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| "AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HUMOR"TM
SHOWCASE
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December 2009/January
2010
Humor Writing Contest Results! |
Congratulations to
the Winners of our
December 2009/ January 2010 Humor
Writing Contest!
American Public Fed Up With Uncontrolled Rural Sprawl
By Carlos Arnade, Virginia
As the economy continues to wander aimlessly across the GNP landscape,
Americans have expressed their anger over the uncontrolled growth of
rural sprawl into the pristine urban and concrete environments of the
country. Invading rural clutter such as trees, deer droppings, crop
pesticides, country music stations, USDA farm subsidies, and food, in
particular have drawn the ire of urban residents who have pronounced
themselves “fed up” with lack of government regulation of rural sprawl.
A recent Green paper jointly published by USDA and the Urban Parking Lot
Institute provided a rash of statistics which provide vivid evidence
that public rage is not misplaced or the result of a country music’s
dominant role in shaping rush hour radio commentary and anger.
For example, the report reveals that:
--sixty eight percent of “suburban homes owners” have spotted an outdoor
fresh vegetable stand, with no laser scanner, background music, and
Hollywood magazine, within two miles of their home.
--thirty six percent of urban homeowners, at least once in the past
year, have been forced to slow their car to “a first gear crawl” to
avoid hitting “horned mammals; which were either buck deer, beef cattle,
or longhorn cars from Texas.
--rescue squads in thirty four U.S. cities had to answer calls, and use
expensive fire ladders, to retrieve drivers from “big wheel” rural truck
cabs.
Chicago Judge Harbarger was quoted by the report stating:
“Every time an urban siren goes off before anyone can stand their
attention on end; some hound dog from the upper Wisconsin Peninsula
starts howling out the hillybilly dog blues and ruins the finest and
proudest sound of the city. When I was a boy townhomes owned Chihuahuas,
European Poodles, or cats who could absorb the shrillest siren scream
without even raising a tail. Now, every half-hickle-body is bringing
hunting dogs right into the heart of every big city. And don’t get me
started about those whacking country crickets that are ruining the
concerts in our City Parks.”
The joint agency report primarily blamed uncontrolled rural sprawl on
lax county regulatory structures, USDA farm subsidies, and greedy
wildlife. Chapter three of the report, in particular, focused on the
growing urban mammalian, and reptilian, underclass:
“Whether it is alligators on Florida golf greens, coyotes in Colorado
suburbs, deer in Virginia driveways, or rabbits all over the place,
invasive rural animals have shown no respect for the basic rules of city
life. These urban invading animals, be they raccoon, deer, rabbits,
skunks, and possums, ignore road safety and do not practice basic urban
hygiene such as washing their paws after using the outdoor sniff-spot.
It is of little wonder that many end up flattened across the middle of
our most splendid urban highways.”
Judge Harbarger, defending his urban siren tastes, provided a Chicago
Sun reporter his sprawling opinion:
“When my generation wanted to embrace rich soil, smell fresh manure,
swallow a big sky, and blend birdsong into the background of every
thought, we rode out to our grandparents' place, drove the tractor round
the pasture and spent an afternoon helping grandpa drive his truck four
miles into town. Now city dwellers just take a cell phone picture of
themselves in a stratosphere cowboy hat, and then e-send it to their
grandparents on Facebook.”
In the wake of the report’s publication, Secretary of Agriculture Tom
Vilsack announced at a Big City Mayors Convention in a downtown Detroit
cow pasture, the following suggestions for stopping rural sprawl in its
dirt tracks:
a)-Construct moats, walls, and turrets around major U.S. cities.
b)-Provide state agencies with funds to dig rural water holes where
wildlife and irrigated farms can compete for scarce resources in a
Darwinian setting.
c)–Spray natural smells on roadway signs which allow rabbits and deer to
sniff-read traffic signals.
d)-Cluster farms around a central cow and farmer, or USDA subsidy.
e)–Restrict transmission of country music to “note of mouth
performances”, and/or,---- the wind.
f)-Teach urban gangs to defend their turf against wild mammals and how
to knife-fight raccoon and possums.
g)-Provide rural residents with maps that black out urban WalMarts.
The Secretary of Agriculture’s comments were quickly incorporated into
the lyrics of six country and western music songs and broadcast on radio
stations across the country.
