A 22-year-old kid is sent to a maximum security prison for larceny. Benefiting from a cliché often found in prison stories, he ends up with an older, veteran cellmate who takes a liking to him and helps him get acclimated to prison life.The first night in the cell block, the kid hears something strange. Other prisoners are calling out numbers in the darkness.”Sixteen!”All the prisoners laugh, except for the new kid.
“Twenty-five!”
More laughter.
And so on. The kid asks his cellmate to explain what everyone’s laughing at.
“Well, at night, we’ve got nothing better to do than to tell jokes.”
“But they’re not jokes. They’re just numbers.”
“That’s all you know. Thing is, we’ve all been here so long that we’ve heard all each other’s jokes so often that we’ve memorized them. So rather than tell the whole joke again, we’ve numbered ’em all. Now we just remind each other of the joke by calling out the number.”
So the kid calls out, “Eleven!”
The entire cell block erupts in almost hysterical laughter.
Then the guy in the next cell calls out, “Fifteen!” Crickets.
The kid asks, “What happened?”
His cellmate answers, “That guy never could tell a joke.”
That is one of my all time favorite jokes. Just the line “That guy never could tell a joke.” can crack me up. And…sadly, it is reminiscent of me, I never remember the whole joke (unless it is short), but punchlines…I can do punchlines.
- “I pissed in its ear.”
- “It is dark in here.”
- “Wrecked’im hell, it killed ‘im.”
- Jesus Johnson
- “Anyone can roast beef.”
- “Sand”
1906 – Henny Youngman, American comedian (d. 1998)
1926 – Jerry Lewis, American comedian