Recycled Email Jokes to the Rescue

On a recent Saturday morning, it was my little window of opportunity to write this humor column. I like to write a couple of weeks in advance, so I have a chance to proof-read and check the spelling. (I give myself the chance to clean up these essays, but I never actually get around to it. So, a tip of the hat to the editorial staff for tidying up these literary dumpster fires.)

Anyway, it was Labor Day weekend, and I just didn’t feel like stringing together 600 original words. Not that the words I string together are literally “original.” I mean, every word I use is in the Dictionary and has been used by other people countless times. (The only original word I ever came up with is fleenerectomy, but it never caught on, mostly because it doesn’t mean anything.) What I’m trying to say is, it was a holiday weekend and I wasn’t in the mood to come up with new thoughts or observations.

Luckily, that very morning an email was forwarded to me with a whole bunch of recycled jokes. You may not get emails like this, but I receive them once or twice — per hour. To avoid laboring on the Labor Day weekend, I decided to let the world’s anonymous email circulators take care of this week’s column. Here are some that made me giggle:

• “How do you milk sheep? Bring out a new iPhone and charge $1,000 for it.”

• “To get rid of unwanted junk during the holidays, put it in an Amazon box and leave it on your porch.”

• “If you’re sitting in public, and a stranger takes the seat next to you, just stare straight ahead and say, ‘Did you bring the money?’”

• “When you ask me what I’m doing today and I say, ‘Nothing,’ it does not mean I am free. It means I am doing nothing.”

• “Interviewer: Tell me about yourself. Me: I’d rather not. I kinda want this job.”

• “Remember, if you lose a sock in the dryer, it comes back as a Tupperware lid that doesn’t fit any of your containers.”

• “Sixty might be the new forty, but 9:00 is the new midnight.”

• “When one door closes and another door opens, you are probably in prison.”

• “When I say, ‘The other day,’ I could be referring to any time between yesterday and 15 years ago.”

• “I had my patience tested. I’m negative.”

• “If you answer the phone with, ‘Hello, you’re on the air!’ most telemarketers will quickly hang up.”

• “That moment when you walk into a spider web and suddenly turn into a karate master.”

• “When I ask for directions, please don’t use confusing words like ‘East’.”

• “I remember being able to get up without making sound effects. Good times.”

• “My luck is like a bald guy who just won a comb.”

• “I run like the winded.”

• “Don’t bother walking a mile in my shoes,that would be boring. Spend 30 seconds in my head, that’ll freak you right out.”

• “Sometimes someone unexpected comes into your life out of nowhere, and makes your heart race and changes you forever. We call these people cops.”

• “When you get out of bed in the morning, are your knees supposed to sound like a goat chewing on an aluminum can stuffed with celery?”

So, thanks to all the internet email forwarders out there for writing the majority of this week’s column for me. Now that there are no more holiday weekends for a while, I’ll get back to the regular routine of coming up with my own original literary dumpster fires. That is, of course, unless I have an emergency fleenerectomy.