Judge Harbarger told reporters that while he enjoyed the new country
lyrics, country music could not match the pleasure of an urban siren
going off in the middle of a stretched-out George Gershwin melody.
www.bananaws.com
© Copyright
by author, used with permission by Humor Press. No unauthorized reproduction or redistribution is allowed.
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 The
Change In Birthday Parties
By David Crawford, British Columbia
I picked up my daughter from a party the other day, and while she was
getting her boots on I was handed a beautiful Donna Karan handbag filled
with lotions, cosmetics, makeover gift certificates, a new transmission,
and several boxes of candy. It was worth nineteen times the value of the
toy we had purchased for the birthday kid, and I was hurled into fiery
pits of guilt as a result.
Isn’t it the birthday kid who’s supposed to get all the loot? When did
the whole birthday party paradigm change shifts anyway?
I hate to sound like a cranky old codger who’s always spouting off about
how things were in THEIR day, but in MY day we went to birthday parties
just for the sake of going to a party, I spout crankily.
We’d eat hot dogs and cake and Kool-Aid, then we'd revel in the fact
that little Billy got a cool set of walkie-talkies that we would destroy
in under five seconds, thus freeing us to run around the yard ‘shooting’
each other with sticks.
WE didn’t get anything – it wasn’t OUR birthday. It was just a party!
Actually, kids attending our parties did get something. It was a
tradition in our house for Mom to insert nickels into the cake before
icing it – each piece of cake containing a little prize for every
adorable child.
There were times, however, when kids didn’t listen to the message about
the cake currency since they were running around the yard, foaming at
the mouth, eyes rolling back into their foreheads, in anticipation of a
sugar rush that would last several weeks and help induce a national
diabetes epidemic.
Things would go quiet during the cake devourment as one kid or another
would turn blue, choking on a nickel that had been inhaled along with
their slice of Betty Crocker Double Chocolate Billion-Calorie Nirvana.
Mom, ever the gracious hostess, would rush around the table, initiating
loud “KA-HAACK!” sounds as she Heimliched our choking, cyanotic party
guests.
Or, some kid would bite down on a coin and lose a tooth or two, deftly
assisted by Mom and her favorite pliers.
Parents arriving to pick up little Billy would find him quietly biting
down on a piece of gauze to stanch the hemorrhaging in his jaw – an
effective way for us to keep the little cuss from opening his big yap
about hazardous foreign objects embedded in the cake being served.
Wasn’t it amazing that his baby tooth decided to come out during our
party? His and six other kid’s teeth? “See you next year, and remember
what we told you about what happens to a rat-fink, now won’t you? Run
along now and thanks for coming!”
Despite the bloodshed, flying teeth and occasional tracheotomy, ours was
always a popular party house.
Nowadays, parents would be horrified at the prospect of having filthy,
germ-encrusted coinage ingested by their hypoallergenic, gluten-free,
decaf, non-fat children.
As for goody bags, family attorneys are ready with lawsuits for bruised
self-esteem and emotional trauma suffered by their precious snowflake if
there isn’t an original Turner painting tucked in with the box of
individually wrapped gummy bears and gold Crayola fountain pens in the
pure silk Gucci bag we just mortgaged the house for.
*Deep breath*
Well, let me tell you something. We didn’t have goody bags back in MY
day. We had sore throats and bleeding gums and plier marks on our lips
and we were happy to have them! If we were to ever get a prize or a
piece of candy because we stumbled dizzily into the donkey’s butt with a
pin – well that was just the icing on the cake we were about to barf up.
My daughter’s birthday is coming up. Gold embossed invite is in the
mail. Cake supplied.
Bring your own pliers.
www.occasionalhumourist.blogspot.com
© Copyright
by author, used with permission by Humor Press. No unauthorized reproduction or redistribution is allowed.
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 The
Agony Of "The Feet"
By Matt Foley, Illinois
A few nights
back my wife was awakened by a strange noise coming from the lower level
of the house. Naturally, because I’m the closest thing to a man in the
house, I was elected to get up and check it out. I woke our dog Boo to
help with the investigation. She slowly got up from her dog bed,
stretched and then headed to our toilet for a quick drink before
plopping back down and back to sleep.
“Good dog.”
