Dave Barry: Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

What H. Boyce sent was a copy of a decision handed down by the Georgia Court of Appeals in the case of Apostol Athanasiou vs. White. It seems the former had hired the latter to mow her lawn. What happened next, in the words of the court, is that “White allegedly slipped on some dog feces concealed in the tall grass, and his left foot was severely cut as it slid under the lawnmower.” I am not going to tell you how this case came out, because you’ll want to find out for yourself in the event that it is released as a major motion picture, but I will say, by way of a hint, that in the court’s opinion “neither party had actual knowledge of the specific deposit of dog feces on which White apparently slipped.”

Our next item comes from a release sent out by the Vodka Information Bureau, in New York City. The Vodka Information Bureau has learned that a whopping 42 percent of the women surveyed consider themselves “primary decision makers” in deciding what brand of vodka to buy. This raises in my mind, as I am sure it does in yours, a number of questions, primarily: What, exactly, do we mean by the verb “to whop”? So I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and there I found—remember, this is the column where we are not making things up—these helpful examples:

“In less time than you can think whop comes a big black thing down. as big as the stone of a cheese-press.” “Mother would whop me if I came home without the basket.”

So I called my mother, who said, and I quote, “I always make the vodka-buying decision as follows: the largest bottle for the smallest amount of money.” So I called the Vodka Information Bureau and told them what my mother said, and they said, sure, you can buy the cheapest vodka if you don’t mind getting a lot of impurities, but if you want a nice clean vodka, you want a brand such as is manufactured by the company that sponsors the Vodka Information Bureau.

Finally, and sadly, we have received word of the death, at age 85, of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, who of course was governor general of the island nation of Mauritius from 1968 to 1982. Mauritius has an area of 720 square miles and was once the home of the dodo bird, which is now extinct. It is hard, at a time of such tragedy—I refer to the demise of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam—to find words to express our feelings, but I think that I speak for all of us when I say that a cheese-press is “an apparatus for pressing the curds in cheese-making.”

I love jokes. The worse the better. Among the happiest moments of my life were those at summer camp when I was 11, lying in my bunk at night just after the counselor, Mr. Newton, had gone off to play cards with the other counselors, which meant that Eugene was going to tell the joke whose punchline is: “Ding dong, dammit! Ding DONG!” Maybe you know this joke. It involves marital infidelity and a closet. By the second week of camp, Eugene had developed a half-hour version, and campers were creeping over from the other cabins to hear it.

So there we’d all be, listening in the dark with lunatic grins of anticipation on our faces, barely able to restrain ourselves, until finally Eugene would reach the punchline. “Ding dong, dammit,” he’d say, and we’d start vibrating like tuning forks, and then Eugene would say “Ding DONG,” and we’d dive down into the depths of our sleeping bags, out of control, howling and snorting, thinking nobody could hear us, although of course in the peaceful stillness of the forest night we must have sounded like water buffalo giving birth over a public-address system.

Mr. Newton would slam his cards down and come storming over, and he’d tell us that he was really sick of this, night after night, and if he heard one more sound out of us we’d have to clean the latrine the next day. This was a serious threat, because it was the kind of highly odorous summer camp latrine where you wondered how it could possibly be so disgusting when nobody ever had the courage to use it. Evidently somewhere along the line it had reached Critical Latrine Mass and developed a life-style of its own.

After making this threat, Mr. Newton would stalk off back to his cards, and there would be silence for maybe a minute, and then there would be this tiny whisper from Eugene’s direction, so faint that only a trained ear could discern it:

“Ding,” said the whisper, “DONG.”

And of course this resulted in a situation where, never mind having to clean the latrine, never mind that Mr. Newton was now standing in the middle of the cabin clutching a weighty flashlight and threatening to break everybody’s heads, the only thing any of us could think about was whether we would ever be able to draw breath again.

And so we had a terrific summer, and all because of one idiot joke, which, although I would not tell it in public except under the influence of sodium pentothal, still does a better job of cheering me up than any major religion. I’d like to meet the person who made that joke up, but of course that’s always one of the big mysteries about jokes: Nobody knows who makes them up. They’re just there, floating around and lowering the productivity of offices and factories everywhere. And they’ve been there throughout human history. Archaeologists found this joke in an Egyptian tomb:

HE: Did you hear about the Sumerian? SHE: No. What about the Sumerian? HE: He was extremely stupid. Ha ha! SHE: No, I had not heard about him.

This, of course, is a primitive version of the modern ethnic joke, which still carries the same basic message, although it has become much more sophisticated over the years thanks to the introduction of such innovations as the light bulb. But who introduced them?

Other mysteries about jokes are: How come you can remember extremely complex jokes involving a minister, a priest, and a rabbi, but you can’t remember your mother’s birthday? How do jokes travel so fast, and so far? (The Apollo 7 astronauts found traces of a joke on the moon!) Also: Does Queen Elizabeth ever hear any jokes? Who tells them to her? What about the pope?

To answer these and other questions, I think we should set up a research project wherein we scientifically track the progress of a specified joke, similar to the way the flight patterns of birds are tracked by scientists called ornithologists, who attach metal wires and rubber bands to the birds’ beaks and make them come back every week for appointments. No! Hold it! My mistake! I’m thinking of “orthodontists.” What ornithologists do is attach bands of metal to a bird’s leg, then toss it gently off the roof of a tall building and watch it splat into the pavement below at upwards of 100 miles an hour. People try to tell the ornithologists that the metal bands they’re using are too heavy, but they just laugh. Recently they dropped a common wood warbler to which they had attached a 1983 Chevette.

But the theory is sound, and I was thinking maybe we could come up with some kind of similar system for tracking a joke. What I propose to do is inject a brand-new joke into the population at certain known places and times. This joke will have a distinguishing characteristic, so that as it spreads around the country, public-spirited citizens such as yourself can act as spotters. As soon as you hear this joke, I want you to report it via postal card to: The Joke Tracking Center, P.O. Box 0 1 1509, Miami, FL 33 1 0 1.

Please include a summary of the joke, where and when you heard it, who told it to you, and any other helpful background information such as whether you were drinking liquor right out of the bottle at the time.

Obviously, I cannot reveal the joke here, but its distinguishing characteristic is that it answers the question: “Why is Walter Mondale nicknamed ‘Fritz’?” Everybody got that? I have tested this joke on a carefully selected panel of lowlifes, all sworn to secrecy, and they assure me that it is in very poor taste and should spread like wildfire.