Текст книги "Napalm and Silly Putty"

Автор книги: Джордж Карлин

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

Of course, such a speech is not your only option; circumstances may permit a more spectacular exit. Perhaps you’ll get your two-minute warning during an aerobics class. If so, volunteer for something strenuous. Grab three sets of dumbells, strap on a lot of leg weights, and start running on the treadmill at a really steep grade. When they tell you to stop, turn the treadmill up to 20 miles an hour and start leaping in the air. Tell them it’s a new exercise called the Hindu Death Leap. Then collapse on the treadmill, allowing it to fling you backward into the mirrored wall, breaking the mirror and showering everyone with small pieces of glass. I guarantee the police will search your locker carefully.

“Heal This!”

Or maybe you’ll be lucky enough to receive your two-minute warning while attending Christian faith-healing services. This is a wonderful opportunity to give religion a bad name. After the sermon, when they ask for those to come forward who “need a miracle,” stand up and get on line with the cripples. Try to time things just right. Cut into line if you have to. Then, with barely ten seconds left, kneel in front of the preacher. He will place his hands on you, shout, “Heal!” and you will croak at his feet. Not quite a miracle, but certainly an attention-getter. And the nice thing is they’ll blame it on the preacher:

THOUSANDS LOOK ON AS?EVANGELIST SLAYS WORSHIPER.?POLICE STUDY VIDEOTAPE.

Posthumous Fun

But you needn’t be satisfied with merely an impressive death scene. You can actually take it a bit further, past the moment of death, by preprogramming some posthumous reflexes into your brain. Remember, the central nervous system runs on electricity, and dying takes place in stages. So, not all of your electrical energy is fully discharged at the time you are pronounced dead; some of it remains stored. Morgue and funeral workers report that corpses often spasm and twitch as much as two days after death.

So I say, as long as you have that potential, be creative. Before you die, try using autosuggestion and visual imaging to preprogram into your brain a few posthumous reflexes. Things that will entertain the folks you leave behind and capture their imaginations. You might want to consider humming during your autopsy, or snapping your fingers during the embalming, or—always a big winner at a wake—bolting upright in your coffin and screaming, “I’m not really dead!” That one is especially fun if someone has brought along impressionable children.

But perhaps you’re of a more conservative stripe. If so, at your wake, something as simple as squeezing off several dozen loud but artistically redeeming farts might bring a smile to the faces of those who knew you best: “Isn’t that just like Uncle Bob,” they’ll chuckle, as they rush to open a window.

So, folks, I think my message is clear: even in death, obligations to your loved ones do not end. You still have the responsibility to entertain and ease their grief. And should you persist, and be truly creative with these postdeath efforts, you may accomplish the rare feat of leaving behind a group of incensed relatives who beat you with heavy clubs until they are satisfied that you’re fully and completely dead.

? HYPERLINK “file:///E:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Dom\Desktop\1791_NapalmSillyPutty%5B1%5D\Napalm_body-contents.html” l “TOC-48” ??FUNERALS ?

I don’t like to attend funerals. When I die, I don’t want a funeral, because I’m sure of one thing: if I don’t like other people’s funerals, I’m going to hate my own.

And I don’t want a wake. I don’t like the idea of lying on display, dead, in a mahogany convertible with the top down. Everybody looking, and you’re dead. They have no idea you’re wearing short pants, and have no back in your jacket. It’s embarrassing. Especially if they use too much makeup, and you look like a deceased drag queen.

And as you’re lying there half-naked, one by one they kneel down and stare silently into your coffin. It’s supposed to look reverent. What they’re really doing is subtracting their age from yours to find out how much time they have left. That is, if they’re younger. If they’re older, they just gloat because you died first.

“He looks good.”

“Dave, he’s dead.”

“I know. But when he was alive he didn’t look this good.”

It’s a perverse fact that in death you grow more popular. As soon as you’re out of everyone’s way, your approval curve moves sharply upward. You get more flowers when you die than you got your whole life. All your flowers arrive at once. Too late.