I stopped at the edge of the stairway and relying on the honesty and
good manners of would-be criminals yelled out,
“Is anybody down there?” Since I received no response I assumed it was a
false alarm and stumbled back to bed. As I was just about to get into
bed, my last step was a bit too far and I stubbed my toe, hard, into the
metal leg of the bed frame. I flopped on the bed clutching my toe,
howling in pain. My wife offered a sympathetic suggestion, “Maybe if you
clipped your toenails more than once a year that wouldn’t have
happened.” Shows how much she knows. I faithfully trim the toenails
twice a year; during the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. I guess my
manscaping may be remiss when it comes to my feet, but it’s not my
fault; it’s genetic.
The sight of the human foot repulses my father. Normally, he averts his
eyes in the presence of an exposed bare foot with a facial expression
resembling someone who’s just eaten a piece of raw liver freshly pulled
from a cat’s dirty litter box. Once, at a public beach, I saw his knees
actually buckle and I swear I detected the audible sounds of
dry-heaving. Although I’m not crippled with disgust at the sight of a
foot, I’d rank feet as my third least favorite place to look at on
another human being; slightly behind up their nose and deep in their ear
canal. (There’s another dark place I’d rather not peek at, but children
may read this and along with a disdain for feet, my father taught me a
little class.)
Have you ever gone to the community pool and looked at people’s feet?
It’s horrific! There’s chubby, stubby Fred Flintstone toes and some toes
as long as fingers, long enough to dial a rotary phone or pick up a
piece of fruit. Feet weren’t always like this. Once supple and healthy,
they were gently played with, the toes were sang to and lovingly
referred to as "piggies." Now, they just resemble pig’s feet. Toes that
were once straight have developed a free spirit of adventure, curling
and gnarling themselves into fantastic shapes and unpredictable
directions.
Take a look at
one of your hooves right now. I guarantee one toe has manipulated itself
to form a perfect right angle. The pinkish hue of once youthful toenails
has been replaced by what best resembles hardened chips of dried,
yellow, tree sap. For some reason, each passing year adds thickness to
each nail, like paint on the interior walls of an old apartment
building. Currently, I am still using a standard clipper but I fear the
day I'll need to employ the use of yard shears is looming on the
horizon.
I don’t think they’re too long, although once in bed, I accidently
bumped into my wife’s leg with my big toe and sliced open an impressive
wound, which prompted her to yell, Hey, Edward Scissorfoot! When you
gonna trim those!?!” Careful what you wish for, I thought. Last time I
trimmed the claws, I was having a particularly difficult time severing
the last bit of the big toe nail. With a mighty squeeze of the clippers,
the stubborn nail broke free with a loud, clicking noise. Having heard
this sound before and fearing being impaled with jagged, accelerated
nail shrapnel, my wife, daughter and even Boo dove like battle savvy
soldiers into a foxhole, or in this case, behind a pile of dirty
underwear and socks.
Some men protect their families and homes from criminals with elaborate
alarm systems, studying martial arts, a baseball bat or even a tennis
racquet. I choose to ward off evil with my feet. Next time I hear a
noise in the middle of the night, I’ll simply declare loudly at the top
of my stairs,
“I’ve got really long, sharp toenails…and I’m not afraid to use them!”
© Copyright
by author, used with permission by Humor Press. No unauthorized reproduction or redistribution is allowed.
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 Wherefore
Is The Sense In Shakespeare?
By
Burton Cole,
Ohio
Whyfore didn’t I know?
And howfore did I get involved? The error in fact -- if, in factfore it
was an error -- was printed on another news site in another state,
nowhere nigh the newspaper for which I scribble.
The news story was about a Florida guy named Abraham Shakespeare who won
$31 million in the lottery in 2006 and since disappeared. A headline
asked “Wherefore art thou, Mr. Shakespeare?”
That lit a flame under sis-in-law Christine’s keyboard quill:
“Anyone who has ever studied Shakespeare knows that Juliet was in no way
asking WHERE IS Romeo when she uttered those lines ‘...Romeo, wherefore
art thou, Romeo?’
“To use the headline ‘Wherefore art thou?’ in the story about the man
who is missing is just silly, not to mention uneducated. You are asking,
‘Why are you Mr. Shakespeare?’”
Christine sent me a copy of her literary lesson, knowing that I would
guff a hearty haw at the other newsman’s ignorance. Instead, I just
guffed.
I, too, thought the phrase was ancient English for “Yo, dude, where you
at?” But I looked it up on Wikipedia, that font of all knowledge written
by anyone with access to the Internet, and Christine is correct.
