The 11th Wretched Pun of Destiny segment aired Nov. 8, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
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* 11. Legendary newscaster Edward R. Murrow stops at his favorite New York diner for dinner. He asks the waiter if there are any specials.
“Well,” says the old man, “it’s Passover, so we’re serving items tailored to our Jewish customers.”
“Like what?”
“Our most popular is matzoh brei, served with an entrée of roast chicken.”
“Sounds good,” says Murrow. “I’ll have it.”
After the Kosher meal, Murrow lays his payment and tip on the table, silently gets up and heads towards the door.
“Mr. Murrow,” the waiter calls after him. “I know you’re a man of few words, but don’t you have anything at all to say about your food?”
The newscaster thinks for a moment. Then, on his way out the door, he says, “good brei and good cluck.”
This Wretched Pun of Destiny segment aired Nov. 1, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
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More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
* 10. A magician is teaching his new assistant the ropes. He brings her to the back room where she sees three shelves – top, middle, and bottom – each with one live dove on it.
The trainer explains, “I do 20 shows a week, and these are the three birds I use for every show. The top one I call “Befores,” because you show him in the lobby before the performance starts. The middle one I call “Afters,” because you display him when I’m signing autographs after the show. And then the bottom one we use during the show.”
“So do you call him Betweens?” asks the assistant. “Or Middles?”
“No,” says the magician. “I call him Bilbo.”
“Bilbo? If your top dove is called Befores, and your middle dove is called Afters, why is the bottom one that you use during the show called Bilbo?”
“Obvious,” says the magician. “He’s Lower Dove Durings.”
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of October 19, 2014.
A year ago, if someone came up to me and asked, “Have you ever heard of ebola?”, I would have said, “Sure, I’ve heard of ebola. I’m ebola. I go to the alley every weekend, and my high score is 230.”
How far we have come in such a short time that ebola has mutated from an obscure, 15-year-old virus to an American panic attack. In just two months, we’ve gone from, “Oh great. Africans are dying from something besides starvation and AIDS?” to “Close the schools, block the airports, fumigate the national parks.”
On some level, all this caution is good. Perhaps we learned from the AIDS years the penalty for looking the other way when horror happens to someone else. In 1984, Ronald Reagan and Ed Koch could blink at HIV and say, “Ehh, it’s a faigeleh plague. Maybe it’ll thin the herd.” Thirty years later, we look at Africa and go, “It’s not in our backyard yet, but we live in a small neighborhood.”
So missionaries and do gooders trek to Liberia and Nigeria and Sierra Leone to help contain the contagious. Good for them. Woulda been better if they’d gone with a one-way ticket. They come back to the United States, unaware that they’re infected. See, ebola is a disease that takes a while to show how insidious it is. Like marriage.
Anyhoo, what a shock! The missionaries and nurses come back on our soil, and we get our first cases in American hospitals, where the protocols are fammished because nobody knows what we’re dealing with yet. Some genius physician says, “Let’s bring the sick people over here because we can treat them better. How do we keep a zillion other people from being exposed? We’ll work that part out later.”
The minute we started bringing carriers over here, you knew and I knew it was only a matter of time before somebody sneezes, someone else inhales, they cough on a third person, and boom, you’ve got school crossing guards in Hazmat suits. How is that I can’t even put a bandaid on myself without fainting, but I know more than The Center for Disease Control?
What I admit I don’t understand is how this disease is spreading so fast. Ebola is not a virus like the chicken pox where a four-year-old bumps into a five-year-old, and soon both of them are home with mommy allllllll day long. Instead, Ebola is like AIDS in that it takes serious physical contact to pass the pandemic from person to person. You don’t get AIDS just from holding someone’s hand. Well, unless you’re holding it halfway up your tuchas. And even then you have to have an open sore for the bad germs to climb into.
Ebola is not carried by air or water, you don’t catch it from mosquitoes—in fact, patient zero apparently got it from a bat. So, if you’re a baseball player, watch out.
We can beg the ebola victims, or anybody coming from West Africa, don’t kiss anybody, don’t shtup anyone, don’t go on the subway and wipe your boogers on the grabby pole—tempting as that is. If you’re from some country where ebola is spreading like Iggy Azalea, go directly to a hospital or, better yet, turn around and get a boarding pass for the first plane back to Lagos. By the way, you have an uncle there who left you $3 million. All you have to do is bring a thousand-dollar downpayment to this lawyer on the internet.
