From
A treasury of American anecdotes; sly, salty, shaggy stories of heroes and hellions, beguilers and buffoons, spellbinders and scapegoats, gagsters and gossips, from the grassroots and sidewalks of America by Benjamin Albert Botkin.
To illustrate the joemiller refurbishing process, Esar cites, first, No. 118 of Joe Miller’s Jests, which appeared unaltered in Funny Stories, or The American Jester (1795).
A melting sermon being preached in a country churchyard, all fell a-weeping but one man who, being asked why he did not weep with the rest, “O,” said he, “I belong to another parish.”
Then, from Bennett Cerf’s Try and Stop Me (1944) Esar cites the following modern version:
A ladies’ club in New Jersey invited a femme book reviewer to speak at its May meeting. She told the plot of a triple-A tear jerker, and the entire assemblage broke into tears. All but one, that is—a lady who sat dry-eyed and unmoved through the entire recital. After the lecture, the reviewer asked her why she hadn’t cried. The lady’s answer stopped her cold. “Oh, I’m not a member,” she explained.
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