Hello. Here is the world-famous Sunday-Monday Gene Pool in which I ask for your questions that I will answer on Tuesday, and promise to return the favor with something interesting. Today’s interesting things are dirty jokes, which I present free of charge, the first of which was told to me by uncle Bob when I was about 13. Uncle Bob whispered it, so my ma and pa could not hear. I think it might have been on Passover but I am not sure of the provenance. It was the first dirty joke I ever heard, and the fact that it was delivered by a kind and beloved uncle changed my life. I learned that it was okay for adults to be a wickedly seditious. For better or worse I was never quite the same:
Walking on the beach, an old Jewish man finds a lamp, rubs it, genie pops out. Genie informs him that he is the greatest genie in the in the world, and will grant a single wish. Man pulls out a piece of paper, and a pen, and draws a crude map of the Middle East. He says to the genie, “Okay, this little country in the middle is Israel. This one is Jordan, this is Lebanon. This is Iran and this is Iraq. This is Saudi Arabia. I want you to bring peace and brotherhood and sisterhood to this troubled land for the next millennium.” The genie is stupefied! “My God!” he said, “I am the greatest genie the world has ever known, but this a tall order! Is there anything else, any other wish, that we can substitute?”
So the man says, “Maybe you could see to it that every once in a while my wife, she could give me oral sex?
And the genie says, “Lemme look at that map again.”
The second joke was told to me by my brother Don, but I’m pretty sure he heard it from Uncle Bob. I loved my Uncle Bob. We both did.
Fabulously wealthy man hires a world-famous architect to build him a mansion. No expense was too great, but he has one request: He demands that the master bathroom doesn’t ever stink. The architect agrees. The bathroom was a masterwork, the centerpiece of the house. It was a quarter acre in size; recessed bookshelves made of antique oak; state of the are aeration filters, etc. The facilities were not porcelain; they were 18th century ivory and the the finest silver and gold. The night he moved in, the homeowner called the architect, furious. “The bathroom stinks,” he says. The architect rushes over in the middle of the night to survey the situation. “Well, wait a minute,” he says, “someone SHAT in here.”
It would be inappropriate for me— a professional journalist and renowned international wordsmith— to mention this joke without pointing out that the Internet is filled with earnest debate about what is the correct past tense of “shit.” There is no consensus, but the general feeling is that it is “shat” but a substantial minority argues for “shitted.”
You are getting this for free, you ingrate. Perhaps you want to subscribe. Common decency suggests you should.
Anyway, the whole point of this Gene Pool is to ask you for the first dirty joke you ever heard. I am asking this not because I want to entertain filth — I won’t publish it, or will sanitize it a bit — but it is my experience that people’s first ever dirty jokes are really idiotic, naive, childish and fun. Here is where to send your jokes.
Right here: Send em in here.
This is the direct address: https://forms.gle/4vAkCgvxKXYVSFFq7
Also I should tell you that after my Uncle Bob died, I spoke at his funeral. I credited him with having told me my first dirty joke. I informed the congregation that I was going to reveal it, right there, and there were gasps from the audience, and I paused, and said, “nah, just kidding,” and after the service the rabbi demanded that I tell him, so I did. Jews are funny.
Shit has several appropriate past-tenses. "Shat" is entirely valid, though I feel like it is the province of an older generation. "Shitted" is also valid, though to me it feels wrong and I don't think I know or have know anyone who uses it. In my experience, "shit" is its own past tense. Similar, but not exactly how we describe when a baseball man has made contact will a pitched ball with his bat. He got a "hit" when he "hit" the ball. He sure didn't "hat" the ball, and he didn't "hitted" it either.
I have no idea what my first "dirty" joke might have been, because my parents were (and are) singularily unfussed about off-color humor (and four-letter words in general), although we were advised not to exhibit this knowledge in front of our grandparents. However, I know that it must have occurred (long) before I became a teenager, because at that age my dad took me to the Uptown theater to see the film "Lenny", with Dustin Hoffman in the role of Lenny Bruce. I don't remember a single detail about the movie (so the language in it cannot have been a startingly new experience), but I *do* remember that while we were waiting in the lobby, two or three people asked my dad whether he was sure that he wanted to let me watch the film.