I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no
white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark.
Dick Gregory
**
BAREBAKE RIDER MAE WEST WITH TALL TALES AS OVERHEARD BY CHESTER CONKLIN
" 'All the men in my family were bearded," he said, "and
most of the women.' Then he went into details about an
aunt of his -- she had some impossible name he'd made up,
...who had a red beard down to her waist. 'She wore it
tucked into her vest,' he told Miss Worth. Later on,
between stills, I heard him explaining that he'd got
his red nose by bruising it on a cocktail glass in his
extreme youth. I think she was a little shocked' "
Robert Lewis Taylor. W.C. Fields: His Follies & Fortunes
(Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1949)
**
WHEN VICTOR BORGE AND HIS WIFE FLED FROM THE NAZIS AND ARRIVED IN AMERICA, HE KNEW NO ENGLISH AND COULD NOT PEFORM HIS MUSIC/COMEDY ACT
"While the Danish comedian could speak Swedish, French,
and German, he knew no English. After trying unsucessfully
to learn from his wife and from a language school, he taught himself American English by going to inexpensive movies and sitting through many showings while he repeated the
'dialogue with the actors. This he did for months,
sometimes picking up a gangsterism or comic dialect which
he would later have to discard, but finally he was able to translate some of his comedy routines into English and
memorize them."
Current Biography 1946
**
Customer: "Oh, waiter!"
Waiter: "Yes, what's the matter?"
Customer: "Taste the soup"
Waiter: "You always have the soup. Today you don't like
it? Look, mister, you don't like the soup, I'll bring
you another soup."
Customer: "Taste the soup."
Waiter: "All right; all right already! I'll taste the soup.
Where's the spoon?"
Customer: "Ah. Ha!!"
"This chestnut reflects a major characteristic -- love of drama. Why not just ask the waiter for a spoon? Because there's no drama to it, that's why. Many consider 'Taste the soup' the quintessential Jewish joke because it beautifully illustrates the Jewish tendency to make a big production out of a mundane situation."
Robert Menchin. 101 Classic Jewish Jokes. (Mistay Publishers, 1998
**
"I'm no cook. When I want lemon on chicken, I spray it with Pledge." Joan Rivers
**
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING THE RIGHT NAME?
When he first started he got a job as the opening act
at a club. He was using his real name - Dallas Burrows.
Each night he came out on stage and said "Hi I'm
Dallas Burrows - Harvard 48" then after a pause
"Yale 0." Each night the joke fell flat. The piano
player told him that the problem wasn't the joke,
it was his name, and that he needed a funny name.
So he tried different names each night (including
Roger Duck). One night he said "Hi, I'm Orson Bean
Harvard 48" and the crowd roared. He used Orson
Bean from then on.
from iMDb Trivia -Orson Bean
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004730/trivia/?ref_=nm_ql_
**
ON CLOWNS & CLOWNING & THE FAMOUS TEACHER
OF CLOWNS PHILIPPE GAULIER
“Compared with other clowning teachers, Gaulier said
he does not emphasize technique or physical
virtuosity. His pedagogy aims for something more
intangible nurturing a childlike spirit, a sense of
play onstage. The most important quality in a clown
is keeping things light and present, and as he said
with utmost respect, stupid. Finding ‘your idiot,
’ as he calls it, is the essence of clowning, which,
unlike comic acting, requires a performer to stick
with the same character. ‘A clown is a special kind
of idiot, absolutely different and innocent,’ he said.
‘A marvelous idiot.’”
Jason Zinoman. “A Big Reason For the Tears of a Clown” in
The New York Times (January 19, 2022)
**
"There were four million people in the American Colonies and we had Jefferson and Franklin. Now we have over 200 million and the two top guys are Clinton and Dole. What can you draw from this? Darwin was wrong."
Mort Sahl
**
MORT SAHL
Sahl, Mort
Reading Mallory's Morte
d'Arthur, said "Folks,
I ask you. Did Arthur's knights ever tell jokes?"
**
PhillipsMiscellany 
They told jokes in Spamalot.
A lot.
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