And people say the nicest things about you. They’ll even make things up: “You know, Jeff was a scumbag. A complete degenerate scumbag. But he meant well! You have to give him that. He was a complete degenerate well-meaning scumbag. Poor Jeff.”

“Poor” is a big word when discussing the dead.

“Poor Bill is dead.”

“Yeah, poor Bill.”

“And poor Tom is gone.”

“Jeez, yeah, poor Tom.”

“Poor John died.”

“Poor John. Hey, what about Ed?”

“Ed? That motherfucker is still alive! I wish he would die.”

“Yeah. The dirty prick. Let’s kill him.”

? HYPERLINK “file:///E:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Dom\Desktop\1791_NapalmSillyPutty%5B1%5D\Napalm_body-contents.html” l “TOC-49” ??JUST FOR FUN ?

When writing a letter of reference for a friend, give him a glowing recommendation, but just for fun, conclude by saying, “Don’t let Dave’s legal history trouble you. There’s reason to believe the little girl was lying.”

Just for fun, knock on the door of any stall in a public rest room and say, “Sir! Please try to control the smell in there. Don’t force us to bring in the hoses.”

Call one of those How-Am-I-Driving 800 numbers and, just for fun, complain about a particular driver. Tell them he was driving on the sidewalk, vomiting, giving the finger to old women, and dangling a baby out the window.

Next time you’re at a baseball game, sing the national anthem in a loud voice, but just for fun, alternate each line between English and complete gibberish:

O-oh say can you see,

Floggie bloom skeldo pronk,

What so proudly we hailed,

Clogga dronk slern klam dong blench.

See if that doesn’t get the fans talking among themselves.

While strolling past a sidewalk café, just for fun, squeeze off several truly repulsive farts, silent or noisy. If silent, stand to one side and watch the results; if noisy, tip your hat and say, “Bon appetito.”

Walk through a crowded amusement park carrying a small tape recorder that plays the sound of a little girl’s voice screaming, “Help, Mommy, the man is touching me like Daddy does at home!” Just for fun.

? HYPERLINK “file:///E:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Dom\Desktop\1791_NapalmSillyPutty%5B1%5D\Napalm_body-contents.html” l “TOC-50” ??SHORT TAKES ?

When you step on the brakes your life is in your foot’s hands.

Attending college at a place called Bob Jones University is like putting your money in Nick & Tony’s Bank.

I think what the authorities need is a SQUAT team. Here’s how it would work: A squad of heavily armed police break into the house and take a shit in the living room.

Burma is now called Myanmar, Ceylon is Sri Lanka, and Upper Volta is Burkina Faso. How can they do that? How can they just change the name of a country? It doesn’t seem right to me.

The Jews are smart; they don’t have a hell.

No one ever says “half a week,” although obviously there is such a thing. As in, “I’ll be back in a week and a half.”

FUCK RATIONAL THOUGHT

You know who would make an interesting murder–suicide? Madeleine Albright and Yanni.

When they print the years of someone’s birth and death, can you resist figuring out how old they were?

I hope reincarnation is a fact so I can come back and fuck teenagers again.

Let me tell you something, if we ever have a good, useful, real-life revolution in this country, I’m gonna kill a whole lot of motherfuckers on my list. For purposes of surprise, I’m not revealing the names at this time.

If a centipede wants to kick another centipede in the shins, does he do it one leg at a time? Or does he stand on fifty of his legs and kick with the other fifty?

McDonald’s says “100 Billion Served.” Bullshit, they hand them to you. There’s a difference.

SPOTS ARE DOTS UP CLOSE. DOTS ARE SPOTS FAR AWAY.

Why is it a pile of dirty clothes is called “the laundry”? “I’m about to do the laundry.” And then, when it comes out of the machine, it’s still called “the laundry”? “I just did the laundry.” What’s the deal here? Is laundry clean or dirty?

The reason county fairs don’t have kissing booths anymore is because someone noticed that a lot of the men in line had hard-ons.

