Omission

A few days ago when I wrote my annual picks I omitted "Best Joke."

The irony in this omission is that I heard more jokes last year than I heard during the course of my entire life.

Yet the best joke was delivered by... Tom Green. I like Tom, and I am cheering for him comeback because I thought that the entertainment community unfairly backed over him with an 18-wheeler ten years ago. But when I listened to his standup routine a few nights ago I suddenly realized ten jokes or so in that he had not written most of it. I have heard that he is hanging around with Norm MacDonald, which makes sense because it was mostly material that Norm might have written.

So... this joke was probably written by Norm and performed by Tom, and it's damn good. I will try to paraphrase it to the best of my ability and add the parts where Tom was acting-- some of the joke's hilarity depended on good acting:

"So these days teachers are sending nude pictures of themselves to their students. That never happened when I was a kid. It's hard for me to even imagine how it would have played out then. These days a teacher just has to pull down her shirt, snap a picture then forward it to the kid. In my day I guess she would have to be sorting through the tests as she downed a glass of Crown Royale, see Johnny's name on the paper, get turned on, then search through the cabinet drawers for the camera (miming of a vigorous search). Then she would have to go through all those mirrored cubes that you would have to put on the camera, find one that wasn't burnt out, put it on the camera, turn it around many times to find that part that wasn't broken, pull down her shirt, snap the picture, put it in an envelope, address it to Johnny, lick the envelope-- and I really miss tasting that gluey stuff, don't you guys?-- seal it, lick the stamp, put it on the corner of the envelope, throw on her coat, make her way to the mailbox-- ALL THE WHILE STILL DRUNK-- open the mailbox (this is when he began to mime putting the letter in the box with a puzzled look on his face, then slowly turned to the audience)-- and somewhere in this process it probably occurred to her....... 'maybe this isn't such a good idea.'"