Eskimo Christians

From Pretty Good Joke Book by Garrison Keillor

The New York Times came out with a big story in the spring of 2005 saying flatly that The Joke Is Dead. Naturally, this got my attention right away. And then, like a lot of what you read in newspapers, the big story petered out down around the third paragraph. It turned out that the reporter had talked to a few stand-up comedians and they do not tell jokes in their acts. From this slight evidence, the reporter naturally reasoned that nobody in America knows any knock-knock jokes and men aren’t walking into bars and lightbulbs aren’t getting changed and priests don’t hang out with rabbis.

For all that the Times may know about the Middle East, the Times is not authoritative when it comes to humor. You will notice this from reading it. Looking to the Times for an assessment of American humor is like asking George W. Bush to review dance. In fact, people tell jokes just as much as they ever did, and maybe more, and the Internet speeds the absorption of new jokes into the word-of-mouth joke culture. Janet Jackson had her blouse fall open accidentally and her breast fall out at the Super Bowl halftime show and in a couple days the e-mails were flying: “Did you hear that Janet Jackson was pulled over by the L.A.P.D.? Yeah, her right headlight was out.” A week after the President confessed to canoodling with the intern, someone said to me, “They had a Presidents’ Day Sale at Macy’s and all men’s pants were half off.”

You go along thinking you’ve heard every knock-knock joke in Christendom and then along comes

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Eskimo Christians.

Eskimo Christians who?

Eskimo Christians, and I’ll tell you no lies.