Wouldn’t you like to read some of the things they found in the suggestion box after a meeting of the Aryan Brotherhood?

This year for the Oscars and Emmys I wore my usual outfit: filthy underwear. I enjoy television a lot more when I’m comfortably dressed.

Regarding “safe and sound”: I’ve often been safe, but seldom have I been thought of as sound.

True Stuff: There is actually an auto race called the Goody’s Headache Powder 500.

I think Kleenex ought to put a little bull’s eye right in the middle of the tissue. Wouldn’t that be great? Especially when you’re hangin’ out with your buddies: (KNNERRFFF! SNGOTT!) “Look, Joey, an 85!”

Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.

What exactly is a wingding?

When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I’m sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.

Have you noticed that in the movies lately a popular thing to do is stick someone’s head in the toilet and flush the toilet repeatedly? Where did that come from? They never used to do that. You never saw Spencer Tracy stick Henry Fonda’s head in the toilet. Maybe Katharine Hepburn’s, but not Henry Fonda’s.

A stone’s throw is much farther than a hop, skip, and a jump, but it’s not nearly as far as a whoop, a holler, and a stomp.

Amusement parks should have a ride where people are pursued by the police at high speed, and when they’re caught they’re beaten and tortured.

When you think about it, attention deficit disorder makes a lot of sense. In this country there isn’t a lot worth paying attention to.

Why do they call one sport “women’s tennis,” and then turn around and call the other one “ladies’ golf”?

Once a year they should have No Hairpiece Day. So everyone could see what all these baldy-headed, fake-hair jerkoffs really look like.

Who decides when the applause should die down? It seems like it’s a group decision; everyone begins to say to themselves at the same time, “Well, okay, that’s enough of that.”

I’m tired of these one-sided heavyweight fights. I think Mike Tyson should just go ahead and fight a leopard. At least it would be an even match. And I wish he would bite more people. God, that was great. I think it would be fun if he just started biting people on the street for no reason.

As a child, I used to wonder if Charlie McCarthy had little wooden balls.

? HYPERLINK “file:///E:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Dom\Desktop\1791_NapalmSillyPutty%5B1%5D\Napalm_body-contents.html” l “TOC-51” ??ADVENTURES IN THE SUPERMARKET ?

Have you ever selected an item in the supermarket and put it in someone else’s cart? Then you realize what you’re doing and you get sort of an alien feeling?

“Wait! This is not my cart. Look at this! Brown flour and sheep entrails. God, I almost put my capers in this cart. Where’s mine? Oh, there it is! The one with the tapioca cupcakes and the mango popsicles. Thank God.”

Or have you ever started to walk off with someone else’s cart?

“Hey! That’s my stuff!”

You have to think fast. “Not yet it isn’t! It’s not paid for. Technically, these things still belong to all of us. And if I feel like shopping out of your cart, that’s what I’ll do. Let’s see, any organic scallions in there? What’s this? Elk milk? That’ll be just fine. You may leave now.”

I’ve found the best way to shop for food is to work up a really big appetite. Fast for several days, smoke a couple of joints, take $700 . . . and go to the supermarket! It’s great. You buy everything!

“Wow, canned bread! Just what I need!”

And all the good things, the things you really love and can’t do without? Well, you buy two of them, because you know you’re going to eat one of them on the way home at a red light.

Shopping hungry is great; you just keep loading things into your cart. But then, after several aisles, you realize you may have overdone it: You find yourself pushing a motorcade of three carts, all tied together with long loops of string cheese. Once again, you’ve lost control.

And so, as you realize you don’t have enough money to pay for everything, you begin to put back some of the more expensive items. Like meat.

“Meat? Twenty-seven dollars? Bullshit! I’ll put back these steaks and grab a few more pound cakes. The kids shouldn’t be eating meat, anyway.”

The nicest thing about putting things back in the supermarket is that you can put them anywhere you want. No one cares. You can leave the Robitussin next to the ham hocks and stick the marshmallows in with the Bacon Bits. They don’t care. They have people who come around at midnight to straighten that stuff out, and in the morning everything is back where it belongs.

