A brunette, redhead, and blonde were driving across the desert when their vehicle suffered a severe break down.
Realizing they would have to brave the rest of the journey on foot, the brunette said, “It will be a perilous trip. I will carry these jugs of water so we won’t die of thirst.”
Seeing the selflessness of her companion, the redhead said, “This journey could last for days. I will carry our supply of food so we won’t suffer hunger.”
Not to be outdone, the blonde chimed in, “And I’ll bring the car door. That way in case we get hot, we can roll down the window!”
This isn’t bad, but I swear I read it on Usenet back when Usenet was a thing. (rec.humor.funny?) It’s hard to laugh when a joke is so long in the tooth.
You know, when George sends me these jokes, I usually have to re-write them. Present or mismatched tenses, first person narratives, lines beginning with greater than signs, bizarre punctuation, and of course, tons of typos. I have no doubt that this particular joke was a copy/paste from usenet. How do I know?
Back in the late ’80s, I used to have a Vax account at the local university. I also ran a local BBS on a 286 computer with a 20mb hard drive and a 2400bps modem. My friends were computer geeks, and I was an outsider even among the outsiders. Nevertheless, as everyone I knew started to spread out and enter into their soul sucking careers, I still kept in touch with them through the e-mails they would send. They were filled with funny pictures and jokes… the same old jokes that we had passed around time and time again over the BBS’s and Vax accounts.
By the end of the ’90s, BBS’s were mostly gone. I had taken a factory job and started drinking with an old Army Sergeant at a local bar. (Yeah, this was the same guy who eventually got me to go into the Army.) He always had a joke to tell, but cautioned me that he had also heard them all. “All jokes are old jokes,” he’d say, and if I told him a joke, he’d be able to tell me an earlier version from whence it was derived.
In the early 2000’s, my attempts at making a notable website was not successful. There were a lot of discussions back then about intellectual property, and technically literate people were a little paranoid about putting a lot of work into something, only to have a bunch of lawyers tear it down because someone else could claim ownership of the IP.
After my upteenth failed attempt at creating a non-cringy vanity site, I had this idea to take all the jokes my friends would e-mail me and put them in a website that came to be known as “Flush Twice”. Since the jokes were mostly old jokes that one could easily find in a usenet news group, it was unlikely that posting them to a website would result in a DMCA take down.
So for you, this is an old joke that is tired and worn out, but for me, it’s a piece of my history. It reminds me of a time when I was hanging out with my friends, geeking out on computer tech, going to Pink Floyd laser shows at the Boonshoft Museum, checking out Hamvention at Hara Arena, and climbing onto the rooftop of an abandoned building so we could shoot fireworks into the night.
Happy Thanksgiving.