21st Century Depression-Era Humor: Inevitability of Joke-Anthology Books

Any day now, I expect some book publisher in this country will publish a new book with a title such as, "Laughing Through The 21st Century Great American Depression: Anthology of Jokes About the Current USA Economic Depression."

Among the jokes that might be included in an anthology of this type:

---"My next-door neighbor has been babysitting my pet dog for me when I'm away from my home. My next-door neighbor says that since he's unemployed these days, babysitting my pet dog on a voluntary basis gives my neighbor something to do. So I told my neighbor that I'm very lucky he's unemployed, since otherwise I would have had to pay for a dog-sitter. So the next thing I know, my neighbor tells me he has just started up a dog-sitting service, and that his rates are very reasonable, only $10 an hour. Would I like to pay for his services by the week or by the day, this neighbor has the audacity to ask me."

or: "My next-door neighbor told me that he's willing to babysit my pet dog when I'm away, since my neighbor was laid off from his job last month and has lots of free time on his hands. I felt very lucky about the arrangement until I suddenly discovered just after my neighbor had dogsat for me that I could not find five of the six most prized possessions I own inside my home. My neighbor later confessed to being the culprit, but said he plans to use a laid-off-workers financial desperation defense in a court of law. He said he is hoping to get lots of media coverage on that innovative line of defense he plans to use. That favorable media coverage might even help him to land a job offer from an employer that admires his creativity and cleverness, he said."

---"Have you noticed that 'underemployment' has vanished from our vocabulary these days?" one American citizen asks another. "I'm so grateful to have a job these days that I consider it a high honor to be cleaning toilet bowls for a living. As a former CEO, I also find that removing manure stains from toilets gives me a chance to reflect on the colleagues of mine from my glory days of the past who were perfect shits toward me!"

----"There's nothing like this 21st Century Great American Depression to make me appreciate peanut butter as a cheap source of protein," one New Yorker says to another. "My only major gripe about peanut butter is that it lacks variety. What can I do with the stuff, aside from making a sandwich from it? And there's only so many peanut butter sandwiches per week that I can eat before I feel nauseated by redundancy. Maybe I should write a letter to the editor of 'The New York Post' and ask for new recipes that call for peanut butter as a leading ingredient."

---"I don't think of it as underemployment anymore," one blue-collar worker says to another. "I think of it as my Survivalism Strategy alternative to standing in a soup line or breadline."

---"Does it ever occur to you," one Jewish New Yorker says to another, "that if you had been performing that type of job in the early days of Nazi Germany, some gentile would have placed a dunce cap on your head and laughed at you with a scornful look on his face?"

---"One of the great things about this 21st Century American Depression is that it has given me a new outlook on charities," one Philadelphia resident comments to a friend. "Today, I'm my own favorite charity cause. All the money I earn, I give to myself. I don't have any leftover money to donate to the 'Save Our Children' campaign."

---"I'm so desperate financially that I bought a carton of eggs and have been eating nothing but egg sandwiches this week," one Bostonian comments to another. "My cholesterol level has probably gone sky high, but at least I'm saving money. Come to think of it, maybe I should be eating Boston-style Baked Beans here in Boston for my daily protein source. That would probably be cheaper, and it wouldn't give me a heart attack."

---"This Great American Depression of 2010 is helping to put an end to euphemistic language," one unemployed linguist comments to another. "That's the only good news I can find in this Depression. I used to comment that I'm 'in between jobs'. Now I tell everyone that I'm hard-core unemployed."

---"You think you're in dire straits, but my situation is even worse," one New Yorker says to another. "I'm so financially miserable that I've developed a habit of frequenting the Happy Hour specials at local restaurants and bars. I order a soft drink and then load my plate with free food, much of it junk food. That's my one meal for the entire day, and I'm definitely not feeling cheerful at those Happy Hour specials. I'm just getting my daily relief from starvation."

---"I'm so financially strapped these days that I've stopped buying bath oil for my bathtub," one Dallas lady comments to another. "Instead of using bath oil beads, I throw my bar of soap into the hot water and hope that this will help to perfume my body. So far, no one has commented on the absence of floral bouquet beauty to my body fragrance these days. But I dread the day when some handsome gentleman I'm dating says to me, 'Honey, you used to smell like the Garden of Eden. Now, your body fragrance reminds me of the Sahara Desert. What happened to you?'"

---"I'm making so many drastic cutbacks in what I spend on basic items that I've even cut my marijuana consumption in half," one law-breaking single male resident of Austin, Texas, comments to another. "Because of reduced work hours for me during this
21st Century American Depression, I am now smoking marijuana every other day, instead of every day of the year. That is the most difficult and gut-wrenching sacrifice I have ever made in my own life. It requires lots of self-discipline for me to endure those very painful and truly awful 24-hour-periods of complete abstinence from marijuana. Marijuana, to me, is God: I worship the marijuana leaf. So what's happening these days is that I feel completely high on Mondays when I'm getting high on grass, then on Tuesdays when I go cold turkey, I feel completely down all day. It's a manic-depressive life in which the marijuana leaf determines whether I'm up or down."