“I use laughter to lighten up the atmosphere,” he said with a chuckle that turns into a loud laugh. “You know, it’s such a silly joke. I had to talk into a recorder at Reader’s Digest headquarters for their, ‘Tell Us A Joke’ contest. By God, I was one of the five finalists, so I got $2,500. And then I got a phone call and was told I was the grand prize winner, and they were sending me another $500.”
The joke, as told by Mlodzik, goes something like this, though it probably loses something in translation:
“A guy is walking down a dark street, when he hears something behind him. He looks behind him and sees a casket, and it’s going, ‘dum … dum … dum … dum … ’ and it’s followin’ him. So he gets frightened and goes faster, and the casket goes faster — ‘dum, dum, dum, dum, dum … ’ So he starts to trot and runs into his apartment building and the casket crashes through the door and comes at him faster, up the stairs — ‘dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum!’ He slams the door, and it crashes through his apartment door, so he runs into his bathroom and he slams the door and he hears, ‘dum … dum … dum … dum … ’ and he knows it’s going to crash through the door … then it crashes through the door, and he grabs the only thing he can. He grabs a bottle of cough syrup and he throws it at the casket … and it stops the coffin!”
Dumb!
I laughed.
I heard this joke, sitting around a campfire with the boy scouts about 1959. It drew groans back then.
Who reads Reader’s Digest? Seriously. I can’t remember the last time I ever saw one. Is it a Middle America thing?
2 observations can be made from this. Those that selected this have no sense of humour, and they obviously lived very isolated childhoods. Variants on this joke are numerous, long complicated story wound up with a short simple punchline, usually word play. Classic punchlines like “silly rabbi kicks are for trids.” or “what’s the matter haven’t you ever seen a moth ball?” come to mind but I’m sure there are many more.
Dumb down… Duumb, Down. Duuuuuummmmb doooooownnnnn. Shhhhhh… The people is sleeping…
AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!
If laughter is the best medicine, then this rates somewhere below a placebo.
The fact is, that’s one of the 10 best jokes ever published in Reader’s Digest!
Worth 3 large? Who knows?
‘Corse the bad news is that his apartment building burned down because his chimney was blocked, and the fire burned out of control.
He stopped the coffin, but couldn’t handle the flue.
>ouch!<
Bad jokes? I could be a billionaire.
I have to admit that I liked the joke, but I don’t think it was $3,000-funny. I don’t get the whole “dum … dum … dum” thing, though. Does anyone get what that’s supposed to be?
I think the “dum … dum … dum” is foreshadowing. The ending of the joke is dum…b
Now that what I call a funny joke.
It only works if you imagine Sarah Palin tellin’ it.
#7 so its akin to homeopathy then I guess.
Related:
Q. What did the undertaker say when he heard a noise?
A. Is that you coffin? (coughin’)
For some reason, this joke always reminds me of Justin Wilson’s “Halo Statue” story. (You could look it up, though it was a lot easier before the game Halo came out.)
If I’m in a slow line at the checkout and there is a RD there, I’ll look through it for the jokes, and if there’s time, the “Test Your Vocabulary” feature.
Some people can tell a joke and some couldn’t if their life depended on it. Those who don’t think this is funny can’t envision this scenario in their minds without someone telling it. Plus it has to be told well for the “hard of laughing” crowd.
That is what makes professional comedy so much more difficult than it appears.
#16. Yes, it’s funny…..if you are a 6 year old.
Really dumb. I remember camping out in the wilderness with my cub scout troop back in the 1970s when I was probably in the sixth grade. Late at night, we were telling stupid jokes and ghost stories in our tent. One of my friends told this same joke, and we all thought it was the lamest thing we’d ever heard. If only little Stevie Baird had known he could have made $3,000 by telling the same joke to Reader’s Digest!
I used to tell this one at Boy Scout camp back in the 60’s and 70’s. Though in my case, I inflated it out to about half an hour (the theory being that the longer it takes to tell, the worse the groans about the bad pun are). BTW, I also had an alternate ending available (in case somebody tried to deflate the punch line), which was: “. . . and so I put my coin into the pay scales and got a weigh (i.e ‘got away’).”
BTW, if RD paid $3000 for this one, I wonder what my other fave “monster story” (ending in “Where’s the mustard?!?”) would have gotten . . . ?