“Romeo and Juliet,” as you may recall from movies or Slim Jims
commercials, is based on a play written by Bill “The Bard” Shakespeare
in which the offspring in rival street gangs, the Capulets and the
Montagues -- also known as the Jets and the Sharks -- fall in love, talk
a lot, and die in pointless suicides. It’s a romantic comedy.
In their big balcony scene, Juliet gazes out her castle window and
utters those immortal words, “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?”
I thought the next line was, “Down here in the bushes! The ladder
broke!”
That’s also incorrect. It’s “Deny thy father and refuse thy name; / Or,
if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, / And I’ll no longer be a
Capulet.”
Roughly translated into plain English, Juliet whines, “Oh, Romey, why
are you a Montague? If you were born a Capulet like me, we could have
gone to the prom, got married and had a mortgage of our own.”
The less poetic speech my sister-in-law laid on the other news outfit
was, “Has your writer no English degree? Have none of your editors an
English degree?”
I work at a newspaper. Wherefore would I want an English degree? It’s
not practical.
Christine was an English major. It got her a job as a flight attendant.
My degree is in journalism -- news. I studied things like news writing,
editing, page design, photography, American politics, psychology,
sociology, economics and data analysis. Shakespeare never came up.
I sidestepped him in high school, too, except for one minor skirmish
with Caesar’s ears and Brutus eating one, too. To quote a Woody Allen
play, it sounded like “Much Ado About Nothing” to me, sort of like a
mid-winter’s nightmare.
But thanks to my sis-in-law and her English degree, I have been
educated. Now I know that “wherefore” means “why,” though I still don’t
know “how” this makes any sense.
Still, as Yogi Berra famously said, “All’s well that ends well.”
www.tribtoday.com/page/category.detail/nav/5135/Burton-Cole.html
© Copyright
by author, used with permission by Humor Press. No unauthorized reproduction or redistribution is allowed.
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 Wii
Wish You A Happy New Year
By
Danielle Schaaf,
Texas
Stepping over candy cane wrappers and
remnants of a half-eaten gingerbread house, The Big Guy cautiously
approached the blue Snuggie slumped on the couch. Scenes from “It’s a
Wonderful Life” flashed across the television, the sound muted.
“It’s time,” he said, prying a glass of eggnog from my hand.
“I’ve called Weight Watchers. They’ve dusted off your scales.”
Most people start New Year's weight loss programs with personal resolve,
but for me, it takes family intervention. That and a LoJack on the
refrigerator. Honestly, what’s the fuss over five, 10, or 50 extra
pounds? It's kind of flattering when someone asks, “When are you due?”
Sure beats the heck out “How's that AARP card working for you?” Besides,
maternity pants are a whole lot more fashionable these days.
After scarfing down the last of the peppermint bark, I got off the couch
and plugged in the Wii Fit game the kids gave me last Mother’s Day.
There’s no better way of saying “I love you mom” than giving her a gift
that spells “F-A-T.”
Actually, Wii Fit is pretty cool. It’s interactive and you get to select
and name your own virtual training partner, called a Mii. You can count
on your Mii for a little pick-me-up. I named mine “Minnie Barr.”
The first step was measuring weight, balance, strength and flexibility
while my Minnie Mii chimed in with instruction and opinion. It’s like
hearing a teen voice coming from the back seat after his first week of
Driver’s Ed. At least Minnie doesn't scream “We're gonna die” and stick
her head between her legs.
I stepped on the scale. Minnie smiled as she waited for my weight to
appear. I slurped down a milkshake. A number flashed and Minnie twirled
around, threw her hands in the air, and then fell to the ground
screeching, “OMG.” Great. Wii Fit was created by a 13-year-old girl.
After receiving mouth-to-screen resuscitation, Minnie revealed my
“fitness” age.
“Good luck with those Medicare forms,” she said. “And lay off the
shakes.” At least she didn’t roll her eyes.
Next, I started a workout. With each step, stretch, groan, grunt and
moan, Minnie was there, offering encouragement.
“Stay with it.”
“You can do it.”
“It can’t be that difficult.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
“I’ve short-circuited.”
“Do you want red or white?”
After tossing Minnie and the rest of the Wii Fit into the trash, I did
what I do every year—hopped back on the couch and waited for New Year's.
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