But I digress. President Obama has chosen an ebola czar — I think I once dated a girl named Ebola Czar — but the dawdler in chief is stopping short of a travel ban. Which basically means: Dangerously ill people, keep coming over here, we’ve got a guy with a suit and a desk. Meanwhile, Frontier Airlines is dealing with a stupid nurse who flew from Dallas to Cleveland during her incubation period, and a Dallas hospital worker who’s stuck on a ship that can’t dock because he might be a carrier. (sings) “The blood Boat.”
And yet, through all of this, getting hysterical does nobody any good. The vast majority of people don’t go around handling blood and sputum and hypodermic needles all day. Unless they’re Andy Dick. So calm down. Take your vacation, go to school, eat at the cafeteria. Be happy that some African countries are closing their borders and keeping containment, and do not allow undue worry to keep you from enjoying your day. After all, life is just a bowl o’ cherries. If cherries carried ebola, then we’d have a problem.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. (Coughs) Just a cough.
The 9th Wretched Pun of Destiny segment aired Oct. 18, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
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*
It’s the last day of a couple’s vacation. Alas, they immediately start to argue over which final tourist attraction to see before making their plane.
The wife says, “I want to see the Botanical Gardens.”
“Boring!” the husband says. “I want to see the Museum of Celebrity Artifacts.”
“Oh,” that’s just trash,” says the wife. “It’s perfect weather for the gardens. And I want to see the buttercups while they’re in full bloom.”
“Again, boring!” says the husband. “They’ve got all these curios at the celebrity museum, like Hank Williams’s radio and Marlon Brando’s shoes. And they just got in a cup of Reese Witherspoon’s urine from when she was arrested for drunk driving.”
The wife huffs, “Are you telling me you’d rather look at Reese Witherspoon’s urine than a flower garden?”
“That’s right,” says the husband. “Reese’s Pee, Not Buttercups!”
The 8th Wretched Pun of Destiny segment aired Oct. 11, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
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More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com * 8. So the March of Dimes is having its annual fundraising push, and they come up with a contest where they get all these famous women in media to help raise money for the cause. The winner, who signs up the most pledges, gets to be that year’s fundraising “queen.” She’s flown to the annual meeting for a big ceremony, gets to wear a tiara, and even has a song written and sung about her.
All these famous women in media compete: Oprah, Ellen, Kathie Lee Gifford, Tina Fey, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric… And yet, surprisingly enough, the winner is Bloomberg Financial anchor Jane King. So they fly her to the big ceremony, make speeches, she gets to wear the tiara and, best of all, the one and only Bob Dylan is there to perform a song about her. What does he sing?
The 7th Wretched Pun of Destiny segment aired Sept. 27, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
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*
7. Neighbors are finally getting fed up with the new guy who moved into their suburban town.
Among his many eccentricities, he fertilizes his lawn once a month with raw garlic, which raises a stink that permeates the town for days. Worse, he’s got a brother in and out of jail, and whenever the felon’s on parole, he comes to visit the new guy and camps out on his front lawn in a ratty old tent.
Finally, the block association can take no more and beg the local police chief to arrest their new neighbor. “But on what charges?”, asks the cop. “Using smelly fertilizer and having a guest?”
“Absolutely!” says the neighborhood spokesman. Get him for: “Lawn Odor: Criminal in Tent.”
Segment aired Sept. 20, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
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More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
*
6. A food writer is compiling a book about the best cups of tea from all over the world. He sends a first draft to his editor, who writes back, “Great job. You’ve been to India, China, Sri Lanka, Russia – but I notice you haven’t been to Australia. You need to go and report on this incredible tea I’ve heard about that’s only served in one tiny shop in the western outback. We can’t do a proper book without it. I’ll extend your deadline, just get there asap.”
So the writer books a plane ticket for Australia where he winds up taking two trains, three puddle-jumpers and a rickshaw before reaching a tiny village. Worried that he’s been sent on a wild goose chase, the writer asks a woman at the local market if she’s heard of this fabled tea shop. “Oh, of course! Best tea in the world.”