By the way, next time you shop at a supermarket in a neighborhood that has higher than average marijuana use, take a look at the cookie section. Combat zone. Half the packages have been opened, and all the really good cookies are gone.

“Where the hell are the Mallomars?”

“Oh, we can’t get Mallomars into the store. Folks line up at the loading dock for Mallomars.”

There are always plenty of crappy cookies. You ever notice that? Shitty, low-priced local cookies? Like “Jim’s Home-Style Cookies. Twenty-six varieties.” I say, “Damn, Jim, if you can’t make cookies in twenty-five tries leave me out.”

Time to head home, folks. Let’s get on the checkout line here and read People magazine. By the way, I must admit I’m a real sucker on the checkout line. I’m an impulse buyer. Anything that’s on display, I want it. I even buy things other people leave behind.

“Wow! Extra spicy diet fudge raisin tartar sauce. Must be a sale. Great. I got the last one!”

One last thought: have you ever been on the express line and tried to convince the tough-looking Hispanic girl with the tattoos that twenty-seven packages of hot dogs are really just one item? I’m always grateful when she finally gives in. “Go ahead, mister, it’s quicker than beating the shit out of you.”

? HYPERLINK “file:///E:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Dom\Desktop\1791_NapalmSillyPutty%5B1%5D\Napalm_body-contents.html” l “TOC-52” ??WELL, AT LEAST THE PLATE WAS BLUE ?

I often wonder why there’s no blue food. Every other color is well represented in the food kingdom: corn is yellow, spinach is green, raspberries are red, carrots are orange, grapes are purple, and mushrooms are brown. So where’s the blue food?

And don’t bother me with blueberries; they’re purple. The same is true of blue corn and blue potatoes. They’re purple. Blue cheese? Nice try. It’s actually white cheese with blue mold. Occasionally, you might run across some blue Jell-O in a cafeteria. Don’t eat it. It wasn’t supposed to be blue. Something went wrong.

? HYPERLINK “file:///E:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Dom\Desktop\1791_NapalmSillyPutty%5B1%5D\Napalm_body-contents.html” l “TOC-53” ??FUSSY EATER ?

When I was a kid, I was a fussy eater. That’s what they called it at our house.

“He’s a fussy eater.”

“Fussy eater” is a euphemism for “big pain in the ass.” They’d trot out some food, and I’d say, “I don’t like that.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I know I don’t like it. And I know that if I ate it, I would like it even less.”

“Well, I like it. Mmmmm! Yum yum!”

“Hey, Ma. You like it? You eat it!”

Sometimes they would try to corner me with logic: “Well, how do you know you don’t like it, if you’ve never even tried it?”

“It came to me in a dream.” Big pain in the ass.

Some things I didn’t like because of the way they sounded.

“Don’t sound right to me, Ma. Say that again?”

“Asparagus.”

“No, I don’t like that.” Imagine. I got away with that for eight or nine years.

To this day, there are still some things I won’t eat because of how they sound. Yogurt sounds disgusting. I can’t eat anything that has both a “y” and a “g” in it. Squash is also badly named.

“You want some squash?” Sounds like someone sat on dinner.

“How would you like a nice tongue sandwich? It’s made from slices of a cow’s tongue.”

“Hey, Ma, are you fuckin’ tryin’ to make me sick?”

There are also foods that sound too funny to eat. Like guacamole. It sounds like something you yell when you’re on fire. “Holy guacamole! My ass is burnin’!”

Or when you can’t remember the name of something. “Ed, where’s that little guacamole that plugs into the lamp?”

Another food too funny to eat: garbanzo beans. Sounds like acrobats. “Ladies and gentlemen, from Corsica, the fabulous Garbanzos!”

On the other hand, there were some foods I didn’t like because of how they looked. That seems a bit more rational.

“I don’t like that! It don’t look right to me. Did you make that, Ma? Yeah? Is there a picture of it in the cookbook? I’ll bet it don’t look like that.”

