The former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was full of political jokes. Since this was an embarrassement to the political leadership they set up a task force to find out where all those jokes originated. The comrades of the task force were successfull after many months of search in finding out that all those jokes originated from a very old man living in a small hut in the mountains. They came to arrest him but finding he was really very old they decided they'd first ask him why he made all those jokes.

"Well, he said, I have been making jokes for all my life, first at the time of the Emperor, then at the Weimar Republic, then at the time of the Nazis, so what is bad in telling jokes about the GDR?"

They sighed and decided to explain: "It was very fine of you to invent all those jokes at the emperor's time and it was still fine in the Weimar republic. We particularly applaud your courage to make jokes during the Nazi time but now we are living in the first real democracy on German soil where the workers and the peasants have the say..."

"This one's not from me", the old man interrupts.

On the serious side, I quite often try to invent jokes (my little daughter loves them), playing around with words with double meanings, etc. Nearly all of them I forget the very moment I make them.

Wolfgang