Comedians these days. In my day if you wanted a fresh joke you had to work for it. You took the bus upstate to Ithaca. Back then Marty Sheffield knew all the swell jokes. Jokes that’d make you laugh so hard it’d give you the fantods. Yes sir, he knew his onions. But he required all comers to rub his feet with olive oil and Gold Bond before he’d even deign tell you a joke. Even then he’d probably tell you one you already knew, which meant you’d have to come back next quarter moon and repeat the whole process. And God help you if he told you the same joke two times in a row. Nowadays you just pull the Jokemaster II out of its sheath, press a button, and faster than you can say Jack Robinson you got yourself a new joke, mister. How do you like them apples?

 OK, so none of that’s true. Cataloging jokes was pretty much taken care of with the invention of the printing press. But books, I mean, honestly. Who reads them anymore? When we want a new joke nowadays, we’d better kick down 30 bones for a gadget that will give one to us and is bigger than our cell phone. And who better to provide the jokes than Jackie “The Joke Man” Martling? Known as “The Man of a Thousand Jokes” (to me), Martling has spent his career painstakingly indexing every joke known to man. You may also know him from his work as lead writer of the Howard Stern show, so count on a lot of the jokes being along the lines of “Baba-booie baba-booie! Midget stripper tits! LOL”

Perhaps you’re thinking, “Why should I care about a joke-telling gadget?” Fair deuce, but just listen to some of the extra features it includes: a high-resolution touch-screen interface, built-in WiFi, Google Maps accessibility, push e-mail support from Yahoo, coverflow integration, and…oh wait, nevermind. This just tells you new jokes. It’ll probably make a good gift for your grandpa who likes to tell jokes and doesn’t trust any gadget unless it requires two AA batteries. Check out the website for a whole lineup of joke-telling devices from “The Joke Man”. It also may be the only place in the world outside my diary you can read the phrase, “Press the left eye, and out come more than 15 of the grossest fart, poop, and burp sounds ever.”

A prize to whoever comes up with the best punchline to the joke in the picture. 

1. alej744 says:
   February 28th, 2007 at 9:10 pm

   Dude, I swear on my life, I own that thing. It’s awesome. Those three face buttons - they laugh for you. You can save your favorite jokes and you can browse by category. It also has a backlight for reading in the dark.