Of course, some people will eat anything, no matter how it looks. I saw guys like that on the chow line in the army.

“Hi, boys! Whaddaya got? I’ll eat anything. What’s that called? Never mind, gimme a whole bunch of it.”

“It’s rat’s asshole, Don.”

“Well, it sure makes a hell of a fondue.”

Not me. I don’t eat anything I don’t recognize immediately. If I have to ask questions, I pass. I’m not at dinner to make inquiries. Gimme somethin’ I recognize. Like a carrot. I know I can trust a carrot.

Now, there are some foods that even though I know what they are, I still don’t like their looks. Tomatoes, for instance. My main problem with tomatoes is that they don’t look as though they’re fully developed. They look like they’re still in the larval stage; thousands of tiny seeds and a whole lot of jelly-lookin’ slime. “Get it off my plate! It’s slimy!” It’s like that stuff at the end of an egg.

Of course, I know it’s not the end of an egg . . . it’s the beginning of a chicken!! “It’s hen come! Eeeeaaaaghhh! Get it off my plate!”

Oh, I’m fun in the coffee shop.

Lobsters and crabs don’t look like food to me, either. Anything with big pinchers crawling toward me sideways doesn’t make me hungry. In fact, my instinct is “Step on that fuck! Step on him before he gets to the children!”

And I definitely cannot eat oysters. Not for the usual reason—their similarity to snot—but because when I look at the whole oyster I think, “Hey, that’s a little house. Somebody lives in there. I’m not gonna break in on a guy just to have a meal. He might be making a pearl. Maybe he just brought home a do-it-yourself pearl kit and cleared off the dining room table. Who am I to interfere with the plans of an oyster?”

? HYPERLINK “file:///E:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Dom\Desktop\1791_NapalmSillyPutty%5B1%5D\Napalm_body-contents.html” l “TOC-54” ??RUNNING HOT AND COLD ?

The refrigerator butter warmer is a strange invention. Originally, humans were cold so they built a warm enclosure. A house. Cold outside, warm inside the house. Everything was fine until they realized that inside the warm enclosure the meat tended to spoil. So they built a cold enclosure—a refrigerator—inside the warm enclosure. Warm in the house, cold in the refrigerator. Everything was fine until they realized that inside the cold enclosure the butter got too hard to spread. So they built an even smaller warm enclosure—a butter warmer—inside the cold enclosure, which was already inside the larger warm enclosure. Strange.

? HYPERLINK “file:///E:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Dom\Desktop\1791_NapalmSillyPutty%5B1%5D\Napalm_body-contents.html” l “TOC-55” ??ICEBOX MAN ?

Around our house I’m known as Icebox Man. One of my duties is keeping people from standing too long with the icebox door open while they decide what to eat. You know, someone smokes three joints and decides to inventory the refrigerator. Drives me crazy.

“Close the fuckin’ door, will ya? You’re letting out all the cold. Here’s twenty dollars, go down to the Burger King! I’ll save that much on electricity. Close the goddamn door! If you can’t decide what you want, take a Polaroid picture, go figure it out, and come back later. You kids are lucky. We didn’t have Polaroids, we had to make an oil painting.”

I try not to let them get me down, though, because Icebox Man has an even bigger job: picking through the refrigerator periodically, deciding which items to throw away. Most people won’t take that responsibility; they grab what they want and leave the rest. They figure, “Someone is saving that; sooner or later it’ll be eaten.” Meanwhile the thing, whatever it is, is growing smaller and denser and has become permanently fused to the refrigerator shelf.

Well, folks, Icebox Man is willing to make the tough decisions. And I never act alone; I always include the family.

“I notice some egg salad that’s been here for awhile. Are we engaged in medical research I haven’t been told about?”

“May I assume from the color of this meat loaf that it’s being saved for St. Patrick’s Day?”

“Someone please call the museum and have this onion dip carbon-dated.”

“How about this multihued Jell-O from Christmas? It’s July now. If no one wants this, I’m going to throw it away.”

