An elderly man comes into a bar and notices a lovely lady about his age having a drink by herself. He pulls up a stool, leans over and asks, “So… do I come here often?”
Sure, laugh. Or cry. Fact is, we’ll all be the lady or the man some day—God willing. In the meantime, we can tremble, or simply grab a copy of “Die Laughing: Killer Jokes for Newly Old Folks,” the new book by William Novak.
The cover shows a cane slipping on a banana peel. But the real joke is on the rest of us who didn’t think of this great idea first. Novak, 68, is the author of 25 other books, and, by the way, father of BJ Novak, writer, actor and executive producer of “The Office” (he played Ryan Howard).
Papa Novak is probably best known as co-author of “The Big Book of Jewish Humor.” But he says he was between books—“which is a ‘writerly’ way of saying unemployed”—when he hurt his shoulder and had to go to physical therapy for the first time in his life.
So he’s stretching, aching, and dealing with doctors when he realizes: This is not a unique experience. What the world needs is a joke book about exactly this—the changes that eventually come to your body, your routine, your love life (!), and especially, your short-term memory:
Mr. Jackson, your test results have come back, and I’m afraid I have a double dose of bad news.
Just tell me. I can handle it.
Okay. You have cancer, and you also have Alzheimer’s.
That’s terrible. But at least I don’t have cancer!
Eleven publishers told Novak no. One (obviously) said yes, so Novak started collecting jokes. As he did, he realized two things: First: “No joke is ever told for the first time.” Proof?
Two older men, acquaintances but not really friends, are sitting on a park bench. One turns to the other and says, “Remind me, was it you or your brother who died last winter?”
Novak says that when his friend told him that joke, he loved it and immediately decided to include it. Then, a few weeks later he was in Vermont and found “The World’s Oldest Joke Book.” It was literally a book of thigh-slappers from 4th century Greece—including the joke, “Was it you or your brother…?”
But if there are no new jokes, what is eternally new is the strange sensation of having been a young person but now gradually experiencing all the things you associate with old people.
To make some sense of this, Novak arranged the jokes into chapters on things like “Long marriages,” “New partners,” “Sex” (yes, I will get to some of these), “Death,” and then its funnier counterpart, “The afterlife.”
So, sex?
A man goes into the confession booth. “Father,” he says. “I’m 82 years old. I have children and grandchildren, but last night I made love to a girl who’s 24. And not just once but twice!”
“Tell me,” says the priest, “when was the last time you came to confession?”
“This is my first time. I’m Jewish.”
“So why are you telling me?”
“Telling you? I’m telling everybody!”
For sexier ones, buy the book. Or, heck, here’s one… sort of:
Mrs. Silver, a former seamstress, was walking through town when a flasher stepped forward and opened his raincoat right in front of her.
She looked at him and asked, “You call that a lining?”
When I was reading these jokes, a strange thing happened to me that might happen to you, too. I heard them in my father’s voice.
That’s not just because my dad loved to tell jokes—toward the end of his life that’s what he asked me for most: “Got any new ones?”
It’s because jokes themselves are almost an artifact of another era, one that’s dying off.
“Funny people these days, they do routines and many are terrific. But they’re not jokes in the form we know them, the ‘Two guys walk into a bar,’” Novak said. Today’s comics “tell stories, or riff, but what I’m interested in—one of my goals—is to preserve the art of the joke, which I fear is leaving us.”
The guys who’d grab a mic and rat-a-tat-tat, “My wife drove her car into the living room”-type of gags aren’t here anymore. Where’d they go? Here’s a clue:
Two old friends made a pact that whoever dies first would come back and tell the other what it’s like. So one day Pete gets a call from Richard, who died of a heart attack. Pete says, “What’s it like?” Richard tells him:
“I start off with a big breakfast. Then I have sex, and after that I lie in the sun. Then it’s time for lunch, followed by a nap and more sex until it’s time for dinner….”
Pete is thrilled. “I had no idea heaven would be like that!”
“Who said anything about heaven? I’m a bull in Wisconsin.”
We should all be so lucky.
