Well......yes, Kendall...*wry grin*... but I am a bigger 'purist snob' about good humor than I am about 'folk. YOU do enough humor that you know the value of tweaking the exact wording & delivery so that the joke really works.

(Now the one about the old lady who has a complaint about the seat in her outhouse and wants the builder to take a look.....that one is a classic!)

I get so frustrated at jokes/stories that are half-remembered, reassembled quickly with poorly chosen language and delivered with no 'pacing'....And then they get copied & pasted endlessly on the internet/WWW until it is almost impossible to FIND the good original.

(the one Dave Hanson related above about the monastery and the 'fish friar' is in that category....it was originally about 3 times that long and set up the punch line very carefully. I call these "Readers Digest Condensed Jokes")

The story about the "staid lion" and "immortal porpoises" has been butchered so many ways since I heard it 35 years ago that I cringe.

(Also...'some' people never grow out of the 12 year old attitude of constructing a "joke" that is nothing but an excuse to toss in a couple of naughty words.)

Spaw's joke about the camel and the bricks is an unusual mixture of two other jokes I heard years ago, but...it works!....it is well-constructed and 'timed'....and Spaw 'illustrated' it, so that even just reading, it sounds like hearing it 'live'.

(The Rene Descarte story has several other lead in lines, but in this case it makes little difference what René is refusing.....but...Leadfingers..it's René Descartes...☺.)

Several of the jokes on this page are so old, they are classics, and I am amazed that they fall into "my current favorite", but I guess everyone has to hear them for the 1st time sometime)

Now, I will retire and decide what to offer as one of MY current favorites....