Did your mother ever pull that stuff on you? Offer you some food that if you didn’t eat it she was “Just going to throw it away”? Well, doesn’t that make you feel dandy?

“Here’s something to eat, Petey. Hurry up, it’s spoiling! Bobby, eat this quickly; the green part is spreading. If you don’t eat it, I’m going to give it to the dog.” It’s so nice to be ahead of the dog in the food chain.

Icebox Man has had some interesting experiences. Have you ever been looking through the refrigerator and come across a completely empty plate? Nothing on it but a couple of food stains? It’s unnerving. I think to myself: “Could something have eaten something else? Maybe the Spam ate the olives. Maybe that half-eaten chicken isn’t really dead. He’s living on our food.” Sometimes I picture a little mouse in a parka, hiding behind the mustard, waiting for the refrigerator light to go off so he can resume his cold-weather foraging.

Probably the worst experience is reaching into the refrigerator and finding something you simply cannot identify at all. You literally do not know what it is. It could be meat; it could be cake. At those times, I try to bluff.

“Honey? Is this good?”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know! I’ve never seen anything like it. It looks like, well, it looks like . . . meat cake!”

“Smell it!”

“It has no smell whatsoever.”

“That means it’s good! Put it back. Someone is saving it for something.” That’s what frightens me; that someone will consider it a challenge and use it in soup. Simply because it’s there.

It’s a leftover. What a sad word: leftover.

But think about this. Leftovers make you feel good twice. First, when you put them away, you feel thrifty and intelligent: “I’m saving food!” Then, a month later, when blue hair is growing out of the ham, and you throw it away, you feel really intelligent: “I’m saving my life!”

? HYPERLINK “file:///E:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Dom\Desktop\1791_NapalmSillyPutty%5B1%5D\Napalm_body-contents.html” l “TOC-56” ??DOG MOMENTS #3 ?

Big Dog, Little Dog

Dogs come in all sizes. There are lots of little dogs, and lots of big dogs. And when I say big dogs, I don’t mean just big dogs. I mean BIG, FUCKIN’, HUGE GODDAMN DOGS! Some people got huge dogs that look more like livestock. Dogs that oughta be wearin’ commercial license plates.

“What the hell is that?”

“That’s my dog.”

“Jesus, man, he blocked out the sun!”

“That’s Tiny. He’s a Great Alaskan Horse Moose Dog. Say ‘hello,’ Tiny. No, no! Tiny! Put the man down! Bad dog!”

Little dogs are different. Little dogs jump all around, and their legs move real quick. They got those teeny little legs. They got legs that if you feel around under the fur it’s like a pepperoni stick under there.

Sometimes they jump up high. Some of ’em can jump clear up onto a real high bed.

[Boing!]

“Holy shit, what a jump! Lemme see ya do that again.”

Put him back on the floor.

[Boing!]

“God, I can’t believe it. C’mon, one more time.”

Back onto the floor.

[Boing!]

And I make him keep doin’ it and doin’ it, over and over, until he gets all tired out and can’t quite reach the bed anymore. I let him fall short a few times and crash back onto the floor. Then and only then, if I decide I want him on the bed, I put him up there myself. It’s my decision; I buy the dog food.

Fleeky Disappoints

Besides, if you do allow him on the bed, sooner or later he’ll create an incident. Before the evening is over, he will force one of the humans to turn to the other and say,

“Honey, did you fart?”

“Not me. I thought you farted.”

“Not me! Phewww! That’s not even one of my farts! I told you, I’ve got four farts. My Heineken’s fart, my broccoli fart, my rice pudding fart, and my nondairy creamer fart. And the fart I’m smellin’ right now is definitely not one of mine.”

[Sniffing]

“Wait a minute. I know! The dog farted!! Fleeky farted! Fleeky, why did you fart? Look at him! Look how guilty he looks. He knows he farted. I seen his asshole open up. I seen it. What? Well, I just happened to be lookin’ at his asshole by chance, that’s all. What kind of a question is that? I was simply glancin’ at his asshole, and I saw it open up. I thought he was doin’ some kinda deep-breathing exercise. I had no idea he was into chemical warfare.”

