Lawrence Welk

The Setup "I woke up in an ambulance and it wasn't nothing but white people staring at me. I said, ain't this a bitch? I died and wound up in the wrong motherfucking heaven. Now I gotta listen to Lawrence Welk the rest of my

Fat Kids Playing the Tuba

The Setup “Boys. That was the primary reason why, in sixth grade, when I was handed a form with three blanks where I could list the instruments I wanted to play—any instrument, the whole band open to me—I put down “tuba” on the first line. I knew tuba

Sleeping with the Milkman

The Setup “Having been incarcerated in her vile womb for nine months, I can say with certainty that the wretched nasally voiced redhead is my mother, but one glance at the fat man tells you I'm hardly a chip off the old moron. So, let's just

Honk If You're Horny

The Setup DIANE: For some strange reason, I find it hard to respect a man with a bumper sticker, "Honk if you're horny." SAM: (laughing) That's pretty good. CLIFF: (laughing) Yeah. Honk honk honk honk! –Cheers, "Love Thy Neighbor," 11/21/1985

Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit

The Setup Beans, beans, the musical fruit The more you eat, the more you toot The more you toot, the better you feel So let’s have beans with every meal! –Unknown It must be said it’s a banger. “Beans, beans, the musical fruit” has to be one of

Wearing a Lampshade on Your Head

The Setup “The third generic type of humor with a reputation for being inappropriate is the practical joke … To be labeled as a real practical joker is a career-demolishing fate. It brands one as a lowbrow possessing a lampshade-on-the-head sensibility–someone to be avoided at all

Metrosexuals

The Setup A feminized society instructs us to abandon all precepts that our thoughts, desires, and delights are any different at all from those of a woman. Do this and we are bestowed the title of society's flaccid favorite, the metrosexual. The newly favored man is not really

Horny Conventioneers

The Setup You can probably name a few stock joke characters off the top of your head: the man who walks into a bar, travelers stranded on a desert island, those sorts of guys. You can probably name one or two that stick in your brain despite being long obsolete,

Underwater Basket Weaving

The Setup "The bride is a graduate of Prairie Dog Tech, where she received her degree in underwater basket weaving. Her other pursuits of study were familiar bird calls, Egyptian folk dancing and men." –1952 April Fools' Day article announcing "Chlorophyll I.S. Green Marries Ima

Coffee Breaks

The Setup “In some government offices there are so many coffee breaks that the employees can't sleep at their work.” –Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips & Quotes, 1968 This is, fortunately, not an essay about jokes like “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee.

Frivolous Lawsuits

The Setup Let’s get it out of the way because you’re probably thinking about it. This is not going to be about Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, the infamous 1994 lawsuit where an elderly woman sued McDonald’s after burning herself with hot coffee. You know that

Elvis Is Alive

The Setup “5. Elvis Is Living in My Bunker (Baghdad Enquirer)” – From David Letterman’s “Top 10 Headlines in Today's Baghdad Newspapers,” February 1, 1991 Elvis Presley suffered a ghoulish revival in the late 80s that detached him completely from his career as a musician. The conspiracy that

Welcome to I Might As Well Explain the Joke

I Might As Well Explain the Joke is a monthly blog where I write about popular jokes in American history, the kind that seep into the culture at large and get repeated on TV and in the funny pages and by everyday people. Each post will discuss one joke, its