One Hundred Whimsically Whimsical Jokes

By Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly

This is a compilation of one hundred (generally inoffensive) jokes, some short, some long. Each joke is given a title and is numbered, and there is a list of the jokes by title and a list by number.
They vary in length - from very short (a couple of lines) to fairly long (more than a couple of lines).
After the main body of jokes there is a section which explains each one for readers who might not have fully understood the joke.
This could be useful for readers who are not native speakers of English - or even readers from other parts of the English-speaking world where the humour (or humor) of some jokes may be incomprehensible or hard to detect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly
• Release date: Dec 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311544445

Book preview

75

One Hundred Whimsically Whimsical Jokes

By Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly

Copyright 2015 Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly

Smashwords Edition

FRONT COVER TEXT: ONE HUNDRED WHIMSICALLY WHIMSICAL JOKES / READERS’ COMMENTS / Could be whimsicaller. (AN ANNOYING MAN) / I always spell ‘whimsical’ as ‘wimzikl’. I think Jackson-Firefly should do so too. (ANOTHER ANNOYING MAN) / Whimsical is Jackson-Firefly’s second name! (AN ENTHUSIAST OF JACKSON-FIREFLY’S BOOKS WHO DEOSN’T KNOW THAT HIS SECOND NAME IS ACTUALLY URIAH) / Buy this book. Accept no imitations. (E. J-F.) / Whimsical (adj). Characterised by fanciful or playful humour. 1600+ . From whims(y) + -ical. (A DICTIONARY) / Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly / There is no pure rhyme for whimsical but there are over three thousand end rhymes such as musical and physical and bicycle and clinical. (AN INDIVIDUAL WHO THINKS THAT THINGS LIKE THIS ARE IMPORTANT).

COPYRIGHT

This literary masterpiece from the hand of the eminent jokester Mr. Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly is the result of many months’ toil (or so he tells me) by the light of a flickering candle flame in his freeing prison cell. Hard labour was the sentence for his misdemeanor (of which he was totally innocent, of course) and it is hard labour that has produced this book.

For the reason of the hardest of hard labour required to confect this book Mr. Jackson-Firefly would prefer it if one were to purchase the book rather than acquire it by nefarious means which do not put coins into his pocket.

We appreciate your collaboration in always been and will continue to be, all being well and if fate continues to smile on me, Mr Jackson-Firefly’s amanuensis, teamaker and dogsbody,

The Editor.

LIST OF CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION

2. CONTENTS: JOKES BY TITLE

3. CONTENTS: JOKES 1501-1600 ACCORDING TO REFERENCE NUMBER

The jokes begin here:

4. ONE HUNDRED JOKES

5. DON’T GET IT? THE JOKES EXPLAINED

1. INTRODUCTION

This is the fourteenth compendium of jokes from the hand of the eminent jokelore collector Sir Isaac Ebenezer-Firefly (his real name is Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly but an example of his impish humour is to call himself ‘Sir Isaac’ to confuse both himself and his family). It is a concise yet comprehensive compilation of little stories with a humorous content. Mr Jackson-Firefly has given the name ‘joke’ to such a story..

I have noted that certain lexicographers would have us believe that the word ‘joke’ is from an Old French word, in turn from Latin ‘iocus’ (a joke, a jest, a sport), that and ultimately it is from the Indo-European root *yek- (= to speak). But this is unlikely, since I have it on good authority (Mr Jackson-Firefly told me so) that it is a coining by no other than Ebenezer Jackson-Firefly himself. The circumstances are these. One evening, when casting his mind around for a word which the general population might adopt for such storylets for inducing laughter, he thought of the word PUQK. But when he told his friends and acquaintances they refused to use the word because that said it was not a good word and it was difficult to pronounce and that he should think of another word.

Mr Jackson-Firefly’s devious mind thought of a way that would make his now ex-friends and ex-acquaintances use the word without them realising it, thus resulting in a great victory for him and his word-creating powers. He decided that if each letter were to be replaced by a letter six letters ahead of it in the alphabet he could disguise the word, and the result was ‘joke’. Although he is not fond of this word of his own devising, he is satisfied insofar as his ex-friends and ex-acquaintances are saying ´PUQK’ without knowing it, though at a distance of six paces, as it were, or at six steps removed.

Mr Jackson-Firefly is engaged at present in a campaign to revise and revive English greetings. He has noticed that increasingly people greet each other before twelve noon with the bland expression ‘Good morning!’, or even shorten it to ‘Morning!’ Whatever happened to ‘A good morrow to you, sir! or ‘A good morrow to you, madam!’? And ‘good afternoon’ seems pale and lacklustre next to ‘A good noontide to you, sir! or ‘A good noontide to you, madam!’ And what about ‘good evening’? Why not a robust greeting such as ‘A good eventide to you, sir!" or ‘A good eventide to you, madam!’. For the few people who greet each other at 12 p.m. with ‘A good midnight to you’, a more suitable salutation might be ‘A good witching hour to you!’. And for the hours of darkness, should any good citizens be abroad in the hours of gloom, the expression ‘A good murk to you, good friend’ would seem to be far preferable as a greeting on meeting, and ‘A good daybreak to you’ as a wish on parting, than whatever it is people say to each other at two a.m. or three a.m.

And that is not all! Mr Jackson-Firefly has other planes for improving and replacing existing social niceties, and purifying the English language. Why say ‘please’ when we might say ‘if it so please you’. Is it any worse to say ‘yay’ for ‘yes’ and ‘nay’ for ‘no’? (Mr Jay-Eff observes that pedants will spell ‘yay’ as ‘yea’ – so then why not spell ‘nay’ as ‘nea’?). How about ‘A pox on ye!’ or ‘A plague on ye!’ when somebody accidentally steps on your foot? Instead of a cowardly ‘Don’t worry about it’, ‘That’s all right’, or ‘Please do it again’?

Mr Jackson-Firefly is a great upholder of the inclusion of long introductions in his books. For one thing, it bulks them out (bulk out = make bigger or thicker; make [a poor piece of writing] seem more substantial and attractive); secondly, it gives his books added value (= value which is added), and thirdly, he is able to give his opinions which the local newspaper editor does not care to include in his ‘Letters to the Editor’ column ‘for more reasons than one’. All this was explained in an editorial entitled ‘The Thunderer Under Siege’ (‘The Thunderer’ being the publisher’s alternative name for the ‘Town Gazette’ newspaper) where he unfairly likened Mr Jackson-Firefly’s many letters to some kind of co-ordinated spam attack.

And here we have another slight diversion – a consideration which Mr J-F holds to be important enough to include in the introduction.

Although he is no believer in theories of conspiracies (also known as conspiracy theories), he does have a question which somebody somewhere might be able to answer. Why does the government keep joke-book writers under surveillance? Are they such a threat to the security of the state?

Now, I ask you, why would our eminent jokester think he is the target of surveillance activities, and even of cruel tricks? Is he deluded? The answer is a resounding ‘No - far from it’.

There are