Mel Blanc: “That’s all, folks!”
Jack Lemmon: “In”
Jackie Gleason: “And away we go!”
Spike Milligan: “I told you I was ill.”
Peter Ustinov: “Do not walk on the grass.”
An Irishman, an Englishman, and a Scotsman are out walking when they capture a leprechaun. It agrees to give each of them one wish.
The Scot says, “My grandfather was a fisherman, my father’s a fisherman, I’m a fisherman, and my son will be a fisherman. I want the oceans full of fish for all eternity.” The leprechaun winks and instantly the oceans are teeming with fish.
Amazed, the Englishman says, “All right. I want a wall around England, protecting her, so that no one will get in for all eternity.”
Again the leprechaun winks, and suddenly there’s a huge wall around England.
The Irishman says, “I’m curious — please tell me more about this wall.”
“Well,” says the leprechaun, “it’s 150 feet high and 50 feet thick, protecting England so that nothing can get in or out.”
On March 15, 1980, the Boston Globe ran an editorial about the nation’s economic woes:
Certainly it is in the self-interest of all Americans to impose upon themselves the kind of economic self-discipline that President Carter urged repeatedly yesterday in his sober speech to the nation. As the President said, inflation, now running at record rates, is a cruel tax, one that falls most harshly upon those least able to bear the burden.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it carried the headline “Mush From the Wimp.”
In 1984 Globe editorial writer Kirk Scharfenberg admitted he’d written it. “I meant it as an in-house joke and thought it would be removed before publication,” he wrote. “It appeared in 161,000 copies of the Globe the next day.”
There once was a miser named Clarence
Who simonized both of his parents;
“The initial expense,”
He remarked, “is immense,
But it saves on the wearance and tearance.”
Victims of Belgian “entarteur” Noël Godin, who flings cream pies at the self-important:
Microsoft CEO Bill Gates
French novelist Marguerite Duras
Choreographer Maurice Bejart
French anchorman Patrick Poivre d’Arvor
French politician Nicolas Sarkozy
Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard
Philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy
Godin told The New York Times he’s trying “to function in the service of the capitalist status quo, without really using his intelligence or his imagination.” Touché.