? HYPERLINK “file:///E:\Documents%20and%20Settings\Dom\Desktop\1791_NapalmSillyPutty%5B1%5D\Napalm_body-contents.html” l “TOC-57” ??SHORT TAKES ?

I don’t mind leaving my house as long as I don’t have to look at a lot of unattractive Americans in the process. Visors, logo hats, fat thighs, beer bellies, bad haircuts, halter tops, cheap sneakers, camcorders, and unattractive children wearing blank expressions. God, these people are ugly. I stay home a lot.

I always refer to any individual member of the Red Sox as a Red Sock. Is this correct?

America: where the Irish, English, Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, and Italians all came together to kill Indians, lynch niggers, and beat the shit out of spics and Jews.

Next guy who says to me, “Badda-boom, badda-bing,” is gettin’ kicked right in the fuckin’ nuts.

I was one of the people at Woodstock who took the brown acid. Lemme tell ya, there was nothing wrong with it.

NEVER FORGET, HITLER WAS A CATHOLIC.

Here would be a good epitaph for some guy: “I want everyone to know it was great being alive, and I really enjoyed myself. I especially enjoyed fucking and going to the movies.”

If you listen to his voice carefully without looking at the screen, Ted Koppel sounds like he’s taking a shit.

There’s a thing called shaken-baby syndrome that people get upset about. Personally, I think you have to give ’em a good shake, or they don’t bake uniformly.

The Golden Gate Bridge should have a long bungee cord for people who aren’t quite ready to commit suicide but want to get in a little practice.

If a movie is described as a romantic comedy you can usually find me next door playing pinball.

Somehow I enjoy watching people suffer.

My most frequent sex fantasy: to work in a delicatessen and have a woman come in and ask me to give her a pound of tongue.

And I’d say, “Well, I don’t get off till four o’clock.”

And she’d say, “Well, I don’t get off at all, that’s why I want some tongue.”

If they decide to cover Viagra under Medicare, we’ll all be paying for other people’s hard-ons.

You know what they ought to have? Motherfucker’s Day. The day after Mother’s Day ought to be Motherfucker’s Day. Actually, when you think about it, Father’s Day is Motherfucker’s Day.

Attention men: The dumb-looking shaved-head thing has finally played out. Try finding some other way of pretending to be cool and different.

In applying the stereotype that all old people are slow-thinking and dull-witted, what’s often overlooked is that many of these people were slow-thinking and dull-witted throughout their lives. At this point they’re simply older versions of the same unimpressive people.

My main operating principle: Don’t take any shit from the zeitgeist.

History is not happenstance; it is conspiratorial. Carefully planned and executed by people in power.

The mayfly lives only one day. And sometimes it rains.

You know what you never hear about anymore? Quicksand. When I was a kid, movies and comic books had quicksand all the time. What happened? Same thing with whirlpools. You never hear about some guy being sucked down into a whirlpool anymore. I miss that.

I think they ought to have black confetti. It would be great for funerals. Especially if the dead person wasn’t too popular.

If you really want to put a faith healer to the test, tell him you want a smaller shoe size.

You never seem to get laid on Thanksgiving. I think it’s because all the coats are on the bed.

In the United States, anybody can be president. That’s the problem.

You know how you can tell when a moth farts? When he suddenly flies in a straight line.

Do you realize that somewhere in the world there exists a person who qualifies as the worst doctor? If you took the time, by process of elimination you could actually determine the worst doctor in the world. And the funny part is knowing that someone has an appointment to see him tomorrow.

I often think of something my grandfather used to say. He’d tell me, “I’m goin’ upstairs and fuck your grandma.” He was a really honest man. He wasn’t going to bullshit a five-year-old.

Just beyond the edge of the solar system, in the Oort Cloud, there’s a swarm of about a trillion comets orbiting the sun. Let’s hope that right now one of them is turning slightly and pointing itself directly at Mississippi.