So Moses said to God, "Let me get this straight"

The Column: 10.14.22

My friend Larry Josephson died in July in New York at the age of 83 and I miss him because he was one of the last people I knew who would run into me and tell me a joke. He had a good career in radio at WBAI but I was too busy doing my own show to listen to his but in later years I used his studio on 89th Street to record at and when I walked in, Larry’d say hello and then he’d say, “So Moses was talking to God and he said, ‘Let me get this straight. They get all the oil deposits and we have to cut the tips off our WHAT?’”

I used to know guys who told jokes, Arnie and Roland and Marty and Al, and it was part of normal male repartee, and sometimes one joke would lead to others. “Moses came down from the Mount with the tablets in his hand and he told the Israelites, ‘Okay, I managed to talk him down to ten, but I’m afraid adultery is still in there.’”

We were in our twenties, grad students, we reconnoitered in a booth at a bar, drinking beer, sometimes whiskey, and muttering about the layers of bureaucracy and the medieval rigidity of academia, but jokes kept popping up, and now I can’t recall the last person who told me a joke. Maybe it was Larry.

His beloved daughter Jennie wants me to speak at a memorial service, which I can’t, but if I spoke, I’d tell about the mine owner who hired an Italian to be the paymaster and a Russian to run the lift and a Japanese guy to manage supplies and all went well for a while until they ran out of supplies. The mine owner walked around looking for the Japanese guy and suddenly he jumped up from behind a rock and cried, “Supplies! Supplies!”

On second thought, maybe not. Times are changing and I can imagine that joke getting a chilly silence. Why risk the awkwardness? So the Zen master said to the hot dog vendor, “Make me one with everything.” So the vendor fixes a hot dog and hands it to the Zen master, who pays with a $20 bill. The hot dog vendor puts the bill in his pocket. “Where’s my change?” asks the Zen master. And the vendor says, “Change must come from within.”

Larry was safe telling Jewish jokes, being Jewish and able to get the accent right, whereas I’d be treading on the edge of anti-Semitism, so I tend toward Norwegian jokes. Scandinavian people have no sensitivity about jokes at all. (Maybe because they don’t get them.)

So Ole came home early from work and there sat Lena on the bed, naked. He asked her, “Why naked in the middle of the afternoon?” and she said, “I don’t have anything nice to wear.” Ole said, “Of course you do” and he opened her closet. He said, “Look, you’ve got a nice yellow dress, a nice green dress, a nice blue dress, there’s Svend, a nice purple dress, a nice black dress …”

Some women might think that joke unfunny, so I should find a better one. Ole was dying and he lay on his deathbed, feeling horrible, and then he smelled fresh rhubarb pie from the kitchen downstairs, so he made his way painfully down the steps and into the kitchen and there it was on the counter, just out of the oven, and he got out a knife and started to cut it and Lena slapped him upside the head and said, “Leave it alone, Ole, that’s for the funeral.”

I told that joke once to an audience and the laughter was mostly soprano.

I can’t go to the memorial so this column is my farewell. I’m asking my readers to tell a joke this week in honor of Larry. It will be a great tribute.

So Moses had a wonderful time with God but finally he had to say, “Lord, I know you’re omniscient and everything, but the knock-knock joke doesn’t work if you don’t say, ‘Who’s there?’” At which point, a guy walked in with his hands full of dog turds and said, “Look what I almost stepped in.” It never gets old. Larry did, and God bless his memory, and if you’ll do as I say and tell a joke this week, you honor a good man. And next week you can tell another one.