Thanks to the recent movie The King's Speech, King George VI is now best known as the king who stuttered. But apparently he also occasionally told jokes. Several of them are reproduced below. They're not bad, for a royal. [Milwaukee Journal — Apr 25, 1937]
[In response to a speaker who was praising him in extravagant terms]. "I am reminded," he said, "of the woman who went to her husband's funeral service. The couple had never got on well together, but the minister devoted his long sermon to a panegyric of the husband's virtues. So glowing a picture did he paint that the widow completely failed to recognize her late husband. 'Milly,' she nudged her friend and whispered loudly, 'is there another corpse about?'"
There was a petrol dump where men sent a canary down into the empty tank to see if the atmosphere was safe for them to go down and clean it out. One day the foreman saw a man walking about in the bottom of the tank before the canary had been let down. "Hey, what are you doing there?" he yelled. In all seriousness the man below shouted back: "I'm just seeing if it's all right for me blinkin' canary."
Recent scholarship has traced the roots of Mad magazine's Alfred E. Newman back to the nineteenth century. But I don't believe anyone has ever before noted his resemblance to this animated version of Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen, as seen in the 1942 Superman cartoon "Showdown," embedded above.
How fitting that today both Jimmy and Alfred are owned by the same company, Warner Bros.!
Maybe it's just me, but I find these commercials remarkably creepy, inauthentic, unappealing, ineffective and misguided, given my perceptions anyhow of who buys a Mercedes.
Not a song, but still another entry in our fine old catalog of comedy that nowadays would have the PC-minded bearing down on you faster than a truck full of tortillas on Cinco de Mayo.
Category: Humor, Jokes, Royalty, 1930's