Kinky Friedman Shows His Commitment to the Environment by Recycling Jokes
To review: Kinky Friedman of Texas, country singer turned mystery novelist turned gubernatorial candidate, got some bad press last month when someone dug up a line from a stand-up routine he did in 1980:
Then I come down to Houston, I went to a bowling alley. I couldn't go bowling, there were no bowling balls. The people here throw 'em all in the sea—they thought they were nigger eggs.
As I noted in my column last week, that's an anti-racist joke, not a racist joke. What I didn't note was that it sounded awfully familiar. I couldn't think of where I'd heard it before, and I figured I had probably come across the same Friedman routine at some point in the distant past. But now reader Stewart Lollar writes to suggest that Friedman lifted it from Hunter S. Thompson, who opened his famous Rolling Stone endorsement of Jimmy Carter with the same story.
I looked it up, and sure enough, there it was:
This news just came over the radio, followed by a song about "faster horses, younger women, older whiskey and more money…" and then came a news item about a Polish gentleman who was arrested earlier today for throwing "more than two dozen bowling balls into the sea off a pier in Fort Lauderdale" because, he told arresting officers, "he thought they were nigger eggs."
So when Thompson told it, it was a Polish joke, but Friedman washed out the ethnic angle. Chew on that: Kinky Friedman made it more P.C.
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On a related note:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/c4ac4a74-570f-11db-9110-0000779e2340.html
Study paints bleak picture of ethnic diversity
By John Lloyd in London
A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University?s Robert Putnam, one of the world?s most influential political scientists.
…
Interesting quote to pick Mr. F. Le Mur. Why not this one?
“Prof Putnam stressed, however, that immigration materially benefited both the ‘importing’ and ‘exporting’ societies, and that trends ‘have been socially constructed, and can be socially reconstructed’.”
So, it is so corrosive and destructive that it actually benefits both societies? Interesting.
Emphasis Mine
Interesting how ol’ Hunter S. Thompson is so popular with liberals when he enthusiastically did so many things that they want to prohibit everyone else from doing.
Also interesting is how he always endorsed liberals when he enthusiastically did so many things that they want to prohibit everyone else from doing.
LA is the most diverse area in the world?
Try zip code 10463. Although the demographics say a third Black, White and Spanish, the blacks are both southern born and caribs, the Spanish come in all flavors of Latin America, with a majority of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, and the whites are older Irish and Jewish people, and immigrant eastern Europeans. If you think all those cultures are similar just based on skin tone, you really don?t know anything about diversity.
BTW, we all get along great!
Q: Why do black people hate Garth Brooks?
A: Because he sucks.
You’ve probably heard this one before, but just in case you haven’t (it’s a great bar joke, sometimes):
Q: What do you call a black man who flies airplanes for a living?
.
A: A pilot, you fucking racist asshole.
That bowling ball joke is way older than any of you. Or me, for that matter.
Hey Stevo, if the pilots are male and it’s a cockpit, what do they call it when the pilots are chicks?
scroll down..okay, don’t
It’s still the cockpit you sexist piggie. 🙂
The real punchline: The Box Office. Pardohn Moi if I used that joke several weeks ago. But the server squirrel may have eaten it so I don’t know.
Heard that over the intercom from a stew, er ah, flight attendant, on a chartered commercial flight from El Toro to Fallon Nv (B4 it was top gun school) many, many moons ago.
Why the Jarheads chartered a plane to fly us to Nevada when we had plenty of C-130’s, DC-3’s, and DC-8’s just sitting around the tarmac I’ll never understand, but they did. I’m pretty sure they were our planes, they had Marines painted on the sides.
Seems like I went MIA from that deployment about 6 days in and grabbed my own commercial flight home from Reno after a couple of days in Tahoe. The trick is to get your name off the flight manifest and then get it back on after the squadron returns so it looks like you were on the plane. These days I think they call that plausible deniability.
I liked the Tom T. Hall shoutout in the original Thompson quote.
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