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“Oh! What a memory you’ve got!”

“I remember when I was young,” the old gentleman said to little Bobby, “I had to fight for my life against sixteen cannibals, and only one ran away.”

“But,” said Bobby, “last year you told me there were eight cannibals.”

“Yes,” said the old gentleman, “but you were too young then to know the whole horrible truth.”

“You are five today. Happy birthday to you!”

“Thank you, Mama.”

“Would you like to have a cake with five candles on it for your birthday party?”

“I think I’d better have five cakes and one candle, Mama.”

“Mother, we’re going to play elephants at the Zoo. Will you help us?”

“What can I do?”

“You can be the lady who gives them nuts and sweets.”

“Isn’t it wonderful how little chicks get out of their shells?”

“What puzzles me is how they get into them.”

“How is your little brother, Johnny?”

“He is in bed. He hurt himself.”

“That’s too bad. How did he do it?”

“We were playing who could lean furthest out of the window, and he won.”

“Is your dog clever?”

“Very. When I say to him: come here or don’t come here, just as you please, he comes or he doesn’t come, as he pleases. [83] ”

A father took his young daughter to the cinema. He took a seat in the middle of the hall while his daughter sat down in the front row to join some other children. The film was showing a forest fire which frightened the little girl very much and she came back to take a seat beside her father.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Did the fire frighten you?”

“Oh, no!” she answered. “The smoke got in my eyes.”

“What is the difference between lightning and electricity?”

“Well, you don’t have to pay for lightning.”

“So, Joe was the life of the party? [84] ”

“Oh, yes. He was the only one who could talk louder than the radio.”

“That letter is too heavy,” said the clerk in the post office, after weighing the letter.

“You’ll have to put another stamp on it.”

“What’s the good of that?” said the boy. “If I put another stamp on it, that will make it still heavier.”

“It was so cold where we were,” said the Arctic explorer, “that the candle froze and we couldn’t blow it out.”

“That’s nothing,” said another man. “Where we were the words came out of our mouths in pieces of ice, and we fried them to see what we were talking about.”

“Is it bad luck when a black cat follows you?”

“That depends on whether you are a man or a mouse.”

An American and a Scotchman were walking near the foot of one of the Scotch mountains. The Scotchman called forth the strongest echo that could ever be heard in that place. When the echo was clearly heard after almost two minutes, the proud Scotchman, turning to the American, exclaimed, “You cannot show anything like that in your country!”

“Why,” said the American, “in my camp in the Rockies, [85] when I go to bed, I just call out, ‘Time to get up; wake up’, and eight hours afterwards the echo comes back and wakes me up.”

Robert smiled when the teacher read the story of a man who swam a river three times before breakfast.

“Do you doubt that a trained swimmer could do that?” asked the teacher.

“No, sir,” answered Robert, “but I wonder why he didn’t make it four times and swim back to the side where his clothes were.”

“Tom, your hands are very dirty. What would you say if I came to school with dirty hands?”

“I should be too polite, sir, to mention it.”

“I can’t think why they make so much noise about Miss Smith’s voice. Miss Jones has a much richer voice.”

“Yes, but Miss Smith has a much richer father.”

“Have any of your childhood hopes been realized?”

“Yes. When Mother used to pull my hair, I wished that I didn’t have any.”

A magician was working on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. The audience would be different each week, so the magician allowed himself to do the same tricks over and over again.

There was only one problem: the captain’s parrot saw the shows each week and began to understand how the magician did every trick. Once he understood he started shouting in the middle of the show.

“Look, it’s not the same hat.”

“Look, he is hiding the flowers under the table.”

“Hey, why are all the cards the Ace of Spades? [86] ”

The magician was furious but couldn’t do anything; it was, after all, the captain’s parrot.

One day the ship had an accident and sank. The magician found himself on a piece of wood in the middle of the ocean with the parrot, of course.

They stared at each other with hate, but did not utter a word. This went on for a day, and another and another.

After a week the parrot said, “OK, I give up. [87] Where’s the boat?”

“I’m really worried about my wife. She drives like lightning.”

“Do you mean that she drives too fast?”

“No, but she always strikes trees.”

“Honey,” said a husband to his wife, “I invited a friend home for supper.”