Stop Me If You Heard This...

Allow me to turn your attention to our collection of jokes told in a foreign language! Turns out the rest of world dabbles in this little thing we at StopMe like to call "telling jokes." Now if you want dead air, just tune into the moment after a tellers from this collection drop the punchline on us uni-languaged USA-ers. Since it's socially quite lame to fake laugh when you don't speak the language (think about it), we can only smile sheepishly and offer our weak thanks for the diversity street cred. Sometimes we are blessed with a translation, but the only thing worse than not getting one is getting an ATTEMPTED translation that fizzles into general awkwardness. Case in point:

This is from our South St./Battery Pk. Expedition (Manhattan, 7/22/07), or Day 2 of Mocha and ‘Nilla’s overnight expedition. We were supposed to wake up in some charming beach-front motel, a little hung over but looking forward to greasy eggs, some good coffee and another breezy day scrounging jokes in the sand. Unfortunately there wasn’t a single room available in any of the beach-front motels; not that we could afford it anyway. So instead I woke up on Mocha’s living room floor staring at a cat turd, the traffic noise outside a far cry from the gentle swish of the waves you heard behind the Hamptons jokes. With a mere 8 hours in front of us to finish off this expedition we needed to stay close to home, thus the South Street Seaport/ Battery Park expedition. It wasn’t the beach, but we could see water, and we ended up with over 40 jokes, an excellent take considering the cat turd.

I just love getting jokes from people on the job. There's just something so Mr. Roger's Neighborhood about bumping into a real NYC native in his City Sights jumper, ready to share with us kiddies a little piece of his "world"— a joke about a guy who pisses vodka and leverages this oddity to get his wife to blow him! Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won't you be... my neighbor!

I just had to advertise how much of a moron I am.

Her: Pete and Repeat are in a boat. Pete jumps off, who's left?
Me (expert Joke-ologist): I don't know-- who?

The lesson here is if you rely on other people to make your joke work, even professionals, you're just going to end up as a filthy rich blond on a yacht.

As I was perusing our Hamptons jokes I couldn't believe I hadn't posted this one, told from a bike (well, a dude ON a bike)! We were just getting out of our first of several Mercedes-lovin' towns when we were pleased to find ourselves behind this self-propelled, earth-friendly gent. As we passed I tapped the brakes and Mocha, perceptive team player that he is, rolled down the glass and popped the StopMe question, "Excuse me, sir. Do you have any Grey Poupon?" Actually, you know the question as well as I do, and besides, Mocha doesn't get any intuition points because I was screaming, "See if he has any jokes-- get him!!" The guy pedaled a half-dozen times, deep in thought, then Mocha got the camera going just as he came up with the Turtle Mugging Joke. A guy on the go telling a joke about two turtle muggers moving way too fast! Pure joketry (that's joke combined with poetry for you novices).
Just by virtue of being on the bike he joins an elite group of StopMe joke-tellers who deliver from weird places or in weird ways. But even without the prop, it's a very worthy contribution.