� it's in the tellin that makes most jokes ,great ones �
A bunch of us were enjoying a "tasting" at a winery on the Rhine. As the gaiety grew, one of our guys told the "check for bees" joke � in a much longer, much more elaborate version than the above � and the crowd roared and rolled.
The German who ran the winery didn't have enough English to "get" it, so my friend Wolf (a German who'd been educated in England � spoke English with a veddy proppa British accent) retold it in German for him. There weren't any German translations for some of the American words, which Wolf therefore had to use untranslated. Thus we who had no German could tell, at several points, just where he was in the joke that we'd just heard. Wolf's enunciaton of the American words enriched the retelling for us "colonists."
Bunches of belly laughs all around the table for the second time.
Then the winery guy roared with laughter at the end of the joke, and we all roared and rolled for the third time.
Yep, the tellin' o' the tale is its white corpuscles (irrespective of whether the audience is drunk, sober, or gettin' drunk).
And I've been sitting here thinking of three thigh-slappers in which the punch "lines" are unwritable gestures and facial expressions. They'll have to wait until we're lookin' at each other.
Remind me � (a) the North Dakotan and the fish tank, (b) the guy who made a cat into a road rug, and (c) the black gal in the "wrong" donor line.
