dad joke as an unoriginal and predictable joke, often containing a pun.

The internet is teeming with dad jokes. Siri will tell them on your iPhone.

Middle aged and elderly men tell the classic dad quips, especially at family gatherings and male-bonding venues like bars and bowling alleys.

Think back to Thanksgiving. “Dad is telling jokes. What do we do?”

“We can go out and rake leaves until he stops, or put on some noise-canceling headphones.”

At my age, dad joke locations switch to retired men's clubs and the local senior center.

A member of the Senior Men’s Association of Stamford told about two dozen dad jokes at a recent meeting.

The first was, why can’t a nose be 12 inches long?  If it were, it would be a foot.

Badda Boom!

Let’s see if I can be more original and less predictable than that. My funnies are a little longer than most dad jests. Brace yourself for an uncle joke, as in Uncle Peter.

At Greenwich Library,  I found a yearbook from the class of 1829 at West Point. The classmates of cadet Robert E. Lee voted the future general “Most Likely to Secede.”

Badda Boom!

Before you ask a Greenwich librarian about 19th-century yearbooks from military academies, I made that one up.

I made up these, too.

Did you know Karen Carpenter's marriage lasted only 14 months. Her husband found a skeleton in her closet. 

I am writing a screenplay about a 55-year-old, post menopausal woman who works in a steel mill during the day and dances in a bar at night. The working title is "Hot Flash Dance."

My off-Broadway play is about a slow-witted religious sect in Utah that practices polygamy.  I call it the "Book of Moron."

Another potential off-Broadway play chronicles the life of a sewer worker who lives with his wife in Brooklyn. Their neighbors are a burly bus driver and his wife, an aspiring astronaut named Alice. It’s the - wait for it - “Book of Norton.”

Someone did that already?  That’s news to me. Today’s woke lobby would claim Ralph Kramden’s famous lines, "Pow. Right in the kisser!" or "Bang! Zoom! You’re going to the moon, Alice!" condone spousal abuse.

Cop I: This is our third domestic abuse call tonight.

Cop II: I blame “The Honeymooners” marathon on PIX11 for this.

What else have I got for you folks?

How did Genghis Khan father more than 1,000 children?
No one knew how to write #MeToo in Mongolian.

Yes, folks. The conqueror-in-chief created the largest contiguous empire in history so he could finance all those child-support payments.

Here’s a local uncle joke. The image of Bridgeport, Connecticut’s largest city,  has suffered because of high crime rates and high taxes. Most Connecticut residents know its current mayor, Joe Ganim, served time in prison for corruption and other crimes.
 
Few know his prison time would lead to revised lyrics in nursery rhymes. The wee ones at Park City day care centers now sing this version of a British classic:

“Rub-a-dub-dub.
Three men in a tub.
And who might those three men be?
The butcher, the baker, the license plate maker.
And they all went out to sea.”

British composer James Hook wrote the original  “Rub-a-dub-dub” in the late 1700s.

If you find no humor in this blog, you might learn history.

That’s all for today, folks. To quote former Vice President J. Danforth Quayle, “You all look like happy campers to me. Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been, and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be.”

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