“What makes it so special?” asks the writer, grabbing his notebook.
“Well, the shop is owned by Johnny Murphy, this Irish fella who moved here thirty years ago and has been making tea ever since.”
“Fine, but what’s so great about the tea itself?”
“It’s not just the leaves; it’s what happens to them. They grow high on these gum trees. And the koala bears climb all over them and chew on them making them really tender. That’s why no other leaves have their flavor.”
Intrigued, the writer asks the woman for directions to Murphy’s Tea Shop. After a three-mile trek, he arrives at this little hut where a burley, deeply suntanned Irishman stands at the counter.
“A cup of tea, please,” the writer orders.
Murphy nods and sets a kettle on the stove. He then produces a small teacup and a wee bag of brown leaves. He pours two heaping spoonfuls of dry leaves into the cup, and, when the water boils, sloshes the hot water into the tea. “Here you go,” he says, handing the writer the cup and a plain napkin.
The writer looks into the cup but isn’t particularly enthused. Though the beverage smells okay, visually it looks like muddy brown water, with twigs and dirt and dead things floating about. “Whatsamatter?” says the Irishman. “Too strong for ya?”
“No,” says the writer, making a face. “It’s just so unfiltered. Why don’t you use a strainer?”
“Sir,” gasps the owner, affronted. “The Koala Tea of Murphy Cannot Be Strained!”
Segment aired Sept. 6, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
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More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com *
5. At the end of World War II, an English madame sets up a brothel in Berlin, figuring to capitalize on all the western soldiers around. Unfortunately, the Yanks just find local girlfriends, and there are no German men with any money, so the brothel struggles terribly.
Worse, next door, a small German bakery grabs whatever business there is to be had. Desperate, the English madame visits the bakery one morning to see if she can work out some kind of deal.
As soon as she walks in, a blueberry muffin leaps off the oven tray, rolls across the floor, flies under her skirt and bites her on the vagina. The woman screams, and all the workers in the bakery come running.
“That bloody thing just bit me!” she said.
“What are you talking about?”
Before the madame can repeat herself, another muffin leaps off the pan, zips under her skirt and gives her a nip on the cooch.
“Oww! What kind of bakery is this?” the madame screams.
“Go away, old woman!” the workers say.
“Go away? This is dangerous! I’m telling everyone!”
So the madame starts raising a ruckus, people gather in the shop door, and the bakery people try to hustle her out of the shop. But the madame points at them, and she sings, “Come all without! Come all within! Your Nazi Muffins Like to Bite Me Quim!”
The 4th Wretched Pun of Destiny segment aired Aug. 30, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
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More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
*
4. Years ago, Neil Young visits a tattoo and piercing shop. The girl shows him a case of wearable jewelry. “Wow, those are nice,” he says, pointing to a pair of studs. “I could put one in each ear.”
“No, you can’t do that,” she replies.
“Oh, well, what about this thing?” he says, pointing to an ivory bar. “I could put that in my cheek.”
“No, Mr. Young, that wouldn’t be appropriate, either.”
“Man, this is tough,” Neil Young says. “Okay, how about this ring? It could go on the side of my lip.”
“Absolutely not,” says the girl.
Exasperated, Neil Young throws up his hands. “Miss, you’ve got all this jewelry. You tell me I can’t put it in my ears, my cheek, my lip . . . Why the heck not?”
“Because, Mr. Young,” she replies, “Everybody Knows This is Nose-Wear.”
The 3rd Wretched Pun of Destiny segment aired Aug. 9, 2014 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
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More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
* 3. A big event for seniors happens here every year, where all the nursing homes take part in a math-and-science Olympics. On Sunday afternoon, senior residents from all the different nursing homes arrive by bus to the town recreation center to compete for prizes and bragging rights. The rules are: you have to be really smart, over 85, wear glasses and a pocket protector, and you can’t have more than nine teeth in your head.
Unfortunately, last year it was embarrassing because one of the buses had engine trouble and had to be towed to the location. It took hours, with everybody standing in the parking lot, waiting for the seniors to arrive.
Finally, after two hours, one parking-lot attendant looked down the road and shouted, “Here it Comes! Here Comes Your Nine-Teeth Nerd-Bus Breakdown.”
